Worm and Caterpillar are best friends in this charming and award-winning early reader that brings us a terrific little story (though a questionable queer analogy).
Worm insists they are friends because they are just the same, but Caterpillar realizes they actually have many differences: Worm eats dirt; Caterpillar prefers leaves. Caterpillar has legs; Worm none. (They both fear birds, however.)
That’s okay. Caterpillar likes that they are different, and Worm likes Caterpillar “just as you are.” In fact, Worm tells Caterpillar, “Never change.”
But Caterpillar has a hunch that change is coming—and indeed it does, in the way of all caterpillars. When Caterpillar creates a chrysalis, Worm protects it with a leaf, but misses their friendship. When Caterpillar finally starts to emerge, Worm wants to help things along by poking the chrysalis with a stick, but Caterpillar wants to do it alone.
Still, Caterpillar is afraid that Worm will not like the new Caterpillar, who has changed “A lot”—and now wants to be called “Butterfly.” Worm is at first afraid of the Butterfly, who flies like a (scary) bird, but is soon reassured. Worm realizes that the two of them were never really the same, but assures Butterfly “I like you just as you are.” The two of them reaffirm their best friendship.
This is an absolutely delightful story, and more notable for being an early reader, a category that is often overlooked, much less awarded. The illustrations are charming and the dialog spot on, simple enough for the target audience but with narrative suspense and humor. The book won a Theodor Seuss Geisel Honor as well as “best of” awards from Kirkus Reviews, the New York Public Library, and Chicago Public Library. It’s a good book by any measure, a lovely analogy for friendship across difference and lasting through change.
But is it a queer one? At least one reviewer, Betsy Bird at School Library Journal, writes:
It doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to see this book as a magnificent trans narrative, by the way. I know that’s taking the whole metamorphosis metaphor into a fairly obvious place, but the reason this book works far better than a lot of (more obvious) picture books or easy books out there is because it’s not about change itself. It’s about how your friends and family accept that change. Worm is a good strong ally to Butterfly.
As a cisgender person, I’m not going to take a stance on whether this story works as a trans analogy—but I do feel obligated to point out an essay in Harper’s Bazaar by Kyle Lukoff, an award-winning author, former children’s librarian, and trans man. Lukoff writes:
I believe that using animals as an introduction to human gender props up transphobic notions that we should instead be resisting….
It’s a common anti-trans taunt to identify as an attack helicopter, or to argue that little kids might identify as dinosaurs but grow out of it. While there’s little strategic value to being on the defensive against opponents who change the rules to suit their will to power, I think that using books that rely on metaphors to teach about identity contributes to that transphobic ideology. These stories lend credence to the idea that gender is a static, immutable, biological reality, and that trans people’s identities are flimsy self-constructions to be humored if not believed.
That should be enough to caution us against using this (or similar books) as a trans analogy without first engaging with the trans people around us to see if the analogy feels at all useful. But even Bird writes of Worm and Caterpillar, “I prefer books where you can bring multiple interpretations to the final product. In this case? Mission accomplished.” In other words, the book doesn’t have to operate solely as a trans analogy (if it does at all). If the book helps children learn to be allies to their friends despite differences and change—no matter what those differences and changes might be—then it may nevertheless be of value in helping children with their friendships broadly speaking, no matter the identity(-ies) of those friends. That ultimately feels more useful than viewing the book purely in transgender terms.
(I am tagging the book “Gender identity/expression,” however, so that people interested in the topic can find and evaluate it.)
