Enlightened and empathetic—required reading for anyone weighing in on gender and sports.
A sports journalist’s careful study of both women’s sports and exclusionary practices facing transgender athletes.
Sports, Barnes explains in their significant debut book, have become a “primary battleground” for a number of culture debates and policy proposals impacting the transgender community, especially transgender youth. Expanding on years of reporting for ESPN from the nexus of sports and gender identity, the author seizes a lightning rod of an issue and effectively imparts clarity and nuance. Barnes astutely positions today’s deliberations and controversies within the history of Title IX and women’s sports programs, enriching this context with research on the science of hormones, fallouts among seemingly obvious allies in the space of women’s sports advocacy, personal stories of transgender athletes’ competing at various levels, and the author’s own experience as a nonbinary former athlete with a deep love for women’s sports. The book is a solid resource for those seeking to understand or discuss sensational news headlines and reactive legislation, providing a foundation built from informative and detailed explanations of relevant topics, including the difference between using testosterone to medically transition and using it for competitive advantage, endogenous puberty, and the distinctions drawn and restrictions imposed by governing bodies like the NCAA and the International Olympic Committee. The heart of the narrative involves questions Barnes raises about the very idea of sex-segregated sports, what qualities are prized in athletic competition, and their personal, thoughtful ideas for a possible path forward. The author is clear in their desire to investigate all the complexities of the issue and dismiss ill-informed arguments. Their attempt to distill truth and instill comfort beyond traditional gender definitions results in a powerful treatise on what current outrage, particularly about transgender girl and women athletes, says about how we think about sports as a whole.
Enlightened and empathetic—required reading for anyone weighing in on gender and sports.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250276629
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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