Dealing With Dragons is a cozy middle grade fantasy novel from 1990. When I read Princess Cimorene's cozy adventure as a ten-year-old, I felt understood for the first time. But it's so much more than just a cozy. In Dealing With Dragons, Patricia C. Wrede discusses the right of children assigned female at birth to define their gender for themselves. Wrede never uses the words "agender" or "gender dysphoria," but she describes the struggles of children raised to be female but internally questioning with tender and sympathetic accuracy.

Wrede discusses "femaleness" through the use of princesses. The "princesses" in Dealing With Dragons stand in for the idealized female identity in Western countries, particularly America, because Patricia C. Wrede is American. This makes sense, as by 1990 the Disneyfication of the princess was already part of pop culture.

While I don't think Wrede necessarily intends for Cimorene to be interpreted as agender, her characterization has a lot in common with my agender experiences. Not knowing why the label of being a "girl" kept sliding off of me like frosting on a hot cupcake was really tough for me as a child. In a time of great distress, and on the cusp of the frightening force of chaos that is puberty, Dealing With Dragons provided psychological comfort at an important time in my life.

In the beginning of the novel, Wrede sets the tone not only by describing the constraints of normativity, but also the Nordicism entrenched in Western beauty standards.

Cimorene was the youngest daughter of the King of Linderwall, and her parents found her rather trying. Their first six daughters were perfectly normal princesses, with long, golden hair and sweet dispositions, each more beautiful than the last. Cimorene was lovely enough, but her hair was jet black, and she wore it in braids instead of curled and pinned like her sisters.

However, the difference between Cimorene and her sisters is more than skin deep. The behavior required of a princess is something Cimorene is not interested in, either.

The King and Queen did the best they could. They hired the most superior tutors and governesses to teach Cimorene all the things a princess ought to know — dancing, embroidery, drawing, and etiquette. There was a great deal of etiquette, from the proper way to curtsy before a visiting prince to how loudly it was permissible to scream when being carried off by a giant.

Cimorene doesn't care about any of this. She sneaks out of her lessons and convinces the royal fencing master to teach her how to fence. This continues for years without her getting caught, but at age twelve, she gets busted by her father.

"Fencing is not proper behavior for a princess," he told her in the gentle-but-firm tone recommended by the court philosopher.

Cimorene tilted her head to one side. "Why not?"

"It's…well, it's simply not done."

Cimorene considered. "Aren't I a princess?"

"Yes, of course you are, my dear," said her father with relief. He had been bracing himself for a storm of tears, which was the way his other daughters reacted to reprimands.

"Well, I fence," Cimorene said with the air of one delivering an unshakeable argument. "So it is too done by a princess."

Cimorene became my hero in this moment. The way that Cimorene argues, using a syllogism correctly, is pure gold. You would think this argument is also one we don't need in our society anymore. But the largest metastudy to date, in 2020, reviewing over a hundred studies and lining up studies that used the same parameters, shows that the socialization of girls being urged to choose "female toys" and boys being urged to choose "male toys" has and is affecting children:

We found a broad consistency of results across the large body of research on children's gender-related toy preferences: children showed large and reliable preferences for toys that were related to their own gender. Thus, according to our review, gender-related toy preferences may be considered a well-established finding. Our results, with 75 studies and a range of toy preference measurements, complement and extend a previous meta-analysis of 16 studies focused on free play (Todd et al., 2018).

Contrary to American perceptions that children have more choices these days, scientific findings don't bear that out. Perhaps in their own homes many children enjoy a greater range of behavior that is considered "appropriate" by adults, but in public spaces such as schools and day cares, this does not seem to be true.

In addition, Wrede brings up an enduring point about the discomforts and worries of parents. Cimorene's mother shuts her down:

"That doesn't make it proper, dear," put in her mother gently.

"Why not?"

"It simply doesn't," the Queen said firmly, and that was the end of Cimorene's fencing lessons.

The Queen, and not the King, puts an end to Cimorene's masculine-coded lessons. The ways in which women police other women is on full display here. Mothers are as culpable as fathers in upholding society's gender role performances.

Furthermore, the King and Queen of Linderwall have every reason to believe that consistently applying pressure to Cimorene to socialize her as a "princess" will work. The same metastudy reviewing what we know about gender socialization explains,

Our results suggest that children's toy preferences might become more gender-related with age, as predicted by several theories of gender development. Children might be encouraged, through socialization pressures such as modeling and reinforcement, to prefer same gender-related toys, and the effects of this socialization may accumulate as they get older (Fagot, Rodgers, & Leinbach, 2000).

