“i’m not a feminist…”

there’s a deeply problematic trend right now amongst young women in the West: the trend of identifying in explicit opposition to feminism in spite of the fact that we take for granted the rights, privileges, and realities created by the work of the feminist movement. the “anti-feminist movement” is a force which grabs a lot of note in the media and which has a decent thrall over the blogosphere, too. it’s not exactly a bunch of extremists advocating anti-feminism but instead this has become something that seems to be worthy of debate, and i’m really curious when the basic humanity and equality of women became a matter that people believe should be subject to debate. yet this is what’s happening, from the modern American uterus police and their obsessive war on reproductive rights to the media’s portrayal of feminist women, there’s a war afoot against feminism in Western culture.

i know feminism is imperfect, especially when it comes to the fact that it’s a movement which has centered the experiences of white women for most of its history. the problem, however, is that the anti-feminist movement has nothing to do with criticisms of feminism’s troubled history when it comes to queers, trans women, disabled women, and women of color, especially Latinas; these criticisms are certainly something feminism must be accountable to and accountable for. a good example of a movement in response to the failings of feminism is Womanism, which centers the Black female experience in Western society; it’s a fine example of a movement which isn’t defined as feminist but is dedicated to uplifting women. the thing is that Womanism isn’t anti-feminism.  anti-feminism is literally being against the goals and desires of feminism…anti-feminism is targeted at the very idea that women deserve to be independent entities with the same right to our own things, rights,  desires, and feelings that men take for granted. the message of anti-feminism is quite plain: women deserve to be lesser.

i am a feminist because i believe that my gender doesn’t change my value as a person. i don’t believe that anyone’s gender should change their value as a person, so i don’t think anyone deserves to be lesser because of their gender. yes, there are deeply transphobic ideologues in the feminist movement, people like Cathy Brennan and Janice Raymond, both of whom center a very patriarchally defined Caucasian version of feminism to start with. now, as much as allegory may be overused, i want to ask you a question…what’s so different about feminism that lets it be judged by a few loud, hateful ideologues? there are deeply transphobic Black folk and LGB types out there, but nobody expects me to stop being Black or gay because of those transphobes, and yet i see feminism used, repeatedly, get bashed by other trans women. why not form rational criticisms of transphobic feminisms and speak to the problems of those transphobes rather than unloading on how you’re not a feminist? i don’t understand what causes this extreme discomfort within a certain group of trans women, especially when i always find it ironic to see a woman complaining about feminism when she does things like own stuff and vote. guess what brought you that right? um, you got it, feminism.

but the problem goes much farther than just trans women. the problem seems to affect a cross-section of women and i agree with the assertion that this is a creation of the increasingly conservative Western media attempting to position feminism as a relic of the past and that feminist women are somehow deficient and that feminism failed when the ERA wasn’t ratified in the US. this is full of fertilizer for a number of reasons, from that there’s a big, big world that isn’t the US on down to the reality that there is no one feminist archetype…didn’t Third Wave feminism address this? i don’t think there’s much question that media shapes perception, whether it’s the perception of trans women or the perception of Black working-class families, and given the nature of social shame aimed at women for speaking up and asserting our independence, it’s very easy to play games with how women are depicted in the media. when was the last time you saw a media story that positively portrayed a disabled single woman? i’ll sit here and wait while you look…you’re gonna be busy for a while.

this rewards a system where women who parrot the current social mentality are rewarded, especially if they espouse values which reassure the kyriarchy. think about who you see demonized when the media wants you to look unfavorably upon the poor: the racist, sexist myth of the “welfare queen”, a myth that has been expanded lately in the UK and the US to demonize disabled people. generally, the people you see portrayed as scroungers are people of color and women. one of the reasons media portrayal becomes so odious goes beyond that: the once-a-week story you see in American media of a woman going into a male-dominated field and succeeding. it often correctly identifies what it’s like to be in that position, but it looks upon this woman as an oddity and not a woman doing her damn job. it treats the success of a woman as an oddity and not as something that’s supposed to be everyday.

i will be the first person to admit to you that feminism isn’t perfect, but plenty of things aren’t perfect; this does not mean they should be disregarded over a few bad apples. i am unabashedly and unashamedly a feminist and i don’t really want to ponder what my life would be like (or if i’d even exist) without the advances the feminist movement has made for women in the United States. i will criticize when feminism fails women of color, and i will speak up when disabled women and trans women are demonized by certain fringe elements of the movement, but i will never, ever accept the idea that the kyriarchy thinks it knows what’s best for me.

