She likes looking at fashion magazines, but she keeps these a secret from her family, not ready to tell her older brother, Scott, or her single mother about her gender. When people look at George, everyone sees a boy. It was retitled in April 2022 due to the author's regret over deadnaming the main character, defeating the point the novel tried to make. And you can change yours too.Melissa (formerly published as George) is a novel by Alex Gino, a genderqueer author who uses they/them pronouns, first published in 2015 by Scholastic. I can’t change every cover, but I can change mine.

'I can’t change the system, but I can change my actions. 'I’m not actually that hopeful of that, but also, I never expected to see gender-neutral bathrooms in elementary schools, and yet, here we are. 'Well, maybe we’ll hit a cultural tipping point where the social outdatedness of calling a trans girl by her name assigned at birth makes the need for the change obvious,' they wrote. While the possibility of renaming the book officially is still rather slim, Gino remains hopeful. Check out the Twitter hashtag #SharpieActivism to see some of that creativity in action! Librarian Ashlee Brown even created an alternate, printable dust jacket that readers can download to correct their books. While bookstores and libraries are adding the alternate title to their databases, readers (with Gino's blessing) are getting creative in altering their books' covers to reflect the update. Though it's unlikely that the book will be officially renamed, especially since it's been in publication for some time, many readers, bookstores, and libraries are taking the matter into their own hands. To more appropriately acknowledge the character's identity, and to remind all trans people that their names and pronouns should be respected, Gino has asked that George be renamed Melissa's Story. 'The title of my book makes it seem as though it is ever okay to use an old name for a person when they have provided you with a different name that works better for them. A big mistake,' the author wrote in a recent blog post. 'I made a mistake when I named my first published middle grade novel.

But, as Gino has explained, this iconic book of support for the trans community is not without its flaws. That book, of course, was George, which, since its release in 2015, has been a staple of LGBTQ+ reading lists, especially for young people. With four starred reviews and a number of honors including a Stonewall Award and a Lambda Literary Award, both critics and readers loved the story of Melissa, a middle grade girl who was then named George. Alex Gino's debut novel was a hit from the start.

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