But this is not the case for Cimorene. As she ages, she does not grow more feminine. Instead, she sticks to her guns about not wanting to do anything that supports the gender role of "princess."

When she was fourteen, her father discovered that she was making the court magician teach her magic.

"How long has this been going on?" he asked wearily when she arrived in response to his summons.

"Since you stopped my fencing lessons," Cimorene said. "I suppose you're going to tell me it isn't proper behavior for a princess."

"Well, yes. I mean, it isn't proper."

"Nothing interesting seems to be proper," Cimorene said.

"You might find things more interesting if you applied yourself a little more, dear," Cimorene's mother said.

This piqued my interest as a 10-year-old child and stands out to me even more as an adult. Wrede signals that Cimorene is not idly exploring her options. There is a gender war going on here. She is fighting for her identity. And, like many children assigned female at birth, Cimorene's mother is telling her that she needs to work harder at being female.

What's wrong the Queen's argument that Cimorene needs to "apply herself" to being female is that the Queen represents the same people in Western society who argue that male and female genders are part of an unchangeable core of humanity. The Queen says Cimorene doesn't have a choice because Cimorene was born a "princess" — and yet in the face of Cimorene's markedly different behavior and resistance to being socialized as female, claims Cimorene is bad at being a "princess" rather than the unwelcome truth that Cimorene may not be a "princess" at all.

When Cimorene is sixteen, not only has she not given up, she has come to a mature realization about her gender. She summons her fairy godmother, the first thing she is "supposed" to do that she does of her own free will, to beg for help. It is a disaster. After enduring the fairy godmother's scolding that being summoned is for emergencies, Cimorene tells her that it is an emergency.

"Then what, exactly, is your problem?" the fairy said in exasperation.

"This!" Cimorene gestured at the castle around her. "Embroidery lessons, and dancing, and — and being a princess!"

"My dear Cimorene!" the fairy said, shocked. "It's your heritage!"

"It's boring."

The argument that being a "princess" is inherited, that it's customary, that society deems it honorable and so Cimorene should be proud, are common rebuttals to people assigned female at birth saying they don't want to be seen as women. We get pointed back to everything historical women have done, everything the women in our families have done, and to cultural and religious standards, and so on…as if by saying we aren't women, we're insulting women.

And that's if anyone takes us seriously. Cimorene's fairy godmother uses a classic brushoff:

"Nonsense, my dear. This is just a stage you're going through. You'll outgrow it soon, and you'll be very glad you didn't do anything rash."

Cimorene's response to this crushing dismissal won my 10-year-old heart even more. I'd been slammed with my identity and my desires being "just a phase" and didn't know what to do about it.

Cimorene looked at her godmother suspiciously. "You've been talking to my parents, haven't you?"

"Well, they do try to keep me up to date on what my godchildren are doing."

"I thought so," said Cimorene, and bade her fairy godmother a polite good-bye.

Cimorene dismissing her fairy godmother in return is the best thing ever. The logical, confident Cimorene isn't impressed — and points out that her fairy godmother's real affiliation is not to her, but to her parents: the hegemonic forces of gender socialization.

Although Wrede may be talking about women's rights in society, there is an inescapable gendered element that only deepens from this point onward. Cimorene's parents try to force Cimorene to marry the first prince they can find, exploding the gender war going on between Cimorene and her parents. Cimorene runs away from home and seeks refuge the only place she has that is immediately available to her: with dragons.

In the world of Dealing With Dragons, dragons have a symbiotic culture with humans. In exchange for "kidnapping" princesses so that princes can "rescue" the princesses back, fulfilling the traditional courtship ritual, the princesses work for the dragons who shelter them during their waiting period before "rescue."

Cimorene petitions the community of dragons in the Mountains of Morning for help, offering herself up as a housekeeper, no princes forthcoming. Immediately, Cimorene discovers it's no easy escape from people with prejudiced ideas about gender:

"No proper princess would come out looking for dragons," Woraug objected.

"Well, I'm not a proper princess, then," Cimorene snapped. "I make cherries jubilee, and I volunteer for dragons, and I conjugate Latin verbs — or at least I would if anyone would let me. So there!"

"Hear, hear," said the gray-green dragon.