“i don’t see you as trans”

…and i know what you meant by that
but, but
i don’t understand why you’d think it
well…
it’s supposed to be a compliment
you see, Erica…
it reminds me why i’m different

so really
do you have any idea what trans looks like?
because
i think i just fail to meet the set of stereotypes you have in your head
and besides
the fact that i fit your expectations of a cis person
but you…
means that you need to change and question
your voice
your perceptions of what it means to be trans
your face
because we come in more kinds and shapes
i mean, your mannerisms…
than they told you about in that true selves book
i just can’t see you as a boy
or in your therapist’s office
i just don’t see you as trans
because when you do you’re telling me how you see me defines me.

…our paths are different, yes. i don’t see a boy in the mirror looking back at me and i don’t really have to worry about street harassment for anything other than being a slightly fly fat girl. i don’t have to wonder if anyone’s going to ask me what my “real name” is in a job interview, though i do get dogged with questions which are obviously designed to weed women who plan to be mothers. i didn’t pay some of the dues that most trans women had to pay, though i paid them fourfold in other ways; i accept that probably does make me different. i’m not fucked up about my height…hell, i’d like to be taller. i don’t care that my shoulders are big, they make me look curvy and sturdy and hourglassy. i don’t care that my face isn’t perfect, because i’ve had years to accept it and i know that when i don’t look just right, i’m probably the only person that sees it and i need to get over it. i know that i can dress up like a boy and nobody is going to believe it no matter how hard i try.  my specific path has come with very little dysphoria in daily life, because, well, i’m a girl/woman/whatever, and for me that’s never really been an issue post-transition; hell, increasingly i’m starting to get that pre-transition it may have been less of an issue than i thought.

but you know what? i’m still trans. i still have the same constraining factors as you and work within the same systems of oppression. i have no reason to be lying about it, because why would i willingly subject myself to the hell that most of us live through if i weren’t? besides, it’s not that you don’t believe that i’m trans, it’s just that you don’t see me as trans. what does that accomplish, really? because what it does for me is it makes me feel like i inhabit this weird twilight world between cis and trans, which i really don’t care to do. it establishes that i fall into this weird category of someone who can shift what she is at will, when really i can’t do that at all. it also comes with the suggestion that my allegiances can shift at will, and i really honestly don’t think that if you’ve listened to much that i said here that i’m going to magically swap my allegiances back to Team Cis and walk away from it all; the fact that i could doesn’t mean that i will. when i get done writing this blog, i’m going to take the tram to meet a friend for breakfast. i could very well not pay my fare; in the four years the thing’s existed, i’ve never seen fare inspectors, after all, but i’m going to because that’s the responsibility i possess to the nice people who take me from Point A to Point B.  given that i’ve pretty much been treated worse by the trans community than i have been by cis peeps, i think maybe you should take a step back and understand that as much as it doesn’t absolve any of the bad things that have fallen on my shoulders, it is all a symptom of transphobia and transexterminationism practiced by a ciscentric society.

plus, what really happens when you say stuff like this is that it boosts the perception that you’d know a trans person by sight. and i know that scrunchy-faced confused look people, especially other trans people, get on their face when i say it; i know that there’s a reason i can move through this world without paying the same dues, i get it…but what you don’t see is that your scrunchy-faced confused look suggests that there’s a specific set of features and realities associated with being trans. i mean, seriously, the fact that i’m not what you expect trans to look like is actually kind of one of the roadblocks those of us who are different face…it’s no compliment at all, even though i know that’s what you meant.

if you want to compliment me, tell me how awesome my shirt is (i’m wearing my awesome busty girl comics tee today) or that you like my hair. tell me how lovely my eyes are, because they really kinda are. but don’t tell me you don’t see me as trans, because as much as you mean well, it just makes me feel more like an outcast and an other. i already fear that i am a trans person without a trans community, and when i’ve shared a deep and closely guarded piece of who i am with you, please don’t throw it back at me, understand that i trusted you enough to share it and i hope you trust me enough to let me be a legitimate person and not an asterisk or a stateless individual.

HBSers and True Transsexuals, we need to talk.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of frustration, othering, and hateful comments from people who seem aligned with the transfundamentalist movement, like HBSers and True Transsexuals, and i’m really thinking that perhaps rather than issue walls of invective, maybe what we really need to do is talk.

