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A review by panda_incognito
A Smart Girl's Guide: Body Image: How to Love Yourself, Life Life to the Fullest, and Celebrate All Kinds of Bodies by Maike Plenzke, Mel Hammond
3.0
I have always been impressed with American Girl self-help books, because they share important information in a brief, kid-friendly way with lots of helpful examples. However, even though I really enjoyed the majority of this book and think that it shares great advice for understanding body image issues and dealing with insecurities, this is the first American Girl book that I know of that addresses transgenderism, and it does so in a way that could easily confuse young girls into misidentifying as transgender. I'll write about the many positive things about this book before I come back to this concern, but I want to mention it at the very beginning so that parents will be aware.
Positive Elements
This book follows the same general format as all American Girl self-help books. It includes brief, compact informational sections, quizzes, answers to questions that real girls submitted, longer testimonials from girls, and activity ideas. There is also a section that specifically deals with disability, and I absolutely loved the content about loving your body no matter what additional medicine, tools, or support it needs. A later section also reiterates that disabled girls should stand up for their needs, and that they and their bodies are not a burden. It is rare for books about body image to address this aspect of many people's experiences, and it made me cry because I felt so seen.
The illustrations throughout are diverse in terms of race, body size, and ability, and I really appreciated the effort the illustrator put in to portraying different types of disabilities instead of only drawing girls in wheelchairs. My one concern about the illustrations is that all of the girls are drawn as conventionally attractive and very pretty, and all of the girls have clear, bright skin except for the ones in the section about acne. This is a minor issue that is easy to overlook, but it's still counterproductive.
This book covers a wealth of important information about developing body confidence, loving yourself the way that you are, adjusting to physical changes during puberty, pursuing healthy eating and movement for the sake of overall health, dealing with insecurities, responding to negative comments from other people, developing a sense of personal style, and seeing past photo-shopped media images, harmful ads, and beauty standards as a whole. This book packs in lots of great information and examples that I learned over the course of years, and does so in a way that is joyful and positive. The book also encourages girls to engage their parents in conversation about things they're concerned about, family rules they don't understand, or ways that their families could build good habits together.
A Few Concerns
Regarding the body image elements, I have just a few critiques. One is the mention of "skipping meals and fasting" on a page about the dark side of beauty standards, with no context about the differences between starving yourself to lose weight versus participating in a fast for religious reasons. I found this flaw particularly striking because the book features Muslim girls in the illustrations and even has a testimonial from a Muslim girl about her hijab.
My other critique is that the author doesn't provide any information about appropriate ways to change your habits if it is necessary for you to pursue long-term, healthy weight loss. This book clearly and accurately depicts the harm and negative consequences of crash dieting but ignores potential health problems associated with being overweight, denying them on one page without any context, citations, or nuance. The part about genetic impacts on weight is also somewhat unclear, since people can gain additional weight beyond their genetic baseline that they can want to lose for healthy reasons, even if they are naturally rounder and should accept their natural body shape.
People can be healthy and well in large bodies, thin people can be unhealthy, and public perceptions of health effects are often overblown because of prejudice and stigma, but I know multiple people who have lost weight in healthy ways and talked afterwards about how much better they feel, how much more energy and physical stamina they have, and how great it is to be free of weight-related side effects like joint pain. They aren't any more valuable or worthy after losing weight than they were before, but they experienced positive outcomes by changing their portion sizes, pursuing more nutritious foods, identifying food allergies, adding more movement to their lives, or whatever was necessary. I wish that this book had struck a balance between discouraging body shame and unhealthy, ineffective diets while still explaining that people who actually need to lose weight can make effective, healthy lifestyle changes.
Concerns about the Gender Expression / Transgenderism Content
The introduction alludes to gender identity content, but nothing comes up about it directly until pages 36-38. After those three pages, there are many references to being transgender interspersed throughout the rest of the book, and there are multiple illustrations with the transgender flag. If someone has been waiting for years for American Girl to address this topic and include a testimonial from a transgender girl, they will be overjoyed, but a lot of parents will be rightly concerned about the way this book can confuse girls into misidentifying as transgender, especially since the publisher included it without being up-front about this theme in the title, cover, or description on the back of the book.
A lot of parents who trust American Girl will give this book to their nine-year-old girls without knowing about any of this content, so it is important to me to describe it in detail. The first page about gender describes cultural expectations for how girls and boys "should" look and then says, "The way you show your gender to the world through clothes and behaviors is your gender expression. Your gender expression can be feminine, masculine, or somewhere in between - and it might change! Maybe you'll experiment with bright dresses and long, feminine hairstyles. Or you might try baggy shorts, plaid shirts, and a buzzed haircut. Your gender expression should make you feel at home in your body."
