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Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities
How the transgender experience opens up new possibilities for thinking about gender and race
In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black?
Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up―in different ways and to different degrees―to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry―increasingly understood as mixed―loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do , not just something we have . By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience―encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories―Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.
At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.
In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black?
Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up―in different ways and to different degrees―to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry―increasingly understood as mixed―loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do , not just something we have . By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience―encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories―Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories.
At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published October 4, 2016
About the author
Rogers Brubaker
18 books37 followersAmerican sociologist, and professor at University of California, Los Angeles. He has written academic works on ethnicity, nationalism, and citizenship.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
October 24, 2017
Brubaker urges the reader to think with trans rather than about trans, giving a brief self-definition in his preface: “I am an outsider not only to the fields of gender and transgender studies but also to the experience of cross gender or racial boundaries.” He further disclaims: “My analysis is no doubt shaped and limited by my own identity as a white cisgender male.” p.xi His principal contribution is to scrutinize unsettled racial, ethnic and gender categories with respect to trans, mainly by signaling their “different differences.” However, his own implication in the debate is negligible since he never offers to deconstruct and criticize his own identity as a “white cisgender male.” Thus, his attempt to think with trans in a book subtitled "Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities" is critically disabled when one of the categories that remains only too settled and fixed is his own self-construal as a “white cisgender male,” and it is from this unquestioned position that the book proceeds. Since Brubaker exempts his own gendered and racial identity as “white male” from critical enquiry, this has the effect of reproducing rather than subverting gender norms. Whiteness remains the invisible norm, and a discourse on race and gender that refuses to interrogate its own whiteness can only remind us of the enormity of this omission.
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July 20, 2016Review forthcoming in Publishers Weekly. While the topic is a fruitful one, I was deeply frustrated by the way Brubaker opportunistically used the celebrity narratives of Caitlin Jenner and Rachel Dolezal to explore race and gender identity in United States cultural discourse. These two cases, exceptional for many reasons, overshadow the lived experience of many people whose gender and racialized identities fail to conform to social expectation. In the end, the text could not shake the feeling of an academic exploiting a hot topic for a book adjacent to -- but not precisely within -- his area of expertise. I hope other scholars and activist theorists do better.
October 20, 2017
Interesting, short, still controversial.
Likely a fascinating read for those steeped in gender studies. If TL;DR, the best take-home point, from Brubaker at the end of this short book:
"Cultural conservatives, moreover -- especially relgious conservatives -- are more deeply committed to preserving sex and gender boundaries than racial and ethnic boundaries. For religious conservatives, sex and gender are central to the created order in a way that race and ethnicity are not. The blurring or crossing of sexual and gender boundaries is therefore a much graver threat than the blurring or crossing of racial or ethnic boundaries."
~hardcover, p150
Likely a fascinating read for those steeped in gender studies. If TL;DR, the best take-home point, from Brubaker at the end of this short book:
"Cultural conservatives, moreover -- especially relgious conservatives -- are more deeply committed to preserving sex and gender boundaries than racial and ethnic boundaries. For religious conservatives, sex and gender are central to the created order in a way that race and ethnicity are not. The blurring or crossing of sexual and gender boundaries is therefore a much graver threat than the blurring or crossing of racial or ethnic boundaries."
~hardcover, p150
July 23, 2023
This man is stepping into unknown territory by using trans as a lens by which one can interpret the phenomenon of transracial. He acknowledges that he is a straight white man, but I feel like validating trans identities at the beginning would be at least the polite thing to do. Instead, the essays feel like he’s fighting transgender and transracial identities together, and it feels wrong to watch the two being compared and the validity of actually queer people be questioned for almost 300 pages.