Like many trans women, i don’t fit the narrow and poorly defined parameters of who qualifies as an HBSer, and this has come with some very specific issues. Because almost all trans-related resources locally are controlled by a support group run by HBSer-identified leadership, there is a great gulf in what happens if you choose not to or cannot fit the HBS framework of who is and isn’t a trans woman. Yes, the Internet offers some workaround, but there’s enough control that people don’t talk and there is often a significant HBSer presence on online fora, too.

I posit that the HBS/True Transsexual mindset is constructed around the idea of “acceptable losses.”  This was best evidenced by a commenter on Reddit who once famously opined that “Nobody cares if you die, really nobody cares if an annoying tr**ny doesn’t get hormones because you’re too ugly, stupid, and poor.“ The comment was deleted not soon after, but the poster, a self-identified True Transsexual, had made her point and revealed this agenda of “acceptable losses.”

So, persons of the transfundamentalist bent, i know you read my blog. You leave about six to eight comments a week about how i must be ugly, stupid, a liar, a “transgender” (but you define as a transsexual), and you adore calling me “it” and a “man”. Okay, fine, you’re angry about something, but the problem is that i can’t really tell what that something is. I’ve been told by many that i should just slag HBSers/TTs in general and not even try to engage, but the engagement is already happening.  I know you’re reading this, so let’s talk about dialogue.

I know we’re not going to be friends, and i accept that.  What i don’t understand is the following short list of things:

1. Why can’t we co-exist? There’s plenty of trans women out here in the real world and if we establish common ground we can be stronger. I don’t understand the need to destroy the outlier and dominate spaces…i mean, yeah, i get that that’s human nature, but that’s no excuse. Oppressed groups historically can find common ground. Why can’t we?
2. What are you gaining in posting your walls of invective or screaming people out of a support group?
3. What does being an HBSer or a True Transsexual mean to you and what delineates the difference between you and i?
4. When do you, personally, consider someone to be an “acceptable loss”? Why do you believe this is necessary in trans politics?

What i guess i’m asking is why, since i am expected to tolerate you, can’t your movement tolerate people like, you know, me? I’m just trying to live my life and i don’t understand what the HBSer problem with that is.

the ground rules:

I’ve unbanned all IP addresses banned from commenting in the past, other than IPs that Cathy Brennan has posted from, because, well, Cathy Brennan.  I am doing this out of a desire for an open exchange of thoughts and ideas.

Comments are still screened and i reserve the right to decline to unscreen a comment if any of the ground rules aren’t followed:

1. No degendering. This applies to me and everyone else in the conversation, and this includes calling anyone “it” or similar, provided “it” isn’t their preferred pronoun.

2. No racism/misogyny/homophobia/ableism allowed. Sorry, but if there’s some essential difference it shouldn’t spin around sexual orientation or race.

3. When you cite a source, link to the source or cite it completely if it’s not online.

Now…let’s talk. And if you’d rather not comment, or desire a more personal dialogue, i’m willing to listen at inchoaterica (AT) gmail (DOT)com, provided you are willing to abide by the ground rules above. If you’re just going to email to tell me i’m an ugly man…you’ve probably done it 12 times before, i get your assertion.

Now, if only you knew how wrong you were…but maybe that’s for another time.

academia: surprise, it’s another oppressive institution

so the other day Savannah asked me if i’d written about the nature of being out in academia, and though i’ve touched on a lot of the systems of oppression that keep trans women relegated to the sidelines in any discourse where academia is centered, i haven’t really given academia the full scourging it deserves, and given that academia is especially hostile to trans women, often using kyriarchical-patriarchical arguments as an element of defending its transphobia, it deserves specific scrutiny.

i will admit that i am pretty well-educated. i have undergraduate and graduate degrees, funded through a crushing heap of debt that i owe to the government and some targeted philanthropy that benefits underprivileged sorts like me who sell their souls to the government in exchange for education financing. i do have a an advantage that a lot of folks lack, but at a very, very large price…not just forced silence about my gender identity, but a whole heap of debt that i’m not sure i’ll ever be able to afford to pay back.

going past the obvious reality that academia itself is generally a cis white able-bodied boys’ club and the fact that there are very real economic, legal, and cultural barriers to college for most oppressed people, especially poor folks of color and first-generation immigrants…there are four specific things that keep the visibility and inclusion of trans women in academia low to nonexistent:

1. adminstrative hostility. i haven’t ever gone to a school where it would be safe to reveal my trans status at any point since i transitioned. depressing, but true…in multiple cases i have been told explicitly that i must not as a condition of remaining enrolled or remaining in the good graces of the administration. i know other trans women who have been told the exact same thing, from “we can’t protect you from the university’s administration if you’re outed or come out” to “it is unfortunate that the school is not ready yet, but we can’t promise you continued success at (school) if you discuss being a transsexual.”  in 2 out of 3 of these cases discussed, as well as at my undergraduate school, no such limitation was imposed on any trans men/CAFAB genderqueers studying at the same school. this is apparently fairly commonplace as there are additional tales of this which i cannot personally vet that are strewn across the internet, and it is a very strong and loud reminder of the privilege gap between CAMAB  trans women/genderqueers and CAFAB  trans men/genderqueers in the academic world.