This description is extremely sexist. All it does is reinforce cultural stereotypes. Rather than saying that you can be a girl who likes to wear baggy shorts, it says that wearing baggy shorts means you're experimenting with a masculine gender expression. This is incredibly restrictive and sexist, limiting a female gender identity to doing things that people historically stereotype as feminine. I typically wear gym shorts, including some purchased from the boy's department, simply because they fit well, are comfortable, and are longer than the girl's gym shorts that I also wear. I'm not experimenting with being a boy. I just want comfortable, athletic clothes that I like.
Now, to give a more dramatic example! I haven't shaved my legs in years, except to wear a particular dress to a relative's funeral, and my sister hasn't shaved her legs since 2012. Neither of us identify as male, nor expect people to assume that we're showing a masculine gender expression. We have our own personal reasons for not wanting to shave, and it was a big accomplishment for me to get over social pressure and a sense of self-consciousness to make this change. It's been wonderful to feel a sense of freedom to never shave again, when I absolutely hate shaving and hate the way that stubble feels on my legs.
This isn't ever something I would have imagined bringing up in a professional book review, but I want to give that concrete, non-conformist example. I do NOT have a masculine gender expression, and I have the freedom to be a woman while clothing my body and handling my body hair in the way that I want. I'm glad that this book wasn't around to confuse me about that at age twelve, when I first hated shaving my legs. Even though the puberty-related section about body hair says that different women will handle it in different ways, the material about gender expression can complicate a kid's perception of this.
After the book introduces its sexist, skewed ideas about gender expression, it moves on to describing gender identity, explaining what it means to be cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary. The following page talks about how transgender kids should open up about their experiences with a trusted adult and see a "specially trained doctor" who can give puberty-blockers (described, not named) or still help them even after they've already gone through puberty. The book doesn't mention anything about the realities of surgery, and just says that transgender kids and teens who get help from doctors "have much better mental health than those who don't."
Although this book doesn't mention suicide, this statement goes along with the usual argument that if kids don't transition, then they are suicide risks. The suicide rate for transgender teens is alarming, but it is incredibly harmful to tell parents and kids that if the kid doesn't go through medical interventions to change their body, then their life is at risk. This pressures people into making emotionally driven, fear-based decisions without truly evaluating what is best for the child, and there are too many awful stories about kids who go through sex transitions and regret them later.
People like to ignore and suppress those stories because they feel like it damages their cause, but if their true cause is for people to be happy with their gender identities, then they should care about the kids whose bodies are permanently altered because of a passing inclination, insecurity, or social pressure that led them to decisions they can't reverse. I recently read an article about a biological girl who went through surgery as a young teenager and now deeply regrets that she will never be able to breastfeed her future children because of the surgery she had. Her entire life is affected by a decision she made when she was thirteen, thanks to doctors pushing her and her parents into it without engaging with any of the deeper reasons behind her discomfort with her body.
I am deeply concerned about the way that this American Girl book glamorizes transgenderism, and it is especially concerning to me that this section directly follows the section about dealing with changes during puberty. I don't think that there was anything malicious or intentional about this placement, since the author was just moving on to her next topic, but it seems to imply that if you still feel uncomfortable with your breasts, or with your developing female shape, then this is the next thing you should consider. Lots of girls feel weird about their bodies during puberty because of their rapid physical changes and toxic social messages that sexualize them, but that doesn't mean that they won't grow up to be happy and secure in their female bodies.
To make matters worse, page 42 asks girls to select and write down whether they are cisgender or transgender, and what their gender expression is, along with other demographic details about themselves. As my sister put it when I mentioned this to her, "Eight-year-old girls can't even pick a favorite color and favorite animal for more than one year! It constantly changes." This book is rated for girls ten and up, but that's still too young for the expectation that girls should label themselves in this way. Also, younger girls will read this book, just because it's American Girl and because body insecurities start young.
Parents need to be aware of what this book covers so that they can save it for when their child is older, avoid it entirely, or read it with their kids to provide much-needed nuance and additional context. They should also be aware of the section near the end that is specifically about bathrooms. It discusses the development of public restrooms for women, bathroom desegregation, and ADA changes to bathrooms, and then talks about the importance of all-gender restrooms. What makes this frustratingly disingenuous is that this short section mentions feeling "safe" in the bathroom twice, but doesn't address safety concerns about adult men using the same restrooms as girls and women. Why should a ten-year-old girl feel safe using an all-gender restroom when a forty-year-old man could be in the next stall over? It is helpful and appropriate for public spaces to have family / all-gender restrooms, but the implication that all restrooms should be open to anyone ignores people's real concerns.
