Neither he, nor she, in pictures

The Story of Ferdinand in 1936 gave children a peaceful male character who loves flowers and refused to fight, it was the first of a growing cannon of picture books that challenge gender stereotypes. While children need books that help them imagine that a person of any sex could have any gender identity, until 1999 the books were limited to girls defying gender stereotypes (by liking baseball, climbing trees, getting dirty, refusing marriage or going to war) or boys defying gender stereotypes (by wearing skirts and dresses, loving dolls, loving pink, dancing and knitting). Debbi Gilori’s No Matter What (1999) first gave children characters that were not clearly identified as either. There are now 18 books in English that have characters that are intentionally not gendered, offering children who are both or neither, and their peers, possibility models. The representational challenge is how to signify an identity outside of boy or girl -  almost all of these have non-human main characters, crocodiles, crayons, cutlery and more stand in for the humans. Text without “he” or “she” struggle to tell a story, leaving non-binary characters in books like Meet Polkadot (2013) to explain their identity, in the tradition of the “special issue book” rather than to have their own experiences. This paper analyses the existing picture books with characters outside of the gender binary, looks at patterns and trends within them, and offers what the next generation of books might consider in order to make them more useful in classrooms.