DRMacIver's Notebook
Book Review: How to understand your gender
Book Review: How to understand your gender
I thought this was a good book, and I would recommend it to people who either are trying to do just that, or to people who want to understand a bit more about what others go through in this space. It’s well written, reasonably thorough, and provides sensible, compassionate, advice.
I didn’t personally get a huge amount out of it. This is partly because I’ve already had a lot of these discussions and done a lot of the relevant reading, partly because I sped through it rather than doing the reflective exercises they encouraged, and partly because my own relationship with my own gender could perhaps best be described as “mild antipathy” - other people talk about gender as this deeply felt lived experience, and it’s not something I can relate to at all (I think Ozy Frantz’s notion of “cis by default”) is helpful here. The result is that the book was written as if a lot of its content should have deep emotional impact and, while I think this was the correct way to write it, a lot of it failed to land for me.