How Sort Of Queers the Coming-of-Age Story
Canadian television has often treated coming of age as a movement toward stability: a young person discovers who they are, chooses a career, finds romantic confidence, and settles into an intelligible adult identity. Sort Of disrupts that familiar progression. The CBC and HBO Max series follows Sabi Mehboob, a gender-fluid Pakistani Canadian living in Toronto, as they move through work, friendship, family, dating, and care.
Created by Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo, the series is frequently described as a queer comedy-drama. That label is accurate, but it does not capture the show’s most interesting intervention. Sort Of makes queerness a way of organizing time, intimacy, and self-knowledge rather than a single identity crisis to be resolved.
Sabi’s life is complicated, funny, and sometimes painful, but the story does not frame them as unfinished until they become more certain. Instead, the series treats uncertainty as a legitimate condition of adulthood. Its coming-of-age narrative is less about arriving at the self than learning how to remain in relationship while the self keeps changing.
A coming-of-age story without a deadline
Many traditional television narratives give their protagonists a clear developmental schedule. Childhood leads to adolescence, adolescence leads to independence, and romantic or professional milestones signal maturity. Sort Of loosens that sequence. Sabi is already an adult when the series begins, yet their life remains open-ended.
Their work as a nanny places them inside a wealthy family’s household while their own emotional and economic circumstances remain unsettled. This position creates an unusual perspective on adulthood. Sabi is responsible for children, but they are still negotiating their own boundaries, ambitions, and relationship to home. Competence and uncertainty exist together.
The series therefore rejects the idea that growing up means becoming settled. Sabi may make choices, retreat from them, or discover that an apparently progressive decision has unexpected consequences. This episodic movement reflects queer temporality: a life shaped by detours, delays, chosen family, and transitions that cannot be measured by conventional milestones.
Sabi’s identity stays in motion
Sabi’s gender identity is central to the series, but the show avoids turning their nonbinary experience into a lesson for other characters or viewers. Their pronouns and presentation matter, yet identity is portrayed as lived practice rather than a static statement. Clothing, language, desire, and social context all influence how Sabi moves through the world.
That fluidity also challenges the expectation that representation must be perfectly explanatory. Sabi does not always have a polished response to misgendering or invasive questions. They can be assertive, frustrated, awkward, generous, or exhausted. These reactions give their identity emotional texture and protect the character from becoming a symbol detached from ordinary life.
The show’s humour is especially important here. It finds comedy in social discomfort without making Sabi’s gender the punchline. Awkwardness belongs to everyone: friends, relatives, employers, lovers, and strangers who assume they understand more than they do. The result is a queer character whose life includes pleasure, irritation, desire, and boredom.
Family makes identity relational
Sabi’s Pakistani Muslim family complicates familiar television ideas about acceptance. The series does not divide the world into enlightened friends and intolerant relatives. Family members can misunderstand Sabi while still loving them deeply; they can cause harm while also providing care, history, and belonging.
This approach recognizes that identity is negotiated within relationships. Sabi’s gender cannot be separated from their class position, racialization, cultural background, or responsibilities to family. The pressures they face do not come from one source. They emerge through overlapping expectations about respectability, adulthood, religion, work, and intimacy.
The show also makes room for generational difference without presenting older relatives as incapable of change. Their responses may be uneven or incomplete, but the family remains a site of negotiation rather than a simple obstacle that Sabi must escape. That framing is particularly significant in queer television, where liberation is often represented as leaving home behind.
| Conventional coming-of-age pattern | Sort Of’s queer alternative |
|---|---|
| Identity becomes stable through a defining revelation | Identity develops through repetition, context, and revision |
| Family is either supportive or oppressive | Family combines love, conflict, obligation, and adaptation |
| Romance confirms adult maturity | Intimacy takes multiple forms and does not guarantee resolution |
| Independence means separation from care | Adulthood includes interdependence and chosen responsibility |
| The ending rewards certainty | Growth can mean accepting ambiguity |
Romance beyond the couple
Romantic storylines in Sort Of do not function as proof that Sabi has finally become an adult. Desire is important, but it is not the central organizing principle of their life. The series gives comparable attention to friendships, sibling relationships, professional connections, and the emotional bonds formed through care work.
This broader account of intimacy is one of the show’s strongest feminist interventions. Sabi’s relationships are shaped by unequal power, emotional labour, and competing needs. They are not simply waiting for the correct partner to validate their identity. Instead, each connection reveals something about boundaries, dependency, vulnerability, and the limits of being understood.
The show also resists the idea that queer romance must be either tragic or exemplary. Sabi’s relationships can be tender, confusing, selfish, and unfinished. That ordinariness matters. Queer characters deserve stories in which love is meaningful without becoming a moral reward.
The form makes room for uncertainty
The series’ tonal shifts support its argument about identity. Comedy can sit beside grief, domestic chaos beside political tension, and gentle observation beside sharp social criticism. These transitions reflect the uneven texture of real life more effectively than a tightly controlled narrative of personal progress.
Its pacing similarly refuses constant escalation. Some episodes focus on a small misunderstanding or a routine obligation rather than a dramatic revelation. This attention to the everyday makes care visible. Looking after children, maintaining friendships, navigating work, and returning home are treated as events with emotional and political weight.
The show’s visual and narrative restraint also prevents trauma from becoming the only explanation for Sabi’s queerness. They are not defined by suffering. Their life includes discomfort, but it also includes pleasure, style, jokes, attraction, and the quiet satisfaction of being recognized correctly.
Why this representation matters
Sort Of broadens the possibilities of Canadian queer television by connecting gender variance to race, migration, class, religion, and family life. It presents Sabi as specific rather than universally representative, while still making their experiences legible to audiences with different histories.
The series is especially valuable because it refuses a neat conversion story in which confusion becomes certainty and conflict becomes acceptance. Its politics are embedded in character relationships and narrative structure. Viewers are invited to notice who performs care, who gets believed, who has room to experiment, and whose discomfort is treated as socially important.
For readers and viewers interested in feminist media criticism, these are useful questions to carry into other coming-of-age stories:
- Watch for which milestones a narrative treats as evidence of maturity.
- Notice whether queer characters are allowed pleasure outside romantic validation.
- Examine how race, class, religion, and disability shape the meaning of “freedom.”
- Pay attention to care work and emotional labour, especially when they are feminized or invisible.
- Ask whether ambiguity is treated as failure or as a valid form of knowledge.
By making adulthood porous and identity unfinished, Sort Of offers a richer account of what growing up can mean. Its queer coming-of-age narrative does not ask Sabi to become easily categorized. It asks the audience to accept that a life can be coherent without being settled.
Read the series alongside other feminist and queer media, and keep its central challenge in view: meaningful representation does not require a character to resolve every contradiction before their life can count as a story.