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Although Luna is a well-written book on a topic that demands more wide-spread exploration, its narrative ultimately promotes the "wrongness" and/or "otherness" of trans characters by focusing on a cis hetero (and ultimately much less interesting) main character.

Luna is one of those books I read a long time ago -- long enough that I can't, in good conscience, review the prose, because I don't remember it... though, perhaps that is telling in and of itself. I read Luna while I was in high school and coming to terms with being queer, myself, mostly because when you're queer and looking for representation, you generally have to settle for whatever you can get your hands on. This was before the Tumblr age, when LGBT sections in libraries were virtually nonexistent and this sort of book was viewed as being sort of taboo (though I suppose it still is), and I remember the subject matter in this book being treated in the exact same way: this is a "freaky and taboo" situation where a narrator's sibling doesn't happen to be cis. Crazy stuff, kids.

Maybe it's obvious from the way I wrote that, but I'm not particularly happy with the way trans issues are dealt with in this book, if only because the one thing that stuck with me from this book was the overall tone of it all. There were things in this book that I carried around with me for years, until I finally became more involved with real trans issues and finally shelved them.

The fact that the narrator of this book is a cis hetero one who refuses to use her sibling's preferred pronouns throughout most of the narrative and views her sibling's trans-ness as alien and unrelateable is something that stuck with me long after I put the book down. Luna is by far the more interesting character, and her struggles as she comes to term with her gender identity are very relatable and engaging. The fact that you, as a reader, are forced to hang out with Regan instead is almost as insulting as it is disappointing -- it means that you're by default forced into this unsavory position of siding with her as she misgenders Luna and feels ashamed of her.

What all of this really points to is a cis hetero author who thinks of Regan as automatically being more relatable than Luna; someone for whom trans issues can only be viewed through the lens of otherness, as something that occurs outside of them. And that's why I don't really think of this as an LGBT book -- I think of it as a bare bones pamphlet for cis hetero folks, queer literature that isn't written for a queer audience. I don't think I would read this book again, because I remember being mildly offended by it when I didn't know shit about trans issues, and didn't have a personal stake in trans representation in media. Now that I do, I worry that it would be bad enough to make me legitimately angry.