A review by kass_e_
Transgender History by Susan Stryker

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.75

The only reason I took off a quarter star is because the book could already use a 3rd edition. I definitely recommend reading this edition over the 1st if you can. A few things were said about non-binary identities I didn’t exactly agree with. Probably two sentences out of the entire book that is otherwise a very moving experience to read as a young trans person. I wanted to better understand my place in the world and the people and events that came before me and now I feel that I have. It’s a humbling reading experience, personally anyways. I’d recommend this to any queer or trans person especially but really anyone who just wanted to get a trans historian’s history of trans people in America.

---

Content Warnings

Graphic: Hate crime, Homophobia, Sexism, Terminal illness, Transphobia, Violence, Religious bigotry, Outing, and Sexual harassment

Moderate: Biphobia, Deadnaming, Death, Police brutality, Medical content, and Lesbophobia

Minor: Sexual assault and Sexual content

All of the “graphic” tags are in the context of “historian telling you events that happened and the causes and consequences of them “. They can still be disturbing. The chapter “The Difficult Decades” (referring to the 70s and 80s)was notably a hard one for me due to descriptions of transphobia, transmisogyny, HIV, and death. Also none of these tags are perpetrated by the author to my knowledge, only ever described.