Reviews and Comments

Read for Intersex Book Club. It was not a "queering of The Great Gatsby", it was just straightforwardly Nick/Gatsby fanfic. With anachronistic discussions of intersex that were so out of place for the time period that it was kind of stupefying.... actual lines like "you know the basics of chromosomal biology" being uttered by nonscientists in the 1930s 🫠

Read as part of QueeReads Montreal. Cute but I was frustrated by the conflation of being "truly in love" with "wildly in love" especially coming from an aspec character :\

Per the title. The genre isn't really my cup of tea. The book bills itself as stories about marginalized scientists and only a couple of stories actually fit this bill. It's run of the mill sci-fi short stories. Don't go in expecting stories about Rosalind Franklin, you will be disappointed. If you want that, "Woman Scientists in America" by Rossiter is what you should be picking up instead.

It took me ages to finish but I'm glad I read it! I learnt so much cool stuff!

Read as part of QueeReads. Not a plot-oriented book. VERY canlit-y. Still enjoyed it and it was very much the right kind of book for the state I was in (brought cat to the ER and waiting around to see if she'd pull though (and she did))

Guessing at the start/end dates. Started strong but petered out in a way that was rather than unsatisfying. Found it on a list of books with intersex rep, and I think this is inaccurate - Swan is trans/altersex (she intentionally transitions to mixed sex characteristics). She is not intersex. Some of the other characters /might/ be intersex but it would really more accurately be varsex representation than intersex because they're not really specified as intersex, just that they have variant sex characteristics. I did appreciate reading a book where being varsex was so normalized that the cause of the sex variation (i.e. natural genetics, intentional transformation, etc) wasn't worth mentioning in the bulk of the cases.

This month's pick for Intersex Book Club. A little nervous because I've been told there's SV at the beginning, but thinking I should get reading anyway.

Fell out of the habit of tracking my reads and am trying to backdate things. Read this for Intersex Book Club. It's a run of the mill collection of science fiction, very little was relevant to the premise of "stories of marginalized scientists" :\

The intro has me jazzed. It really is frustrating how so many #intersex people will try to distance our community from disability and then are surprised Pikachu that we continue to have problems with pathologization, bodily autonomy, epistemic power, eugenics, etc. Positioning intersex as "not a disability" reinforces the medicalizing ableism that hurts both intersex and other disabled people.

I learnt a lot but came out with a bad taste in my mouth. The book was too often uncritical in ways that were frustrating. Like his discussion of agriculture in the Amazon: he couldn't just do the logical thing and promote landback. Also disappointing how he doesn't take indigenous sources of information like oral history seriously. Also also disappointing to see him treating Jared Diamond like a legitimate source 😬