More Personal Thoughts
This book has a lot of great elements, but I am concerned by the way that it seems to encourage transgenderism as a trendy and glamorous thing to identify with, especially if you don't fit into stereotypical feminine norms. My older sister and I are both deeply grateful that we grew up in an era where we were free to be tomboys without people telling us to question our gender identities or consider changing our bodies through medical and surgical interventions, and I have multiple friends who feel the same way.
When my brother was in preschool, he confidently declared that he wanted to be a mommy when he grew up. I told him that he could be a daddy, but that only girls could be mommies. He got extremely upset about this at the time, but he laughs about it now, saying, "I wasn't transgender. I just had no understanding of how humans worked!" It makes me sad to think about these kinds of examples from my past, knowing how eager agenda-driven people are to jump on this kind of childish confusion.
Also, when I was discussing this book with some of my friends last night, one of them brought up how one of her other friends was peer-pressured into identifying as bisexual for years, just because she didn't have typical female interests. As an adult, this girl identifies as straight, and my friend believes that she would have been pressured into the same kind of thing if she hadn't been homeschooled, and still has dealt with people asking her if she's a lesbian just because of her personality and interests. I believe they're both lucky to be fifteen years older than the audience for this book, so that they've experienced social pressure towards other sexual orientations instead of pressure to make irreversible changes to their bodies.
Conclusion
This is an incredibly long review, but I care so deeply about the children who can be influenced by books like this that I wanted to give parents and teenage readers all the information they need to make an informed decision about this book. It has a lot of really great advice and encouraging elements, but parents and kids need to know that it pressures readers into thinking of their personal clothing styles and interests in terms of "gender expression" instead of just personality, and repeatedly emphasizes themes about transgenderism in ways that go beyond addressing the needs of kids who are truly gender dysphoric.
It makes me so sad that children are expected to choose between a vast array of identity labels at the same age when I was still playing with My Little Pony and pretending to be a knight, with no gender conflict or confusion anywhere on the horizon. The current discourse forced on children creates unnecessary confusion and complication, with potential severe consequences for the child's future. Even though I don't doubt the good intentions of this book's author, I hope that all parents who share this book with their children will talk to them about the content and share a much more nuanced view of what the book covers.
I received a free copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine in exchange for an honest review.
Positive Elements
This book follows the same general format as all American Girl self-help books. It includes brief, compact informational sections, quizzes, answers to questions that real girls submitted, longer testimonials from girls, and activity ideas. There is also a section that specifically deals with disability, and I absolutely loved the content about loving your body no matter what additional medicine, tools, or support it needs. A later section also reiterates that disabled girls should stand up for their needs, and that they and their bodies are not a burden. It is rare for books about body image to address this aspect of many people's experiences, and it made me cry because I felt so seen.
The illustrations throughout are diverse in terms of race, body size, and ability, and I really appreciated the effort the illustrator put in to portraying different types of disabilities instead of only drawing girls in wheelchairs. My one concern about the illustrations is that all of the girls are drawn as conventionally attractive and very pretty, and all of the girls have clear, bright skin except for the ones in the section about acne. This is a minor issue that is easy to overlook, but it's still counterproductive.
This book covers a wealth of important information about developing body confidence, loving yourself the way that you are, adjusting to physical changes during puberty, pursuing healthy eating and movement for the sake of overall health, dealing with insecurities, responding to negative comments from other people, developing a sense of personal style, and seeing past photo-shopped media images, harmful ads, and beauty standards as a whole. This book packs in lots of great information and examples that I learned over the course of years, and does so in a way that is joyful and positive. The book also encourages girls to engage their parents in conversation about things they're concerned about, family rules they don't understand, or ways that their families could build good habits together.
A Few Concerns
Regarding the body image elements, I have just a few critiques. One is the mention of "skipping meals and fasting" on a page about the dark side of beauty standards, with no context about the differences between starving yourself to lose weight versus participating in a fast for religious reasons. I found this flaw particularly striking because the book features Muslim girls in the illustrations and even has a testimonial from a Muslim girl about her hijab.
