Taylor Drew reviewed トランスジェンダー入門 by 周司 あきら
Informative and easy to understand
4 stars
While I already knew a fair bit about this topic before starting the book, I thought reading it would be a great opportunity to learn more about the vocabulary used in Japanese to talk about these topics and also learn about specific to Japan issues and understandings of certain topics--I was right about that.
The way this book is designed is really easy to understand and also really easy to just pick up for 5 minutes here and there. The chapters are all broken down into much smaller sections and a lot of the information gets repeated again and again as you read through the book.
That being said, the book does have a pretty heavy focus on, I'm not really sure how to describe this, more binary aspects of being transgender? While there are small sections on nonbinary experience and hopes for the future, the way the topics were …
While I already knew a fair bit about this topic before starting the book, I thought reading it would be a great opportunity to learn more about the vocabulary used in Japanese to talk about these topics and also learn about specific to Japan issues and understandings of certain topics--I was right about that.
The way this book is designed is really easy to understand and also really easy to just pick up for 5 minutes here and there. The chapters are all broken down into much smaller sections and a lot of the information gets repeated again and again as you read through the book.
That being said, the book does have a pretty heavy focus on, I'm not really sure how to describe this, more binary aspects of being transgender? While there are small sections on nonbinary experience and hopes for the future, the way the topics were explored felt pretty binary, which was admittedly a bit underwhelming even if the authors do recognize and discuss briefly how nonbinary views of gender would actually be extremely beneficial for everyone.
Despite that, I still really enjoyed reading the book and I'll probably pick up other books by the authors when I get the chance. Definitely a good book to read in Japanese if you don't know so much about transgender experience or specifically transgender experience in Japan.