However, Cimorene makes two allies among the dragons: Kazul and Roxim. Kazul, a female dragon, hires Cimorene, and Roxim, an elderly male dragon, takes on an avuncular role.

"I like cherries jubilee," Kazul replied, still watching Cimorene. "And I like the look of her. Besides, the Latin scrolls in my library need cataloguing, and if I can't find someone who knows a little of the language, I'll have to do it myself."

"Give her a trial run first," a purplish green dragon advised.

Woraug snorted. "Latin and cherries jubilee! And for that you'd take on a black-haired, snippy little — "

"I'll thank you to be polite when you're discussing my princess," Kazul said, and smiled fiercely.

Kazul protects Cimorene, giving Cimorene the safety for the first time in her life to be exactly as she is.

A powerful sign that the novel isn't just about women's rights but is genuinely about gender is Wrede's world-building about the society of dragons. Cimorene reports about the group of dragons, in which Wrede casually drops a major bombshell:

Each of the males (there were three) had two short, stubby, sharp-looking horns on either side of their heads; the female dragon had three, one on each side and one in the center of her forehead. The last dragon was apparently still too young to have made up its mind which sex it wanted to be; it didn't have any horns at all.

Gender and sex are choices. In Kazul's framework, Cimorene needs space and time to finish figuring out what her gender and sex are. Kazul sees Cimorene as full of potential, not locked into an essential, in-born gender identity. Also, jobs and genders are entirely separate in the dragons' society. The King of the Dragons and the Queen of the Dragons are just jobs. No gender is meant.

"'King' is the name of the job. It doesn't matter who holds it."

Cimorene stopped and thought for a moment. "You mean that dragons don't care whether their king is male or female; the title is the same no matter who the ruler is."

"That's right. We like to keep things simple."

"Oh." Cimorene decided to return to the original topic of conversation before the dragon's "simple" ideas confused her any further.

Cimorene, coming from the rigidly gendered Linderwall, finds this difficult to understand. Her mother and her father couldn't change places if they wanted to — and they have been trained to not make the attempt, regardless of whatever their true desires may be. Linderwall is a lot like most countries around the world.

Now, Wrede doesn't make the mistake of making dragon society a utopia. The latter half of the novel is about a major political intrigue that goes to show there is no such thing as a perfect society — but justice is still worth fighting for. Cimorene and the friends she makes, other humans who live in the society ruled by dragons, band together to prevent the dragon kingdom from being overthrown by someone who wants to rescind all the freedoms people have to be themselves.

And in the end, Cimorene isn't forced back into the box her parents tried to make her live and die in: she doesn't become more feminine, doesn't "learn her place," and doesn't marry a prince. The novel ends with Kazul giving Cimorene a promotion.

As a fifth-grader, I wrote to Patricia C. Wrede as part of my school's English class, and Wrede wrote back a very nice personalized response sharing that she had written the series exactly backwards. I wish I still had that letter, but it's likely in an enormous box of school papers at my mother's house. Still, I've never forgotten it. Writing to an author and having her respond was a kind of magic I'd never experienced before.

What strikes me now as an adult is how Wrede began with a very patriarchal, ho-hum idea of Cimorene, and then wrote her way into the wish fulfillment she couldn't originally envision for herself. The last book of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which is the one Wrede chronologically wrote first, pigeon-holes Cimorene as the hero's mother. That's it. But as Wrede wrote backwards in time, the real magic happened. I wonder if Wrede ever regrets books 2–4 of the series because of how they turn Cimorene's life into a tragedy. For that reason, I personally advocate only reading Dealing With Dragons if you love Cimorene as much as I do.

While I wish that Wrede had made space for someone to come out as agender rather than having to choose from the only two options in the gender binary, I give a lot of credit to her for saying something that was extraordinary for 1990 and in many ways is still extraordinary to say now. And as a 10-year-old, it was enough for me to be told by an adult somewhere that I had a choice — and that people trying to force me to live in their version of reality, on their terms, is wrong.

Dealing With Dragons taught me that it's the lens other people bring to my behavior, not my behavior itself, that was the problem. Once I truly accepted Patricia C. Wrede's explanation, my emotional life took a turn for the better, and middle school and high school were a lot easier for me as a result. I could weather other people's attempts to squeeze me into a gendered box much better and resist their assumptions about what was "proper" for me to be doing or not. Reading Dealing With Dragons and falling in love with the character of Princess Cimorene was my first step toward self-acceptance as an agender person.