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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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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