My other critique is that the author doesn't provide any information about appropriate ways to change your habits if it is necessary for you to pursue long-term, healthy weight loss. This book clearly and accurately depicts the harm and negative consequences of crash dieting but ignores potential health problems associated with being overweight, denying them on one page without any context, citations, or nuance. The part about genetic impacts on weight is also somewhat unclear, since people can gain additional weight beyond their genetic baseline that they can want to lose for healthy reasons, even if they are naturally rounder and should accept their natural body shape.
People can be healthy and well in large bodies, thin people can be unhealthy, and public perceptions of health effects are often overblown because of prejudice and stigma, but I know multiple people who have lost weight in healthy ways and talked afterwards about how much better they feel, how much more energy and physical stamina they have, and how great it is to be free of weight-related side effects like joint pain. They aren't any more valuable or worthy after losing weight than they were before, but they experienced positive outcomes by changing their portion sizes, pursuing more nutritious foods, identifying food allergies, adding more movement to their lives, or whatever was necessary. I wish that this book had struck a balance between discouraging body shame and unhealthy, ineffective diets while still explaining that people who actually need to lose weight can make effective, healthy lifestyle changes.
Concerns about the Gender Expression / Transgenderism Content
The introduction alludes to gender identity content, but nothing comes up about it directly until pages 36-38. After those three pages, there are many references to being transgender interspersed throughout the rest of the book, and there are multiple illustrations with the transgender flag. If someone has been waiting for years for American Girl to address this topic and include a testimonial from a transgender girl, they will be overjoyed, but a lot of parents will be rightly concerned about the way this book can confuse girls into misidentifying as transgender, especially since the publisher included it without being up-front about this theme in the title, cover, or description on the back of the book.
A lot of parents who trust American Girl will give this book to their nine-year-old girls without knowing about any of this content, so it is important to me to describe it in detail. The first page about gender describes cultural expectations for how girls and boys "should" look and then says, "The way you show your gender to the world through clothes and behaviors is your gender expression. Your gender expression can be feminine, masculine, or somewhere in between - and it might change! Maybe you'll experiment with bright dresses and long, feminine hairstyles. Or you might try baggy shorts, plaid shirts, and a buzzed haircut. Your gender expression should make you feel at home in your body."
This description is extremely sexist. All it does is reinforce cultural stereotypes. Rather than saying that you can be a girl who likes to wear baggy shorts, it says that wearing baggy shorts means you're experimenting with a masculine gender expression. This is incredibly restrictive and sexist, limiting a female gender identity to doing things that people historically stereotype as feminine. I typically wear gym shorts, including some purchased from the boy's department, simply because they fit well, are comfortable, and are longer than the girl's gym shorts that I also wear. I'm not experimenting with being a boy. I just want comfortable, athletic clothes that I like.
Now, to give a more dramatic example! I haven't shaved my legs in years, except to wear a particular dress to a relative's funeral, and my sister hasn't shaved her legs since 2012. Neither of us identify as male, nor expect people to assume that we're showing a masculine gender expression. We have our own personal reasons for not wanting to shave, and it was a big accomplishment for me to get over social pressure and a sense of self-consciousness to make this change. It's been wonderful to feel a sense of freedom to never shave again, when I absolutely hate shaving and hate the way that stubble feels on my legs.
This isn't ever something I would have imagined bringing up in a professional book review, but I want to give that concrete, non-conformist example. I do NOT have a masculine gender expression, and I have the freedom to be a woman while clothing my body and handling my body hair in the way that I want. I'm glad that this book wasn't around to confuse me about that at age twelve, when I first hated shaving my legs. Even though the puberty-related section about body hair says that different women will handle it in different ways, the material about gender expression can complicate a kid's perception of this.
After the book introduces its sexist, skewed ideas about gender expression, it moves on to describing gender identity, explaining what it means to be cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary. The following page talks about how transgender kids should open up about their experiences with a trusted adult and see a "specially trained doctor" who can give puberty-blockers (described, not named) or still help them even after they've already gone through puberty. The book doesn't mention anything about the realities of surgery, and just says that transgender kids and teens who get help from doctors "have much better mental health than those who don't."
Although this book doesn't mention suicide, this statement goes along with the usual argument that if kids don't transition, then they are suicide risks. The suicide rate for transgender teens is alarming, but it is incredibly harmful to tell parents and kids that if the kid doesn't go through medical interventions to change their body, then their life is at risk. This pressures people into making emotionally driven, fear-based decisions without truly evaluating what is best for the child, and there are too many awful stories about kids who go through sex transitions and regret them later.