 1a. academic elitism. of course, telling someone like me that “maybe you should have gone to another school” is a really counterproductive, victim-blaming/victim-shaming argument. despite what Good Will Hunting will have you believe, the stuffy high-end schools that seem to have more open and affirming environments are not looking for poor mixed disabled girls, or even poor white able-bodied math genius boys like Matt Damon played…we can’t all go to Harvard, in other words, and i’m not sure that i’d want to. when the “you should have gone somewhere else” card is played, it means that you’re saying that person’s academic choices and limitations are not worth considering and that you’d really rather they have made choices based on your terms, and at the risk of being repetitive, that kind of attitude is toxic and it establishes that you don’t see their reality. what if the school they chose was the only one they got in at? what if the school they chose gave them a significant scholarship? what if the school was close to home and they can’t afford a long commute or to move away from their parents or family-like structure?

 1b. the “well you don’t have to tell them” defense …sure. unless you have high school records in a different name, or the school requires a copy of your proof of legal presence and all you have is a birth certificate with the wrong name, or your discipline (medicine, some social work arenas, law, early childhood education, etc) requires a background check where you are expected to disclose every name you’ve ever had. this defense is really tired because it comes with the reality that you’re stuck with compulsory invisibility  either way and it’s just more victim-blaming/shaming…you can’t contribute to visibility like we’re being told we’re supposed to under this bargain, either, and it diminishes the importance of the lives and work of trans women just as much. by the way, here’s a great piece on the expectation of “coming out” and the cis/hetero-enforced idea that our identities never shift from Avory over at RadicallyQueer.

1c. the barney frank special: housing Barney Frank, a famously transmisogynist politician, once bleated something vague about penises in locker rooms being a reason to exclude trans people from ENDA. scholastic housing policies often sound something like this, from paranoia about surgical status (there’s nothing like being asked to provide “proof” you’re post-op as a condition of university housing) to taking measures which could easily compromise a trans student’s need to privacy so that they can choose how to identify on their own terms. many schools, including the undergrad school i went to, require most students who don’t live locally to live on campus, and housing is often much cheaper than living off campus if the area your school’s in is rather expensive. if your choices for housing are all bad or gender-hostile, it makes going to school that much harder, and it also makes it completely impossible to transition in housing…

2. transmisogyny from professors. yes, schools have hired some trans professors, but they’re overwhelmingly white and male. the idea that there could be a trans woman of color, despite the fact that it would satisfy the diversity bingo that we all know damn well many universities play, is beyond the pale…it simply hasn’t happened, because oppressive institutions don’t really understand intersectionality well. so when schools are claiming they hired the “first trans professor in (whatever)” they’re hiring white men. and, well, white CAFAB dudes have a history of doing shitty transmisogynist things…you know, the Gunner Scott/Dean $pade/Chaz Bono/Templeton Koala sorts who get power and run with it and make sure that they must control all dialogue about transness. obviously, not all CAFAB trans men and genderqueers are bad, but if you’re not speaking up when ugly transmisogynist shit happens and just letting people like Scott and $pade slide for their actions, you’re acquiescing. speak up and center the voices of all trans people and experiences (not just white CAFAB trans men/genderqueers)and i promise it won’t be at the cost of white men because very little ends up being at the cost of white men. stop using the “they mean well” excuse, because the result is still white men standing on our necks.

throw in the transphobic old guard like Janice Raymond or Jean Grossholz and the smaller tinpot dictators that populate academia (all you need is tenure and a grudge!) who have nasty things to say about trans women and you’ve got a real problem on your hands: professors reinforce the reality that unless your documentation is all in order and you’re blessed with passing privilege, you’re pretty much at their mercy if they have some sort of issue with your transness. these folks go from the cis gay man who thinks we’re running from our gayness to the cis white political lesbian who thinks we’re really men, but any way you slice it, transmisogyny is an obstacle to our access to the commons and the fact that it can be so casually wielded by someone like a professor can be really terrifying.

