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A review by tackman_babcock
Trans Like Me by C.N. Lester
5.0
It's hard to sum up a book like C N Lester's Trans Like Me: I've never read anything like it.
Our media landscape is fractured; trans 'issues' are in media and political spotlights today like never before. Those connected to trans people in social circles can gradually develop the informal understanding (and even a refreshed vocabulary) needed to wrap their brains around some difficult realisations, to help them recognise and then empathise with the humanity of hundreds of thousands of trans people crying out to be understood.
And at the same time, a great many people are starting from a level understanding of trans experience that they collected from newspapers that—to put it charitably—were most likely edited by some Piers Morgan type.
The conceptual gap between these two groups feels like a chasm. And most of the tools that people "on the outside" of trans circles would need to bridge that chasm aren't readily accessible to them and can only be picked up from being far more involved than they are. Lastly, most trans people who are trying to cultivate better understanding in those around them are often vastly outnumbered by non trans voices, so getting their messages actually heard can be brutally difficult, draining and disheartening.
For those of us that don't live trans lives ourselves, C N Lester's Trans Like Me is a book that helps equip us, enables us to think more clearly—and importantly, more personally—about the extraordinary, endlessly varied and fascinating ways which that elusive thing we call 'gender' does what it does in all of our lives: how it gets experienced, constructed, understood, enforced, and demanded. Large parts of it draw on Lester's own personal life, gently drawing out the many ways where our ideological assumptions crash into the actual experience of life as a trans person. And in their critique of media and exploration of historical genderqueer lives, it's an invitation to recognise the long record of all the countless ways that having gender prescribed for people from the outside fails, often leading to misery.
If I rate this book based on how well it has helped me reflect on the pervasive ways that outside gender expectations govern peoples lives including my own and others and those far from the centres, and rate it based on how well it's helped me consider things with fresh insight after reading it, it's a 5/5 no question.
If I had one critique of the book it'd be that in contributing to this precious struggle for liberation from the prison of centuries of narrow ideas, to issue a call for us all to recognise wider, broader ways of being human, Lester's language came across sometimes a little plain, as though they chose to be as clear as possible rather than being warm. I don't know Lester's other work, so it's hard to say for sure whether they've suppressed some emotion from their writing here so that hostile readers couldn't dismiss the book for being "hysterical" or "over emotional". If that is true, though, that would just be one more way that we rob trans people of their birthright to be fully human.
Our media landscape is fractured; trans 'issues' are in media and political spotlights today like never before. Those connected to trans people in social circles can gradually develop the informal understanding (and even a refreshed vocabulary) needed to wrap their brains around some difficult realisations, to help them recognise and then empathise with the humanity of hundreds of thousands of trans people crying out to be understood.
And at the same time, a great many people are starting from a level understanding of trans experience that they collected from newspapers that—to put it charitably—were most likely edited by some Piers Morgan type.
The conceptual gap between these two groups feels like a chasm. And most of the tools that people "on the outside" of trans circles would need to bridge that chasm aren't readily accessible to them and can only be picked up from being far more involved than they are. Lastly, most trans people who are trying to cultivate better understanding in those around them are often vastly outnumbered by non trans voices, so getting their messages actually heard can be brutally difficult, draining and disheartening.
For those of us that don't live trans lives ourselves, C N Lester's Trans Like Me is a book that helps equip us, enables us to think more clearly—and importantly, more personally—about the extraordinary, endlessly varied and fascinating ways which that elusive thing we call 'gender' does what it does in all of our lives: how it gets experienced, constructed, understood, enforced, and demanded. Large parts of it draw on Lester's own personal life, gently drawing out the many ways where our ideological assumptions crash into the actual experience of life as a trans person. And in their critique of media and exploration of historical genderqueer lives, it's an invitation to recognise the long record of all the countless ways that having gender prescribed for people from the outside fails, often leading to misery.
If I rate this book based on how well it has helped me reflect on the pervasive ways that outside gender expectations govern peoples lives including my own and others and those far from the centres, and rate it based on how well it's helped me consider things with fresh insight after reading it, it's a 5/5 no question.
If I had one critique of the book it'd be that in contributing to this precious struggle for liberation from the prison of centuries of narrow ideas, to issue a call for us all to recognise wider, broader ways of being human, Lester's language came across sometimes a little plain, as though they chose to be as clear as possible rather than being warm. I don't know Lester's other work, so it's hard to say for sure whether they've suppressed some emotion from their writing here so that hostile readers couldn't dismiss the book for being "hysterical" or "over emotional". If that is true, though, that would just be one more way that we rob trans people of their birthright to be fully human.