Butch is a Noun, by S Bear Bergman
Huh. I wasn't expecting to bounce quite so hard off this one. Bergman is clearly a good writer, and with interesting things to say, and I enjoyed reading about hir experiences of gender, but I did not click with anything ze said at all. I guess it's how clearly ze connects with having a gender. Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon felt much more relatable to me in their book Gender Failure.
And also how Bergman connects gender with behaviour/actions, like how to hir, being butch is strongly associated with being gentlemanly, which I find kind of offputting actually? idk, maybe that's a generation thing. The whole thing with pulling out chairs for femmes and always walking on the outside of a sidewalk and all that, it just really rubs me the wrong way.
At any rate, I continue to appreciate reading books about gender outside the gender binary. I've got a third one sitting by my bed to read at some point (....along with at least a dozen other books, whoops).
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, by Steve Silberman
REALLY good book covering the history of autism. Features a lot of child harm (physical and emotional abuse as well as murder!), but does a great job of covering how autism has been seen in popular understandings and who/what has shaped that. I think the ending is a little too optimistic, given the amount of crap that is still done and believed, but it is pointing in a helpful direction at least.
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