3. isolation, aka “you’re the only one, so why bother?” this is a one-two punch with #2: at most schools, if you’re a trans woman, you’re all alone. it’s possible there’s someone else pre-transition or something, but even the most basic attempts to ask the people in charge why they were scared of my attempting any visibility were met with the statement that my existence was some sort of isolated freak incident. there’s nothing quite like a cis straight white able-bodied man telling you that you’re probably the only trans woman the school’s ever going to enroll and that he has a difference of opinion with your presence but is willing to let it slide because he’s such a nice person. it’s a friendly reminder that you aren’t really a person and that your existence is conditional and that even though you’re handing this school a whopping heap of money, you still live with the pass-or-die reality that many of us who are trans women live with.

throw in that the queer group on campus is pretty much all white cis LGB sorts and that there is a trans group…but it’s all CAFAB men and/or genderqueers. when i asked nicely (and admittedly anonymously) if i would be welcome, i was told that they “weren’t comfortable answering that without taking a vote.” a vote, as you can probably guess, was apparently never taken. so not only did i have to wonder if you’d be seen as an invader in their space but also you know you’d be the only one. it’s a lovely double-bind…not only does it end up enforcing cisnormativity, but it also reinforces by proxy that some people deserve trans space and some people don’t. needless to say, i never went, since they were still hemming and hawing about if a theoretical trans woman would be welcome years later…

 3a. trans women can’t afford to be tokens. the differential nature of privilege means that we have different consequences for visibility, and we often end up in situations like the one i did at my most recent school, where a scholarship was on offer to “LGBTQ” students, but the catch was that you had to be out because they expect to be able to throw a blurb in the school newspaper about you. now, since i’m out as being gay, i could go into that, but i didn’t have the ability to express myself completely and point out the reason that represent a truly disadvantaged group, and the school is already in denial that it has working poor students, so i don’t really even want to know how that would work out with a trans woman, especially given that this is the same school telling me not to talk about being trans. i probably could have used that $2500, you know…

4. the only way we can tell our stories is through autobiography but academia marginalizes autobiography…Vivienne Namaste, one of the scant few openly trans women in academia, once said that autobiography is the only discourse in which transsexuals are permitted to speak. because of this, there’s a lot of first-person storytelling in any discussion of trans issues; this has been a criticism of this blog, but the reality is that it’s necessary because for all my formal education, it’s mostly been about dead white people and lots of theory and very little about the real lives of real living people. in this way, academia fails all marginalized groups and i understand this. i probably, in hindsight, should never have gone to college, simply because the amount of debt involved in relation to the minimal advantages afforded to me is a pretty unpleasant thing to ponder on a good day. on a bad day, it’s just despair. i feel like i’m being punished for being too uppity and not knowing my role and staying in my place.

and yet, my autobiographical statements will never be properly peer-reviewed, they’ll never be in some cis white man’s textbook, they’ll never matter to the tokens that get hired, and thus, like the autobiographical statements of all of us, they’ll never matter to academia. by shutting autobiography off from any consideration, our voices are kept out of academia. autobiography is part of reality, and it’s how we express our own realities…to say that autobiography is invalid is silencing, pure and simple.

…and when you add up hostility, transmisogyny, isolation, and exclusion of narrative, you’ve got a recipe for why we’re massively underrepresented in academia, a place where it’s supposedly safe to be trans if you ask some people. if i had one wish about all this, it’s that i could have been forthright about being trans in college the same way i could have been honest about being gay, and it bothers me that i had to accept forced silence because by keeping me silent, my classmates missed a chance to know that one of the very “transsexual fake women” one of my professors obsessively railed against was sitting right next to them doing none of the horrible things said professor promised “those men in dresses, those pantomime dames, those woman-hating decievers” do.  in fact, one of those very “transsexual fake women” was trying to get through a required class for her Women’s Studies minor and take notes without just bursting into tears and screaming her guts out. instead, i just got ripped apart from the inside, because the comfort of many cis people is conditional on our complete silence, and that sounds like something academia should never stand for…

rachel gold’s “being emily”: a book review

warning: this review contains spoilers. if you don’t like it, don’t read it. i’m not Kirkus Reviews…but you get my pithy observations for free. oh, also, i’m back. hi!