July 7, 2025
Who has access to what categories, and to the social spaces reserved for their members? Who controls--and patrols--the boundaries of categories? How do new categories--and new kinds of people named by those categories--come into being? Can one choose to become a member of a category that is generally understood as biologically based and fixed at birth? In a world crisscrossed by dense classificatory grids, is it possible to live between or beyond categories?
well, ok. i heard unfavorable things about this book years ago and decided to pick it up and see what it was about. its an interesting read, though at times i did feel as though the analysis of the gender/race distinction could have gone deeper. i'll list the main takeaways for me:
* racial identity is socially ascribed and defined by racially categorized behavior and culture
* biological race does not exist; race is determined by phenotypes
* transracial identities are rooted in the performance of the socially ascribed and defined behaviors and cultures
* unlike the gender/sex distinction, race does not have a distinction between identity and social perception - there's no language for it
* transracial identities are similar to transgender identities in the sense that race and gender are social constructs, and in that case, you could hypothetically identify as socially anything (this only tracks so long as gender is explicitly delinked from sex and understood as its own thing)
* race classifications are less enforced in the modern united states; there's less reason to identify as a different race
* sex distinction is more enforced in the united states than race; you see it in legal documents, single-sex spaces, etc.; gender is more capable of being policed than race because of conflicting opinions about its relation to sex
* gender identity is independently ascribed and defined by how you feel about your sex assignment/your gendered social positioning in the world (also described as an internal or innate feeling)
* your gendered social position is determined by your biological sex; biological sex does exist
* transgenderism can go three ways: from one binary gender to another, from one binary gender to somewhere between the two, and from one binary gender to a gender beyond the binary (creating a new gender category)
* while some transgender people attempt to fit into the binary and pass as the opposite sex, many reject the binary system or gender completely, or view transness (whether it is genderqueer, trans man, trans woman, etc.) as a way to escape the binary
and as for the other reviews on this book... in no way is brubaker delegitimizing trans people, nor is he advocating for transracial identification. brubaker uses modern gender ideology and applies it to race. contemporary ideas of gender are used to deconstruct racial identity (beyond identifying as black instead of white, but also the emergence of multiracial identity). since race is a social construct, and gender is a social construct, how we identify with both can be compared and contrasted, no? if walking through the logic of the trans movement somehow delegitimizes transgenderism to you, i don't even know what to say to that.
anyway, its ultimately a very neutral argument and conclusion, basically just a similarities/differences T-chart of racial identity and transgender identity, nothing super profound and not very critical (in fact, it seemed as though brubaker didn't want to offend). collective race identity compared to individual gender identity was very interesting. brubaker describes opposing viewpoints throughout. you take what you want out of it from there. i appreciated that it wasn't full of academic jargon and is readable for the general public. nice!
June 28, 2018
A brief overview comparing the categorization of race and gender in contemporary society, and the welcome and unwelcome efforts to blow up those categories.
Brubaker offers a four quadrant analysis of the Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner controversy (trangender ok/transracial ok, trangender ok, transracial not ok, etc.) and the scholarly and social histories that define those arguments. He then talks about the understanding of gender and racial tranformation as binary, in-between, and post-categorization.
The book admirably tries to avoid too much academic jargon and indeed provides a broad overview of the various concepts, mostly focused on a black-white view of race.
In some ways this is useful as a primer, but the lack of depth and the focus on only the black-white racial categorization (the increase of white Americans increasingly identifying as Native is simply pointed to as "interesting") leaves the reader frustrated that the 150 pages are not expanded to offer a more in-depth analysis. Like a tasting menu, you get bite-size flavours of thought without being able to substantially enjoy and digest them.
Brubaker's main point is that, while gender and race are becoming increasingly fluid, the ancestral and cultural baggage around race makes it harder to view it as a category you can flip to (if your parents are white you're going to be white, whereas you have a random chance of being a boy, girl, or intersex no matter who your parents). There is also the idea that gender identity is deeply personal while racial identity is imposed by society and more product and action than individual identity. It is collective, not individual.
With the rise of mixed marriages and the recognition of the lack of deeply biological racial differences unlike with sex, it's becoming easier to change, but still lacks the cohesive philosophy that transgender has.
What frustrated me about the book is the lack of exploration of the societal imposition of race and its consequences. Again, this is a product of the book's length where ideas like the "fragility of the black male body" are referenced as throwaway lines but not explored fully. I want to know WHY gender can be more individual than race considering that gender roles can be imposed as well. I want to explore the cultural imposition of race by whites and the construction of black culture by black people as an identity.
