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 revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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