Gender Failure

This book is a collection of vignettes of how two people, largely apart but also together, went from believing they were failing at gender to realizing that gender was failing them. Both share somewhat rural Canadian backgrounds, met as adults, toured together as a "trans folk musician and a butch storyteller" in a show that they created with 'no specifically queer content at all."

After that show they began working on a new one, one that would explore all the parts of themselves they usually kept under wraps, their trans realities, a show that became Gender Failure. This book then grew out of that show.

There are stories, photographs, song lyrics, drawings, a Gender Identity Interview for adults seeking medical care for transition. There show more are startling/mundane incidents of ignorance/aggression. There are moments of clarity, of unexpected connection, of joy.

In Rae's introduction to the book, they say "There should be as many books like this as there are people constrained by the gender binary, and I hope in my lifetime to read as many of them as possible." This is part of why I loved this book, just the uniqueness of their stories how it is similar and still different to other trans and nonbinary memoirs I have read, but it isn't just these unique markers, Rural, Butch, Folk Musician, that give this value, but also their real skill as storytellers. Each chapter feels like a story that has been crafted before countless audiences, and probably was. show less

If I had to put the way I felt about Gender Failure in a couple of words, those words might be "behind the times." I would have been ecstatic to read this before about 2012 or 2013 (ask me why The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard marks a watershed in transgender fiction and memoir---but that's another review), but it was published in 2014.

That's partly for intensely personal reasons: my own butch-identified top surgery was in February 2014, two months before "Gender Failure" was published, and after years of desperate searching for people who had made a similar journey. I felt a peculiar kind of hollowness as I read Coyote's words about the decision and the process (both emotional and bureaucratic), knowing how show more much it would have meant to me six months before, and not quite feeling it.

It's also political: Spoon and Coyote are (like me) the kind of white masculine-presenting female-assigned people who get undue attention in trans (and queer) communities, who take up so much of the airtime that people of color, trans women, and transfeminine people can hardly get a word in edgewise. Coyote at least makes an effort to talk about the disparity. Spoon seems... oblivious. One more work of white transmasculine memoir doesn't literally take the place of the books that non-white, non-transmasc trans people are writing, but that doesn't exactly let them off the hook either. show less

Two AFAB individuals share their stories, interleaved as they almost certainly were in the stage show that this reflects. I adore the notion of gender-retired, and am pretty convinced that the government really should be gender-blind—if someone passes the physical for military service, fine. The govt. should not enforce pronouns or gender expectations.

A very funny book about a very hard topic. This about sums it up; telling the doctor doing your top surgery to "please measure twice and cut once," the kind of laughing you do so you don't cry. Plus the idea of going into "gender retirement" is a new, and much needed creation in the world.

A book of essays that tell the narrative of two performers who see themselves outside the gender binary. I found this book enlightening and thought provoking, making me look at the concept of gender, and respecting a person's gender identity, in a new light.

This book is a powerful storytelling about how gender failed the writers. Written in essay form, the book is easy to read, but the concepts very thought provoking for any reader; consoling for the transgender folk.

Before I read this, I read another book each by Coyote and Spoon. Told from alternating POVS, Gender Failure is a a two-person memoir bout retiring from or messing with the gender binary. I really liked it and I would recommend it to to, oh, everyone.