Reviews and Comments

Read for Intersex Book Club. Had some good essays, but the sequencing was poorly organized and there was a lot of tonal whiplash.

For people who want to get the highlights of the book, I'd recommend reading:

Special - medium length, introduces her early background as someone with CAH Pray - short musing on disability-intersex solidarity Lessons - short musing on how her childhood affected how she saw her body, gets at fat-intersex intersection and Jewish experiences Education - short, a bit nauseating, but it stood out for me as punchy Change - longer essay, on how she got involved in ISNA - if you read one essay from the book I'd make it this one Swallow - short essay on stopping HRT Present - medium, on intersex outreach in queer spaces Condition - medium, on intersex outreach in the prairies Okay - short, poem about what she wishes her mother had known

Took me a long time but I'm glad I finished it. I'm gonna have to gather my thoughts about this book into a longer post. Loved the takedown of Darwinian sexual selection & the cisheterosexism in a lot of biology research.

Did not love how poor a job the book did with regard to intersex stuff - Roughgarden just generally fumbled all of the intersex stuff. For example, in Part 1 she seems to conflate intersex with biological hermaphroditism; in Part 2 she misrepresents intersex as "baby born with ambiguous genitals" only to then contradict herself by describing some common intersex variations that don't fit this description. Her conceptualization of intersex is inconsistent, bioessentialist, out of line with what the intersex community, and gramatically weird to boot (she talks about intersexes a lot).

This is an ambitious book and I learnt things. It could sorely use an update for fixing the intersex content, improving the history section, and an update to the genetic engineering chapter now that CRISPR is a thing.