I'm Afraid of Men

I used to work for an LGBTQ non-profit, and part of my job was reading and researching books, journals and other forms of media.

It was exhausting. It killed my ability to read for pleasure. I was tired, often, of reading the same statistics, experiencing the same pain the community experiences in such a volume.

I read everything from more recent, modern texts to memoirs from the 80's, historical documents, comics, personal anecdotes. Largely, many of the ways we experience queerphobia and transphobia have shifted, but the way they make us feel is the same.

Of course, there was so much queer and trans joy too, but I was immersed in these videos, books, journals and magazines personally, professionally and emotionally.

A labour of love, show more and it was wonderful to hear from so many people in my community. But it was a deep and tiring commitment.

Then I read this book.

People always call Vivek Shraya's work raw, and while it was an emotionality all its own, her level of craft, care and execution is exceptional.

How can I even begin to review this book? To talk about how she examines gender and toxic masculinity, how she relates it to her own experience? Shraya is exceptional because she proves that you cannot critically examine something without speaking to its emotional power.

You cannot critically examine the performative nature of gender without speaking to personal anecdotes. Those anecdotes, those experiences make that concept come to life.

As always, lines in this book floor me completely.

“Queerness is associated with freedom from boundaries.”

I read an exhausting number of queer books for my work, and somehow, Vivek Shraya's I'm Afraid of Men triumphed over all of that and gave me back my love of reading.

I'll always be grateful for that.

And imagine, just for a minute, that you are a trans youth. And you read this book.

Vivek's power is immeasurable, but her love is too. show less

Vivek Shraya’s biography on the back flap of I’m Afraid of Men. says she’s many things: an artist in all kinds of genres, a musician, a professor, and the founder of a publishing imprint. She’s also a transwoman, and in this short book she describes how that trans identity has defined her life, especially in her dealings with men, both romantic and platonic. Shraya’s self-reflection gives way to self-indulgence at times, especially in the first section, but the second section takes the book from diary to something for the public.

Her musings on the arbitrariness of gendering and what it means to act “like a man” or to act “like a woman” are crucial. Dismayingly, despite reading a lot about gender, I’ve seen only one show more other book confront arbitrary gendering: Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression by Iris Gottlieb. But our gendering of neutral things (and the accompanying erroneous belief that women and men naturally like certain specific things) thwarts gender-equality efforts so much that every book on gender relations should robustly question it. The woman-man binary is a literal division, the perfect kindling to feed the fire of sexism and toxic masculinity. It affects all, but for those who fall neatly into the woman box or man box, the binary exerts a pressure steady enough to be mostly white noise. For trans people like Shraya the noise never stops clanging.

Through ongoing study we’ve come to understand that gender is flexible, lying on a spectrum. I’m Afraid of Men. is a candid first-person experience of the flexibility; however, it’s so personal that it doesn’t reach its full potential as a wider educator. For that, I’m glad to have read Seeing Gender some years before.

Complementary reading in addition to Seeing Gender: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini

(This review is cross-posted on The Story Graph and Goodreads.) show less

Drawn in by the high-impact book design, I picked this up from the new non-fiction shelf at the library, and seeing that it is essays on gender written by a trans artist, I had to check it out. (The Tegan & Sara blurb didn't hurt anything either.)

The essays are deeply personal, but they go deep on how gender policing behaviors trap everyone, sooner or later. The people doing the policing, the people being policed, and how everyone involved on all sides internalizes the policing and ends up policing themselves. How policing of gender identity intersects in weird ways with sexual identity.

This book is short, but hard-hitting.

This is Shraya’s statement of what her experiences of dealing with men have been like. As a trans woman, she has, as the song says, ‘looked at life from both sides now’. As a boy, she was encouraged to be more male. She did body building, lowered her voice, and mimicked the walk of masculine men. She gave up color in her wardrobe, sticking to dark neutrals. Later in life she gave up trying to be what she was not, and started expressing her femininity. Now, instead of being harassed for not being masculine enough, she gets harassed for not being feminine enough. The world- and men in particular- just cannot deal with people like her. The majority of men (and women) want women and men to be firmly at the poles of the male/female show more spectrum, and so find themselves uncomfortable- and sometimes violent- in the presence of a trans or gender fluid person. This is an essential book for the 21st century, as we learn to view the world as non-binary. show less

When I'm browsing in the library I find it hard to resist short books with provocative titles. This one challenged me to question my own way of thinking and empathize with a person who is very different from me. While it is fodder for much thought, the fact that it is needs to exist ultimately just makes me sad. And I'm in the quandary that I find the book frustratingly short, but at the same time, were it longer I doubt I would have read it.

In this short book comprised of a single essay, Vivek Shraya reflects on the various ways men and masculinity have made her fearful, from experiences in childhood, to her time in her twenties as a gay man, to her time coming out as a trans woman in her thirties. In the process she reflects on how we might approach gender in the 21st century and how it has the potential to improve the experiences of everyone regardless of their gender expression. While the book is only a brief 85 pages, it's a thought-provoking read with plenty of ideas to unpack and consider.

A gem. Loved the personal perspective of Shraya's writing--both relatable and eye opening while being truly lovely in it's level of detail. Prompts a view up close and from above gently and with so much warmth.