People like to ignore and suppress those stories because they feel like it damages their cause, but if their true cause is for people to be happy with their gender identities, then they should care about the kids whose bodies are permanently altered because of a passing inclination, insecurity, or social pressure that led them to decisions they can't reverse. I recently read an article about a biological girl who went through surgery as a young teenager and now deeply regrets that she will never be able to breastfeed her future children because of the surgery she had. Her entire life is affected by a decision she made when she was thirteen, thanks to doctors pushing her and her parents into it without engaging with any of the deeper reasons behind her discomfort with her body.
I am deeply concerned about the way that this American Girl book glamorizes transgenderism, and it is especially concerning to me that this section directly follows the section about dealing with changes during puberty. I don't think that there was anything malicious or intentional about this placement, since the author was just moving on to her next topic, but it seems to imply that if you still feel uncomfortable with your breasts, or with your developing female shape, then this is the next thing you should consider. Lots of girls feel weird about their bodies during puberty because of their rapid physical changes and toxic social messages that sexualize them, but that doesn't mean that they won't grow up to be happy and secure in their female bodies.
To make matters worse, page 42 asks girls to select and write down whether they are cisgender or transgender, and what their gender expression is, along with other demographic details about themselves. As my sister put it when I mentioned this to her, "Eight-year-old girls can't even pick a favorite color and favorite animal for more than one year! It constantly changes." This book is rated for girls ten and up, but that's still too young for the expectation that girls should label themselves in this way. Also, younger girls will read this book, just because it's American Girl and because body insecurities start young.
Parents need to be aware of what this book covers so that they can save it for when their child is older, avoid it entirely, or read it with their kids to provide much-needed nuance and additional context. They should also be aware of the section near the end that is specifically about bathrooms. It discusses the development of public restrooms for women, bathroom desegregation, and ADA changes to bathrooms, and then talks about the importance of all-gender restrooms. What makes this frustratingly disingenuous is that this short section mentions feeling "safe" in the bathroom twice, but doesn't address safety concerns about adult men using the same restrooms as girls and women. Why should a ten-year-old girl feel safe using an all-gender restroom when a forty-year-old man could be in the next stall over? It is helpful and appropriate for public spaces to have family / all-gender restrooms, but the implication that all restrooms should be open to anyone ignores people's real concerns.
More Personal Thoughts
This book has a lot of great elements, but I am concerned by the way that it seems to encourage transgenderism as a trendy and glamorous thing to identify with, especially if you don't fit into stereotypical feminine norms. My older sister and I are both deeply grateful that we grew up in an era where we were free to be tomboys without people telling us to question our gender identities or consider changing our bodies through medical and surgical interventions, and I have multiple friends who feel the same way.
When my brother was in preschool, he confidently declared that he wanted to be a mommy when he grew up. I told him that he could be a daddy, but that only girls could be mommies. He got extremely upset about this at the time, but he laughs about it now, saying, "I wasn't transgender. I just had no understanding of how humans worked!" It makes me sad to think about these kinds of examples from my past, knowing how eager agenda-driven people are to jump on this kind of childish confusion.
Also, when I was discussing this book with some of my friends last night, one of them brought up how one of her other friends was peer-pressured into identifying as bisexual for years, just because she didn't have typical female interests. As an adult, this girl identifies as straight, and my friend believes that she would have been pressured into the same kind of thing if she hadn't been homeschooled, and still has dealt with people asking her if she's a lesbian just because of her personality and interests. I believe they're both lucky to be fifteen years older than the audience for this book, so that they've experienced social pressure towards other sexual orientations instead of pressure to make irreversible changes to their bodies.
Conclusion
This is an incredibly long review, but I care so deeply about the children who can be influenced by books like this that I wanted to give parents and teenage readers all the information they need to make an informed decision about this book. It has a lot of really great advice and encouraging elements, but parents and kids need to know that it pressures readers into thinking of their personal clothing styles and interests in terms of "gender expression" instead of just personality, and repeatedly emphasizes themes about transgenderism in ways that go beyond addressing the needs of kids who are truly gender dysphoric.
It makes me so sad that children are expected to choose between a vast array of identity labels at the same age when I was still playing with My Little Pony and pretending to be a knight, with no gender conflict or confusion anywhere on the horizon. The current discourse forced on children creates unnecessary confusion and complication, with potential severe consequences for the child's future. Even though I don't doubt the good intentions of this book's author, I hope that all parents who share this book with their children will talk to them about the content and share a much more nuanced view of what the book covers.
I received a free copy from the publisher through Amazon Vine in exchange for an honest review.