A wonderfully clear and convincing guide to comprehending and defending gender diversity.
Understanding the realities of gender identities.
In this remarkable book, Bailar, the first trans athlete to play a sport on an NCAA Division 1 men’s team and now a prominent advocate for trans rights, reflects on his experiences as a trans man and explains how we might best comprehend and discuss gender identity. In four sections, the author provides definitions of critical concepts related to gender, recommendations about ways to discuss complex and sensitive issues, scientifically informed debunking of common misconceptions, and guidance about how trans individuals and their allies can successfully navigate the challenges of an often transphobic society. Along the way, Bailar astutely unpacks the assumptions informing key debates that have become flashpoints in the nation’s culture wars: the appropriateness of surgery and hormone treatments for young people; the participation of trans individuals in sports; the politics of bathrooms; the significance of pronoun use; and the relationship between trans identities and mental illness. Among the many strengths of this book is the author’s patient, informed unfolding of his arguments. Though his claims are obviously deeply held and passionately rendered, Bailar refrains from polemics and remains generous toward those who might disagree. Another key point is the author’s linking of transphobia to other forms of prejudice and indictment of deep-seated cultural anxieties about gender and sexual orientation. Trans individuals, he writes, “are a threat because our very identities disrupt the most basic conventions of Western society: cis white patriarchal power—the system of oppression that has built and controlled this country since its inception…we know ourselves even when those in power say it is impossible for us to exist.” Bailar’s appeals for understanding could not be timelier, given the recent rise of anti-trans legislation as well as anti-trans violence. For those seeking such understanding, this is an invaluable resource.
A wonderfully clear and convincing guide to comprehending and defending gender diversity.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780306831874
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette Go
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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