Reviews tagging 'Dysphoria'

The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood by Krys Malcolm Belc

5 reviews

dominic_t's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

This is a really unique book. Krys discusses pregnancy, birth, and parenting from a non-binary perspective. Krys included pictures and legal documents that illustrate the parenting journey. He does more than just transcribe the documents; he uses them as a jumping off point for essays that describe his experiences in more depth. It's a very unique way to structure a book, and it really works.

Krys has some beautiful insights into how his pregnancy and birth shaped his self-image, and he writes about his experiences so beautifully.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Dysphoria, Eating disorder, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Transphobia and Deadnaming

Minor: Miscarriage

nagev's review against another edition

fast-paced

2.75

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Dysphoria, Medical trauma, and Transphobia

Minor: Deadnaming

fiveredhens's review against another edition

emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Pregnancy, and Dysphoria

Moderate: Child abuse, Homophobia, Outing, Domestic abuse, and Transphobia

Minor: Alcohol, Bullying, Mental illness, and Miscarriage

shewantsthediction's review against another edition

challenging hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

3.0

Parts of this made me a little uncomfortable, particularly

when the author talks about almost hitting their kids

. I respect the honesty, but as a survivor of child abuse, it was super off-putting. The other thing that bothered me were the pregnancy descriptions, but that's more of a personal squeamishness. 

The perspective of being a trans nonbinary parent and the story of how they had to adopt their own children was super enlightening, though.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Deadnaming, Eating disorder, Child abuse, Dysphoria, Homophobia, Mental illness, and Pregnancy

Moderate: Medical content, Medical trauma, and Miscarriage

Minor: Alcohol

rieviolet's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

3.5

I think I went into this book with a lot of pre-made assumptions and expectations that weren't really met. But I recognize that this is all on me the reader as I expected to find reflected a lot of my own feelings and experiences about being non-binary and the concept of motherhood/parenthood and so I cannot really put any blame on the book itself. Still, the reading experience, for me at least, fell a bit flat, aside from some really interesting, reflective and emotional passages, but they were few and far between. 

There were times I struggled a bit with the prose, it felt a bit fragmented, jumpy and fast, with very short sentences or with sentences lacking punctuation. I don't think that I personally get on well with this kind of writing style, sometimes I struggled to follow the structure of the sentence.
At times, I also felt that the story telling was a bit disjointed and there were many segments expanding on related topics that, nevertheless, I found a bit boring and that took me out of the main narration. For example, there were digressions on the ultrasound technology, on other scientific or medical topics that I did not expected and just did not care much for. 

I'm still glad to have read the book as I'm always keen to read more about queerness in all its forms. I just struggled a bit to get thorugh the book and did not get out of it as much as I was expecting. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Transphobia, Pregnancy, and Medical content

Moderate: Violence, Deadnaming, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Dysphoria, Eating disorder, Homophobia, and Mental illness

Minor: Sexual content, Sexual violence, Miscarriage, Cancer, and Body shaming