Happy Wednesday! Hope everyone’s week is going well. Pride month for the LGBTQ community might be over, but I love reading about gender and people’s own unique experiences with it every month of the year.
The comic focuses on writer Rhea Ewing, she started this project in the early 2010s when they had question about what gender meant to different people. They started the project to help them dissect their own complex feelings on gender. The study they was fairly small with what seemed like about twenty participants.
Their study of gender evolved as they went along. First they were simply trying to define what masculinity and femininity were and how people fit within those contrasts. But as they extended their research, they also explored trans issues. Some of the issues that came up were about the way gender was enforced even in queer spaces and how those who aren’t binary transgender often feel out of place.
While cis writers tend to expect the goal of transition to be one gender or the other, Ewings participants pointed out how important the space in the middle was for a lot of them. Ewing themselves also seemed to fall somewhere in the middle.
I think that feelings of being ‘trans enough’ hold a lot of people back from accessing care, especially when tied in with gate keeping in the queer communities by more affluent people (Read cis and white generally) over those who had more lived experience of these issues themselves.
Ewing didn’t even start the study thinking about the way race played with gender but learned its importance along the way, when some of their BIPOC participants pointed out that their gender was defined in terms of their race. Ewing also realized as they went along that they had put themselves in an interviewing position to avoid having to deal with the issues that came up for themselves. This was something they resolved as they went along.
Overall I thought the book was very good. I’d give it three stars, I appreciate the fact that they found BIPOC sources and discussed many of the important issues for trans people. I also enjoyed the fact that they focused beyond the binary when it comes to being trans. I would have perhaps liked some more detail from the different participants but I think overall that Ewing did a good job. And I enjoyed their own personal story along with the participants.
The way they started off the story about being uncomfortable at a wedding was very familiar to me. I think we as a society need to come up with a third option to suits and dresses for formal events as this is a major source of anxiety for lots of trans and non-binary people.
What are some of your favorite books that explore gender? Let me know in the comments so I can check them out.
Happy Reading
Solara
Rose's Book Garden 