Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

In 1995, Kate Bornstein wrote Gender Outlaw. It was a book about her own M to F transition, and a treatise on gender. It helped a lot of trans people get through their lives. Now, 15 years later, she and co-author/editor Bergman have produced a collection of essays, comics and poems, all from members of the trans community. While the average person thinks of the trans community as made up of drag queens and people who surgically and hormonally transition from one set of genitals to the other, it’s not nearly as cut and dried as that. This book proves something I’ve believed for many years- that gender is not binary but a continuum, and that a person need not always occupy the same spot on that continuum, that they can, if society allows, dance up and down the scale. But society usually doesn’t allow.

And that is one of the beauties of this book: it shows how members of the trans community have made their way through life; their problems, their solutions, the abuse they’ve endured, the joys and love they cherish. And it shows the incredible variety of genders that exist-a trans-man who gives birth, a ciswoman who performs as a drag queen, an intersex, people who do not consider themselves male or female and that general society has no pronouns for.

The problems that people in the trans community face are numerous, from getting medical care to legal standing to just using a public bathroom or going to the gym. I hope that this book gets a huge circulation and goes a long ways towards getting society to understand and accept trans people and make the changes that need to be made. ( )

Gender Outlaws is a series of poems, essays, comic strips, etc. which offers insight into a variety of trans* issues. o many different perspectives are presented in this text; however, intersectionality drove many essays in the book. Focusing on the vast space between in the gender binary, these essays are quite unique despite the commonality. Gwendolyn Ann Smith's essay, "We're All Somebody's Freak", resonated with me as encapsulating the primary theme throughout the text. She writes:

"We live in a world of incredible variations, where there are some 200,000 species of moths and butterflies to be found in this planet, where biodiversity is the very thing that keeps the whole complex system in tune. The notion of classifying things and then claiming that only this or that is a proper version of some being is a distinctly human construct, full of arrogance and hubris."

The insistence of the dominant ideology on prescribing specific and set gender roles does violate a basic law of nature: variation is highly beneficial, too much of the same is bad.

My favorite essay, as of this moment, comes from CT Whitley. "Trans-Corporation: A benefit analysis of a transgender man in a corporate setting" tells the story of Whitley's time as a financial officer in New York. You may expect the rest of the essay to talk about the difficulty of working in (what is widely considered as) a conservative, relatively homogeneous environment. Not so. This article is much more interesting and unique. Whitley has "a female past and a male present" providing him with invaluable insight into gendered communication. His ability to manipulate his own style of communication to address particular audiences not only gave him opportunities for promotion, it also put him in a unique position to act as a sort of translator between the biomales and biofemales in his office. I love this.

I want him to come to my classes and give a presentation. Seriously, if anyone reading this knows him or knows someone who knows him or even has a third cousin twice removed who once dated his mother's old tennis instructor, tell him I need him. Typically my philosophizing on gendered communication takes place with Deborah Tannen, who is absolutely fantastic. Reading this essay gave me a whole new perspective on the issue, however, and now I want more.

Okay so back to the book as a whole... I found this to be a wonderfully informative collection; although I will admit that by the end I was reading pretty dang fast, a wee bit ready for the end. And a few of the entries were a bit too figurative for me - but I completely recognize that that is my own issue. Poetry is not my thing and overly figurative poetry is really really not my thing. As with any collection of works by disparate authors, my enjoyment depended on the piece: I absolutely adored about half the entries, was ambivalent about a few, and didn't enjoy a few. Overall though, I would highly recommend it for those I did love. ( )

I was incredibly excited when I discovered, completely by accident, the upcoming publication of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, both of whom are transgender trailblazers and activists. Bornstein wrote Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us in 1994 and the book made a huge impact on me when I read it a few years ago. I wasn't even aware that the collection Gender Outlaws was even in the works until I happened to spy its eye-catching cover on a Seal Press' list of books available for review. I requested a copy and was absolutely thrilled when it arrived in the mail. Released in 2010, Gender Outlaws was published sixteen years after Gender Outlaw, hence the book's subtitle, The Next Generation (occasionally referred to as "genderation" in the text.)

Gender Outlaws collects fifty-five short works by fifty-seven creators, including Bornstein and Bergman. The contributions are roughly divided into five vaguely thematic groupings: Part One, "Do I look like an outlaw to you." Part Two, "Being reconfigured is not the same as being reimagined." Part Three, "...which is why I'm as cute as I happen to be." Part Four, "It might not be a picnic, but there's a great buffet." and Part Five, "And still we rise." Also included are acknowledgments and sections devoted to the individual contributors and editors. Each piece is rather short--none are over twenty pages long and most are only five or so pages with plenty that are even less.

Gender Outlaws contains some powerful stuff. Generally, I expect these sorts of collections to vary in quality from piece to piece, but every one of these was strong. Certainly some spoke more to me on a personal level than others, but I was able to take something away from each offering. It's difficult for me to choose a favorite (really, they all were fantastic), but probably the piece that stood out most for me was "trancension," a comic by Katie Diamond and Johnny Blazes. Some entries were amusing, some charming, some heartbreaking, some challenging, but they were all unique and worthwhile. Overall, the collection is very positive and forward thinking although it doesn't ignore the problems, issues, and challenges that trans and queer folk still face today. Happily, things have progressed since Bornstein wrote Gender Outlaw which is one of the reasons this collection was created.

What most impressed me about Gender Outlaws was the wide variety and diversity exhibited by the content and creators. More than three hundred people submitted work to be considered for the collection and Bornstein and Bergman have done a marvelous job in selecting and editing the pieces together into one book. I appreciated the different viewpoints and experiences that each contributor brought to Gender Outlaws; they didn't always agree on everything and I found that to be illuminating and valuable in and of itself. A whole spectrum of gender identity, sexualities, religions, nationalities, and more make up the list of creators. I also loved the range of work included in Gender Outlaws, everything from academic essays to creative nonfiction, poetry, transcripts, and comics. Regardless what form it takes, each entry is intensely personal and makes Gender Outlaws an absolutely fabulous collection.

Experiments in Reading ( )