All that is admittedly not part of this book's purpose, but the fact that it is so brief and so high-level makes that exclusion frustrating. If you've studied the subject nothing will strike you as particularly novel except every once in a while, and those novel ideas (individual gender and collective race) never feel developed enough.
It's a good though surprisingly high-level look at the subject, more interested in opening a debate around transracial issues than really contributing anything new to it.
Brubaker offers a four quadrant analysis of the Rachel Dolezal and Caitlyn Jenner controversy (trangender ok/transracial ok, trangender ok, transracial not ok, etc.) and the scholarly and social histories that define those arguments. He then talks about the understanding of gender and racial tranformation as binary, in-between, and post-categorization.
The book admirably tries to avoid too much academic jargon and indeed provides a broad overview of the various concepts, mostly focused on a black-white view of race.
In some ways this is useful as a primer, but the lack of depth and the focus on only the black-white racial categorization (the increase of white Americans increasingly identifying as Native is simply pointed to as "interesting") leaves the reader frustrated that the 150 pages are not expanded to offer a more in-depth analysis. Like a tasting menu, you get bite-size flavours of thought without being able to substantially enjoy and digest them.
Brubaker's main point is that, while gender and race are becoming increasingly fluid, the ancestral and cultural baggage around race makes it harder to view it as a category you can flip to (if your parents are white you're going to be white, whereas you have a random chance of being a boy, girl, or intersex no matter who your parents). There is also the idea that gender identity is deeply personal while racial identity is imposed by society and more product and action than individual identity. It is collective, not individual.
With the rise of mixed marriages and the recognition of the lack of deeply biological racial differences unlike with sex, it's becoming easier to change, but still lacks the cohesive philosophy that transgender has.
What frustrated me about the book is the lack of exploration of the societal imposition of race and its consequences. Again, this is a product of the book's length where ideas like the "fragility of the black male body" are referenced as throwaway lines but not explored fully. I want to know WHY gender can be more individual than race considering that gender roles can be imposed as well. I want to explore the cultural imposition of race by whites and the construction of black culture by black people as an identity.
All that is admittedly not part of this book's purpose, but the fact that it is so brief and so high-level makes that exclusion frustrating. If you've studied the subject nothing will strike you as particularly novel except every once in a while, and those novel ideas (individual gender and collective race) never feel developed enough.
It's a good though surprisingly high-level look at the subject, more interested in opening a debate around transracial issues than really contributing anything new to it.
December 5, 2018
I had a lot of thoughts on this one; I should take the time to review it properly. This probably won't be it.
I think I started off a lot more skeptical of Brubakers ability to grok it than I was when I finished. There were a number of points where just due to choices he makes in grammatical construction, it really feels like he's not as aware of common discussions within trans* communities but on the other hand, that shifts and evolves so quickly that it may just be that it's moved on since Brubaker wrote this.
His delineation of the trans of migration, between, and beyond is both helpful and reductive, I think, but I don't think he'd disagree with that statement. From what I can tell from the other works of his I've read, his whole thing is trying to delineate out rough areas, name them, and then see if theres anything fruitful in the comparison that doesn't depend on the lines between his categorizations being particularly discrete. The lines drawn are really just rhetorical devices.
Which is why, in the realm of takes that start from "if trans gender, why not trans racial", this work may actually be one of the few worth reading.
Still, I think there's something here that I can't put my thumb on but still want to comment on. Unfortunately the only comment I have is that "Alien Nation: Tales from the Queer Beyond" would be an excellent title for a literary anthology around the topic of complex gender, national, and racial identities and someone should get on that because I want to read it.
I think I started off a lot more skeptical of Brubakers ability to grok it than I was when I finished. There were a number of points where just due to choices he makes in grammatical construction, it really feels like he's not as aware of common discussions within trans* communities but on the other hand, that shifts and evolves so quickly that it may just be that it's moved on since Brubaker wrote this.
His delineation of the trans of migration, between, and beyond is both helpful and reductive, I think, but I don't think he'd disagree with that statement. From what I can tell from the other works of his I've read, his whole thing is trying to delineate out rough areas, name them, and then see if theres anything fruitful in the comparison that doesn't depend on the lines between his categorizations being particularly discrete. The lines drawn are really just rhetorical devices.
