Both Sides Now

Overview

Finch Kelly has his senior year plotted out like a closing argument: win the National Speech & Debate Tournament, head to college in Washington, DC, and eventually become the nation's first openly trans member of Congress. He is methodical, ambitious, and used to winning. What he has not planned for is a sudden, disorienting crush on his debate partner, Jonah, who is gay, spoken for, and entirely unaware of the effect he's having.

The wrinkle in Finch's five-year plan multiplies from there. The scholarship he needs hasn't materialized, the acceptance letter he's counting on hasn't arrived, and the topic chosen for Nationals turns out to be transgender rights, forcing Finch into the surreal position of debating the legitimacy of his own identity for points.

Peyton Thomas balances this predicament with a light, comic touch, following Finch through the ordinary indignities of senior year alongside the much stranger task of treating his own humanity as a motion to be argued, won, or lost on a judge's scorecard.

A Debater's Coming-of-Age

Competitive debate gives the novel its structure and its central irony: a discipline built on arguing any side of any question, applied to a question that isn't abstract for its protagonist at all. Finch's skill at constructing airtight cases becomes both his ticket out of his hometown and the mechanism by which he's asked to rehearse arguments against himself, a tension the book uses to explore how institutions that reward neutrality can still demand something deeply personal from the people inside them.

The romance plot runs alongside this, tracing Finch's slow recognition that his attraction to Jonah complicates a self-understanding he thought was already settled. Rather than treating his trans identity and his evolving feelings as separate plotlines, the book lets them inform each other, suggesting that figuring out who you are rarely happens on a single, tidy axis. The novel sits within a wave of recent YA fiction centering trans protagonists in coming-of-age stories that foreground ambition, humor, and romantic mishap rather than crisis alone.

Why Both Sides Now Has Been Challenged

Much of the disagreement over this novel turns on whether a story built around a trans protagonist's inner life and romantic interests belongs on school library shelves accessible to all students, or should be restricted to older readers or removed from school collections entirely. Objectors have generally pointed to the book's handling of gender identity and sexual orientation as inappropriate subject matter for a young-adult audience, arguing that its frank engagement with what it means to be transgender exposes readers to ideas or content they consider unsuitable for a school setting. Some challenges have also cited the novel's romantic content and its discussion of sexuality more broadly as grounds for restriction.

Supporters of the book counter that its premise, a debater forced to argue against his own right to exist, speaks directly to the stakes trans teenagers face in public discourse, and that removing it denies readers a rare mainstream depiction of a trans protagonist pursuing goals unrelated to his identity alone. The book has been the subject of 3 state-level and 3 district-level challenges tracked in this catalog, reflecting the broader, ongoing dispute over which stories about gender and identity belong in school libraries.