Children’s books across genres, including science fiction and young adult romance, are finally addressing gender fluidity, New York Times writer Alexandra Alter reports; after a long history of releasing books with stereotyped portrayals of transgender characters, major publishers are starting to reverse the trend.

It started in 2004 with Julie Anne Peter’s book Luna, which was the first young adult novel with a transgender character released by a major publisher (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers). Since then, publishers have released over fifty novels with transgender characters, according to librarian Talya Sokoll, who compiled a reading list of children’s books with transgender characters for her students.

“In our culture, it was really something that was in the shadows, but suddenly people are talking about it,” said David Levithan, vice president and publisher of Scholastic Press, which will release George, “a middle-grade debut novel about a boy who knows he is a girl but doesn’t know how to tell his family and friends,” in August. Levithan continued: “As our culture is starting to acknowledge transgender people and acknowledge that they are part of the fabric of who we are, literature is reflecting that.”

The author of George, Alex Gino, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and identifies as genderqueer, said that s/he felt motivated to fill a void in his/her own experience as a young reader. “I wrote it because it was the book I wanted to read. I wanted trans voices telling trans stories.”

Other recently published children’s books that feature transgender characters include Jazz Jennings’s I Am Jazz and Katie Rain Hill’s Rethinking Normal.