Which is why, in the realm of takes that start from "if trans gender, why not trans racial", this work may actually be one of the few worth reading.
Still, I think there's something here that I can't put my thumb on but still want to comment on. Unfortunately the only comment I have is that "Alien Nation: Tales from the Queer Beyond" would be an excellent title for a literary anthology around the topic of complex gender, national, and racial identities and someone should get on that because I want to read it.
April 7, 2018
Taking the media dialogue around Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as a jumping off point, Brubaker explores how we might be able to use ideas from the modern way of thinking about gender and transness to think about ethnoracial identity in a more fluid way.
The ideas are not as controversial or out there as you might expect based on the premise: his main interest seems to be in taking inspiration from nonbinary ways of looking at gender and seeing how they might apply to race. Also he is mainly looking from a sociological rather than polemical perspective.
Tbh not too much in it felt super new to me. It was reasonably interesting and a fine read though.
Also it did prompt me to think anew about my own racial identity, as someone with mixed race parentage raised in a predominantly white environment. It spoke more to that type of complex situation than many other things I've come across. So that was nice. Though I wish it had gotten more in depth with it.
The ideas are not as controversial or out there as you might expect based on the premise: his main interest seems to be in taking inspiration from nonbinary ways of looking at gender and seeing how they might apply to race. Also he is mainly looking from a sociological rather than polemical perspective.
Tbh not too much in it felt super new to me. It was reasonably interesting and a fine read though.
Also it did prompt me to think anew about my own racial identity, as someone with mixed race parentage raised in a predominantly white environment. It spoke more to that type of complex situation than many other things I've come across. So that was nice. Though I wish it had gotten more in depth with it.
October 2, 2017
The value of this book is really determined by one's familiarity with this topic. As a relative novice, I found it illuminating for understanding the epistemological rationales than underpin racial and transgender identities, particularly when their ideologies were brought in opposition to one another in 2015. Just as scientists unlock the mysteries of the universe by using particle accelerators to smash sub-atomic particles together, the author correctly identified the clash of racial and transgender ideologies as a golden opportunity to explore their fundamental principles. Personally, I was more interested in this contrast, rather than the significant chunk of the book devoted to using trans as an analytical concept. So, if you're like me, read the first two sections then skip to the conclusion. Don't slog through the uninteresting parts like I did. Overall, 3.4.
December 9, 2022
I just cannot get behind this book. Sorry, not sorry. I think the intention of this book is to understand transgender people or someone like Rachael Dolezal, who claimed to be transracial.
Firstly, this book comes off as trying to make transracial a thing & how it is done strikes me as negating the experience of being a person of color.
Secondly, the book also reads like it is trying to delegitimize the trans community.
Look, I do not think that either of those are the intention behind the book. I think the author, who is a professor of sociology, is actually trying to look at sociological aspects of transgender & transracial. It just ended up being a very dry read that ends up being not a good look.
Firstly, this book comes off as trying to make transracial a thing & how it is done strikes me as negating the experience of being a person of color.
Secondly, the book also reads like it is trying to delegitimize the trans community.
Look, I do not think that either of those are the intention behind the book. I think the author, who is a professor of sociology, is actually trying to look at sociological aspects of transgender & transracial. It just ended up being a very dry read that ends up being not a good look.
June 22, 2017
An excellent treatise from a critical sociologist's perspective. Brubaker offers instrumental concepts like "trans migration" and "trans of between." The analyses fall short on the case studies of Jenner and Dolezal, a bit too simplistic and obvious. At times both simplicity and the obvious make for excellent critique but here, it felt to me as if the author was afraid to offend anyone. The author does well to point out the logical flaw "If Jenner then Dolezal" and maintains a rigorous study of that debate, one that helps us parse out the stakes for a trans subject. You should read this because it is educational but not as critical as I'd hoped.
June 21, 2023
Was very impressed by this book’s ability to distinguish the differences between sex/gender and race/ethnicity in a way that provoked thoughts on similarities between the two from a trans lens. It offers great analysis of the basis of sex/gender and race/ethnicity from a Western perspective while grounding historical context using a broad number of examples from cultures and regions outside of the U.S. The author is definitely forward thinking, as this was published in 2016 and he anticipated more heated and controversial debates about trans people and trans identities to ensue post-publication as is seen in public discourse today.
