Some scholars of children's literature consider X: A Fabulous Child's Story to be part of the lineage of modern children's books with transgender themes, even though the story does not explicitly deal with transgender identity. While Fremont-Smith wrote in his 1978 review of the book that Chwast illustrated X wearing exclusively overalls "to avoid the taint of transsexualism or campy drag",[12] Jamie Campbell Naidoo wrote in 2012 that X: A Fabulous Child's Story may be a precursor to newer works which do feature explicitly transgender children, like Marcus Ewert's 10,000 Dresses.[13] Similarly, Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel described X: A Fabulous Child's Story as the first picture book that was sympathetic to trans people[14] while Robert Bittner, Jennifer Ingrey, and Christine Stamper wrote that it was the first picture book to include a non-gendered child as one of its characters.[15]
X: A Fabulous Child's Story was Gould's only story for children.[16] The story has variously been anthologized as radical children's literature[17] and as feminist science fiction,[18] and has also been collected in social psychology and gender studies readers.[19][20] The story partially inspired an experiment by three City University of New York researchers to test the effects of introducing an infant to adults without identifying its gender; their work was reported in the journal Sex Roles in 1975.[21] X: A Fabulous Child's Story has been reported to be difficult to find copies of in the 2010s.[3]