sometimes you have really low expectations for something, and i confess that before i read Autumn’s review of this book i wasn’t exactly thinking it was going to be great. see, cis people write about trans people all the time with pretty disastrous results, especially when writing about trans women, and doubly so when writing about trans teenagers and/or children.  thus, i approached Being Emily with less trepidation than i would have because someone i respect signed off on its quality. as literature goes, i’m probably going to be especially sensitive when it comes to a book about a trans teenage girl, given that i’ve lived through that experience, and i’m probably most likely to view it in a harsh, critical light. in other words, i approach this kind of thing loaded for bear and expect to be disappointed. that said,  i loved, loved, loved this book no matter what expectation i brought to it, and i strongly recommend it. 

sometimes, you see, even a harsh, critical light can find few flaws…which feels like something Claire, the titular Emily’s girlfriend, would have said in the book. Emily, who at least starts the book out as a so-called Chris, lives in a fictitious suburban wasteland that could be anywhere but is in this case Minnesota (though i’m not sure when the less fictitious Annandale sprouted a mall…), along with her rather proper nuclear family and a high school life that at first seems straight out of the American Dream. naturally, because there’s a book, you know things didn’t turn out quite as expected, because stories about boring lives don’t get published, as much as it seems like there’s a lot of YA that tries to be as boring as possible these days.

as you might expect if you read the book, the character i identified with most strongly was Claire (that line about an inkblot in a sea of color was very much me outside of school and Claire’s sense and idea of gender nonconformity is a lot like mine) and  Ms. Gold’s level of detail is just amazing, including a perfect précis of what it feels like to have a therapist ask you what name you really wanted to be called. i also remember with disturbing clarity trying to introduce to some strange woman the idea that i wanted to be a girl and how ridiculous and terrifying that felt inside my head, and this book gets that just perfect.

what else was awesome? i adored the way that Dr. Mendel works not just as a compassionate character but as a plot device for introducing a lot of technical nuts and bolts in a manner that feels credible. it takes a good storyteller to nail introducing important details like this, and Ms. Gold is darn good.  i also liked the job she did with a supporting character, Natalie…not just keeping Natalie in balance to the rest of the story but the portrayal of her experience.  i know a girl a lot like Natalie whose father’s acceptance largely comes through avoidance and that the things Natalie says and does impart subtly a lot of what you need to know about the mechanics of passing for the new-at-this and perplexed plus the weirdness of trying to cover for someone’s gender with the tables turned…i’ve been there, and Claire does something pretty hilarious in response.

i ended up feeling a touch sorry for Emily, which is probably not the reaction that you’d expect but the reality of differential experiences always ends up controlling how i see trans characters in books. her gender enforcement experiences were much more in reaction to deviance than what i lived through, but that’s okay because this is a story and we look to stories for escape and to look at lives different from our own…that’s the purpose of fiction, and the reality that Emily ends up happy and well-adjusted  makes it kind of awesome. i won’t tell you how she gets to that place in her life because you should read the book, but if you have Annie On My Mind-itis like me you won’t get a crappy ending that makes you feel hopeless for being queer. in fact, i’m going to lay it down that Ms. Gold has written the first fiction book i’ve read about a trans female protagonist with what would commonly be considered a happy ending, and it’s a damn good book to boot.

Ms. Gold covers a lot of ground in a relatively short novel, in fact short enough that i read it in the better part of three hours, and outside the first chapter (more on that later) i had nary a complaint about the writing and the narrative, easy to follow and economical with verbiage. it’s always nice to read well-written YA from a new author regardless of the content because let me be honest with you, there’s a new Twilight wannabe every week and a half and it’s dumbing down the genre, so i’ll give you a completely non-trans-related reason to buy the book: Gold is a really, really good writer and YA needs more good writers, so i hope to see a lot more from her no matter the subject matter. i haven’t enjoyed another YA book (and i read a lot of YA) quite as much since Malinda Lo’s Ash. 

the largest complaint i had was indeed the first chapter, amusingly exactly what Autumn warned me about in recommending the book: its editing makes it choppy and throws a lot of story detail out really fast, and if you don’t watch the details carefully you end up going back and referring to it, but the degree to which it was edited makes it feel disjointed and like you want to power through it. don’t do it, you have to pay attention for some of the details to make sense later. don’t say i didn’t warn you!

i strongly recommend Being Emily and really hope you’ll read it. i was disappointed to find none of my local libraries had copies yet, but i managed to convince a couple of friends who have a few bucks to remedy that problem. if you’re looking for a good way to benefit your local trans youth and don’t know a better way to do so, i suggest you consider buying a copy (or four) and donating them to your local library system. no matter what, though, i greatly suggest you read this book. just in case you need a reminder in the conclusion sentence of a review.