She/He/They/Me: For the Sisters, Misters, and Binary Resisters

Through its subtitle with the "Binary Resisters" bit and its cover design (the book opens with a note crediting the--beautiful--cover art to a group of nonbinary Brazilian artists), She/He/They/Me promises to include nonbinary or genderqueer readers and experiences. It does have a lot of interesting content on gender systems through space and time, but it fails badly in terms of inclusivity toward nonbinary people.

One issue is that the genderqueer path just ... dissolves. You can choose not identifying as a boy or a girl as a path early on, but you quickly get dumped back into questions about marriage, jobs, medical care, etc. where you are forced to choose a binary gender identity in order to proceed.

Another big issue for trans and show more nonbinary people (and for trans and nonbinary representation to well-meaning cis readers!) is that the book gives us ONE CHANCE to come out and be accepted. If you choose a trans path in early life, you automatically come out to your parents, and then you can choose them reacting well (yay!) or badly (in which case the only option is to live as though you were cis ... and there is never a possibility of either realizing new things about your gender or breaking free from your abusive family of origin and transitioning or coming out as an adult). Although our culture is really attached to the story that all queer people come out when they're about 17 and it's either tragic or inspirational, that story does not fit a lot of people, and it's harmful to reinforce it as The Only Way.

I'm sad, because I want what this book seems to promise. show less

She/He/They/Me: For the Sisters, Misters, and Binary Resisters is a fabulous book that takes the reader on a route through the reality of social history and customs that come along with gender roles and identities. It starts by asking whether you are born in a time and place that gender exists. Your answer determines the next page you go to. My journey took me to a society where people are born with two genders. Since my gender assignment, expression, and identity are all matching, you would think my journey would be a hop, skip, and a jump and done, but Robyn Ryle explores more about gender than you think and finds elements to complicate things such as how we feel about our bodies, disabilities, the work we do, access to birth control show more and more.

I love the warm and optimistic tone of this book. I loved going to a new page and seeing “Congratulations!” as the first word. Of course, it’s not all fun and games. Ryle recognizes realistic cultural biases and oppression, but the tone is so warm and comforting that the book makes a person want to continue the journey. It was intriguing and even fun to follow other possible journies that lead us all to questioning how we think about gender.

She/He/They/Me will be released on March 5th. I received a copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

She/He/They/Me at Sourcebooks
Robyn Ryle author site

★★★★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/03/04/she-he-they-me-by-robyn-r... show less

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Reading this book was... exhausting. I did two full paths, as well as several detours where I checked out another path, and many dead-ends. In the end, I'm sure there are still chapters I haven't read (I might return to them later), but I feel like I have a good enough idea to write a review.

Here's the short version: as an information resource, this book is pretty good. As a choose-your-own-adventure book that emphasises nonbinary people on the cover, it fails terribly.

1) Let's talk about the information first. Most of this book is about binary gender roles in Western culture, with a US focus. It addresses race, class, and has some chapters on transgender healthcare, show more as well as a few chapters on other countries, and explanation of gender roles in some indigenous cultures. It also deals with some statistics, and gave information about gender in Olympic sports that was really interesting to me. Obviously, I can't speak for the accuracy of all this information, but I appreciated the intersectionality, and the focus on issues that I didn't even think of.

So, why does this book absolutely fail to deliver what the cover and blurb seemed to promise?

2a) A quick word about the formatting. I read an e-ARC that had links to every chapter in the contents, but at the end of chapters (where it gives you the choices and tells you which chapter to go next) there are no links. There are also no page numbers, which (especially in a paperback copy) would have been much more useful in my opinion than chapter numbers. This book required a lot of jumping around, as all choose-your-adventure books do, but the actual activity of jumping around was so inconvenient that after my second read-through it just got frustrating.

2b) And now let me talk about my personal experience trying to read this book as it was intended, as a nonbinary person.

On my first read, I picked that my assigned gender didn't match the gender I felt I was. So far, so good. Next question is whether your parents accept your gender identity or not. I picked no, so I was taken to a chapter that forced me into "pretending to be a cis person for now". And then... the gender questioning thing never came up again. I actually knew about this because another reviewer pointed it out, but it was still a really dysphoric experience, and a pretty big oversight. There could have been a chapter there about transitioning as an adult, or leaving your parents, or ANYTHING. But no, I guess if your parents don't accept your gender then you're out of luck forever.

On my second read, I picked that my parents accept my gender identity. This allowed me some options, like choose to be a transgender man, a transgender woman, nonbinary, or agender. (Yes, nonbinary and agender are separate.) I picked the nonbinary option, and there was about... one chapter about nonbinary experiences. Then at the marriage part, the route merged with the previous path, and I was forced into a binary of picking between being a man or a woman.

Other things I noticed:

1) If you pick the asexual option, you can be either alloromantic or aromantic, but if you pick to be allosexual, there is no mention of aromanticism.

2) I mentioned this above, but I'd just like to emphasize that for a book that emphasises nonbinary people on the cover, all the medical, sports, work and other information is only for men and women. I understand that society is binarist, but at the very least it could have been phrased as "you are perceived as a woman" or something similar, as opposed to "you ARE a woman". There are also very few chapters specifically about nonbinary experiences in non-indigenous cultures.

3) There are several chapters where man vs trans man and woman vs trans woman are used, as opposed to cis man vs trans man or cis woman vs trans woman. There is also a chapter where the sentence "they have lived their lives as normal women" (as opposed to intersex) is used.

In summary, the information in this book focuses on a lot of issues and includes a variety of experiences - however, it heavily erases nonbinary people in non-indigenous cultures, and treats cisgender people as the norm, which was really disappointing after that cover. show less

There are already a lot of great reviews of this book on goodreads, so I'll just say that I found this book fascinating, but it couldn't quite follow through on the promise of the title.

Included in a blog post and resource list at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2019/06/10/non-fiction-about-gender-and-trans-e...