A brief but powerful and affecting book on the struggles of the trans community.
A trans author presents a discussion about being trans in a cis world.
Anyone can be trans, from entertainers to cashiers to members of one’s family, notes Radclyffe. Why, then, he asks, has discourse around this topic “become a pinball machine” in which trans people are the ball, ricocheting against the walls? Radclyffe asserts that it’s partly a matter of perspective. Some voices are simply louder, he notes—journalism, politics, and religion are largely cisgender domains. Using his own personal experience, wit, and enthusiasm, the author guides his readers to viewpoints that may be new to them. On the subject of trans kids competing in sports, he invites readers into the mind of a child on a soccer team. The child has body dysmorphia but is happy and at peace with her teammates. To ban her from playing, the author says, means only considering the feelings of cis people who feel threatened. At another point, the author explains that he didn’t transition from one sex to another, but “changed my body to become itself.” Overall, Radclyffe presents an empathetic and insistent work that effectively brings clarity to several topics for people who might lack it. For example, he uses an analogy of sheep in pens to illustrate a “binary world, where the two sexes are separated off from each other. There is no migration, there are no gates between the fields, and the fences never move.” He points out that such thinking is limiting (“Why can’t we just have full run of the countryside?”) and driven by misogyny, and he clearly expresses his belief that all feminists should embrace trans rights, because the “mythical hierarchy of female weakness / inferiority and male strength / superiority can only exist if the two sexes remain separate.” He also notes the many gender identities to choose from beyond the binary male/female option (Radclyffe posits that there are between 72 and 93). In addition, the book contextualizes such often-misunderstood topics as gender therapy and gender-affirming surgery.
A brief but powerful and affecting book on the struggles of the trans community.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9798987019979
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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