Dianna E. Anderson

OK! Time to tackle In Transit. Would be a more comprehensive review if I'd gotten the print book instead of the audiobook because it's easier to refer back, but here we are.

I enjoy D.E. Anderson's twitter presence and they seem like a thoughtful and interesting person, so I had high hopes for the book. Unfortunately, like many people who were writers before they came out to themselves, they are way too new to this topic to have anything worth writing a book about.

Good thing first: Anderson contributes real-human-language statements of highfalutin gender theory like Butler, Halberstam, Stryker, and Foucault. That was legitimately interesting and helpful to me as someone who never read these texts in college but sees them referenced all the time.

On the other hand, here's what I wrote around 45%:

I feel like this chapter is what happens when you trace the development of ideas of transness among western academics instead of reading about what actual people were doing with their lives. It's a funhouse mirror version of queer/trans history, there's some similarity but a lot of different emphasis and terminology. As if what people do in their bedrooms is changed when academics' theories change. Weird!

This impression was strengthened at 54%: instead of consulting primary or even secondary sources, Anderson is skipping straight to tertiary sources.

"For many years being trans has meant disappearance, either by violence or alteration of the body to pass and go stealth. But as the queer community becomes much more visible than before, .... "

Instead of talking about *why* trans people used to exclusively go stealth (because they wouldn't let you into the medical program without that goal), Anderson skips right over it to be like "good thing that now we are more enlightened!"

And at 68%:

I really do not think that tumblr discourse *followed* the release of [b:Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category], hot damn! I was on tumblr starting in 2009-10 and I tried to read that book around the same time and I could not make heads nor tails of it.

83%:

"we've never had a chance to sit and think about labels because our community has been focused on survival" lmao tell that to the scholars you've been quoting the whole book!

There are also at least a couple areas where Anderson badly misses the mark. The first is offhandedly mentioning Two-Spirit at 18% but not explaining anything about the history or context until 69%. They really could and should have moved that earlier. In the same vein, in the audio they mispronounce "hijra" at 28% and (IIRC) never bring it up again or explain anything more about it, which is an uncomfortable metaphor for how western trans people extract work from nonwestern gender systems without understanding them.

The second is a defining intersex as simply 'having ambiguous genitalia at birth' (I forgot to get the exact quote), and then going on to oversimplify and massively misunderstand the relationship between identifying as intersex and trans, for people who meet the definition of either/both categories. Anderson then has the chutzpah to criticize Andrew Sullivan's transphobia "like the possibility of intersex people had never occurred to him." (40%)

0. a large number of intersex conditions are only diagnosed at puberty, and more only when an adult is having fertility problems,
1. non-transitioning intersex people identify as trans, as cis, as nonbinary, and as none of the above,
2. intersex people do not universally agree that intersex is part of the "trans umbrella",
2a. intersex people do not universally agree that intersex makes sense as part of the LGBTQ+ acronym,
3. some intersex people who have transitioned identify as cis,
3a. some of the aforementioned cis people attempt to throw trans people under the bus for being the real freaks,
3b. some non-intersex trans people claim to be intersex to access transition, and some of them also go on to throw other trans people under the bus (ahem Roberta Cowell ahem)

So those are my big criticisms. Most of my other issues were run-of-the-mill "oh dear, you are *way* too green to be writing a book":

"Most nonbinary people I know are AFAB and come from highly... queerphobic backgrounds." Yeah friend, you are really telling on yourself here.

[describes ~butch flight] "...a trend that is not necessarily new." LMAO

In conclusion: do not write a book about trans shit before you've been out for at least 3-4 years!!! you are not the uniquely talented exception!* your adoring cis friends and publisher don't know what they're talking about! you will regret it! we will all regret it! you are very talented and smart and you will be even more talented and smart 3+ years from now!!

* unfortunately that position has already been taken by Daniel Lavery's [b:Something That May Shock and Discredit You] and he's successful precisely because he's so deeply familiar with the literature of early transition.… (más)

Some nice history, but I didn't find this book particularly compelling. I expect that's mostly because I was reading Ivan Coyote at the same time, and in contrast Anderson came off as both a distanced intellectual and a provocative troll (Coyote is a storyteller who clearly tries to find the way by leading with love -- Anderson shares enough of themself to humanize their book as well, but I didn't finish the book liking them).

This book will give readers a broad 2022-accurate introduction to trans and non-binary orthodoxy, touchstones, and contentions. I think it's a nice introduction and I particularly enjoyed its discussion of allyship. But as a decades-long consumer of long-form writing on queer, trans and non-binary issues, I personally didn't get much from this book. I think I was hoping for something more nuanced than the doctrine, and hoping for unexpected connections to the "world of dichotomies" advertised in the title.… (más)