January 7, 2024
Why is 'trans' acceptable for gender, but not for race? That's a reasonable question, and Brubaker's answer is an interesting. The book is hardly perfect, but good on him for trying to say something intelligent and genuine about contemporary discourse and debate and concepts. I'm too scared to even start thinking about this, let alone talking about it with people I know and love. If you want to know why I'm scared, try reading some of the reviews of this perfectly anodyne, well-intentioned book.
March 17, 2019
What wants to be a well-meaning and thoughtful engagement with the challenges of naming and doing trans identities in this contemporary moment, unfortunately fails. Even as Brubaker acknowledges his white, cis privilege in writing this he never really deals with it aside from a passing reference early one. The result is a series of "discoveries" that are neither new nor generative to the communities being talked about.
January 26, 2024
How did this man get a degree? Does this man have no understanding of race? Or gender? How is he getting published? He got a whole degree and paid money to compare Rachel Dolezal and Caitlin Jenner and make the most nonsensical comparisons. How did he not get laughed out of every room he’s ever walked into?
June 13, 2017
V interesting book that gets at some complications and contradictions involving perceptions of identity and whether it can be "legitimately" changed. Innovative analysis of both race and gender using the metaphor of "migration."
June 8, 2022
Livro fenomenal que discute um assunto tão complexo e dominado por opiniões políticas de uma forma muito inteligente, profunda e clara. Não se limita a respostas fáceis, é bem escrito e deixa a cabeça fervilhando.
April 16, 2025
Its probably Brubaker's most procovative book. I am not entirely sure I fully agree with his general argument but i cannot say that it did not make me think a lot. It's a really good book for all people interested in gender and identity studies.
February 16, 2017
Can we change race as easily (sic ) as gender. A look at these two identities which are in flux.
April 17, 2021
Repetitive. First time I've read a gender studies text and felt the author was out of new ways to say the same thing
December 28, 2024
Explores the concept,
intersectionality,
in an easy way.
intersectionality,
in an easy way.
February 20, 2025
Sth bothers me in this book but I can’t verbalize it
January 21, 2026
Provocativo, tiene un punto principal que no sé si estoy de acuerdo pero que definitivamente te deja pensando.
March 7, 2017
... I'm not exactly sure what point this book is trying to get across exactly. It wasn't boring, just vague.
December 5, 2016
Brubaker uses the media storm around the transitioning of Caitlin Jenner and questions about the racial identity of Rachel Dolezal to look at the issue of transgender and transracial. He discusses 3 ways that trans is deployed: 1) trans of migration, from one category to another. 2) trans of between, ei., androgyny and 3) trans of beyond, those who want to discard all categories.
"In this landscape of unsettled identities, sex/gender and ethnoracial categories have ceased to be taken for granted and have become the focus of Self-conscious choices and political claims. These choices and claims intern have given rise to a series of questions. Who has access to what categories, and to the social spaces reserved for their members? Who controls-and patrols-The boundaries of categories? How do new categories – and new kinds of people named by those categories – come into being?" 5
"The unsettling of identities has substantially enlarged The scope for choice and self transformation. The enlargement of choice, however, is itself unsettling. It has given rise to anxieties about unnatural, opportunistic, or fraudulent identity claims, and it has prompted challenges to questionable claims in the name of authentic and unchosen identities."5-6
"Rhetorics and practices of choice and self transformation have been central to western modernity. They have structural roots in the Erosion of order forms of social organization based on ascribed identities and inherited statuses. They have cultural roots in powerful ideals of individualism, dignity, autonomy, and self realization..." 50
"The ideal of sexual autonomy-built around the freedom to choose whether, when, how, and with whom to have sex -has been central boat to the women's movement and two movements to legitimize alternative sexualities. Though it remains contested by religious and other cultural conservatives, this notion of sexual autonomy has been spectacularly successful; it informs, law, policy, education, and popular culture." 52
"In this landscape of unsettled identities, sex/gender and ethnoracial categories have ceased to be taken for granted and have become the focus of Self-conscious choices and political claims. These choices and claims intern have given rise to a series of questions. Who has access to what categories, and to the social spaces reserved for their members? Who controls-and patrols-The boundaries of categories? How do new categories – and new kinds of people named by those categories – come into being?" 5
"The unsettling of identities has substantially enlarged The scope for choice and self transformation. The enlargement of choice, however, is itself unsettling. It has given rise to anxieties about unnatural, opportunistic, or fraudulent identity claims, and it has prompted challenges to questionable claims in the name of authentic and unchosen identities."5-6
"Rhetorics and practices of choice and self transformation have been central to western modernity. They have structural roots in the Erosion of order forms of social organization based on ascribed identities and inherited statuses. They have cultural roots in powerful ideals of individualism, dignity, autonomy, and self realization..." 50
"The ideal of sexual autonomy-built around the freedom to choose whether, when, how, and with whom to have sex -has been central boat to the women's movement and two movements to legitimize alternative sexualities. Though it remains contested by religious and other cultural conservatives, this notion of sexual autonomy has been spectacularly successful; it informs, law, policy, education, and popular culture." 52
October 29, 2016
The transgender issue has became a topic for the political debate in the last couple of years. The general acceptance in western societies of the diversity of sexual orientations has opened the door to the debate on gender identity. However, there is still a need for essays and articles describing the complexity of trans identities. Below the surface of well known cases of gender transition, as the case of Cathlyn Jenner, there are a whole category of different gender identities that fall outside the binary system male-female.
The book ¨Trans¨ is a good introduction to the transgender topic. First of all, it gives a good classification of the different trans identities based on the attitude of trans people towards the binary gender system. Not all trans people face the definition of its gender identity in the same manner. Some of them accept the binary system and they feel as migrants from one gender to the opposite one (trans of migration). Others are reluctant to be classified and they float with ambiguity between male and female identity (trans of between). A last group resist to the binary system and aim to overcome it (trans of beyond).
But ¨Trans¨ goes beyond being a book about the transgender issue. The author aims to treat trans as a tool to think with and not only as a thing to think about. In order to achieve the goal the exploration of transgender identities is done in paralel with the (less known) transracial issue. Although the reader may be shocked at first with this approach, the book shows the similarities of the concepts that could be applied to both phenomenos and how sometimes our prejudices work as a barrier to understand identity issues.
A book that deserves a read, although perhaps the last chapter of conclusions could be shorter and leave more space to the reader to build its own ideas on the issue.
The book ¨Trans¨ is a good introduction to the transgender topic. First of all, it gives a good classification of the different trans identities based on the attitude of trans people towards the binary gender system. Not all trans people face the definition of its gender identity in the same manner. Some of them accept the binary system and they feel as migrants from one gender to the opposite one (trans of migration). Others are reluctant to be classified and they float with ambiguity between male and female identity (trans of between). A last group resist to the binary system and aim to overcome it (trans of beyond).
But ¨Trans¨ goes beyond being a book about the transgender issue. The author aims to treat trans as a tool to think with and not only as a thing to think about. In order to achieve the goal the exploration of transgender identities is done in paralel with the (less known) transracial issue. Although the reader may be shocked at first with this approach, the book shows the similarities of the concepts that could be applied to both phenomenos and how sometimes our prejudices work as a barrier to understand identity issues.
A book that deserves a read, although perhaps the last chapter of conclusions could be shorter and leave more space to the reader to build its own ideas on the issue.
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November 18, 2016306.768 B8863 2016
April 11, 2017
I loved this essay. The controversy over Rachel Dolezal and Caitlin Jenner in 2015 generated heat but little light. This essay uses the language of Trans to analyze our concepts of race and gender in present society. It is thoughtful and analytic and adds positively to the conversation. Our concepts of both are changing but in different ways and along different trajectories. This essay provides an useful analytical framework for thinking about the issues of race and gender that were highlighted in social media and among talking heads during the summer of 2015.
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May 1, 2019I find books on transgender issues to be interesting, and this book is also about trans-racial. Is that even a thing? Does it harm transgender people and their plight to have people claiming it? It's a very complex and interesting, timely issue explored here.
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