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I tried but gave up. Butler talks about intersex people using very medicalizing language and uses a slur to talk about us. The positioning of intersex as an opposite to trans felt like they were just using us as a rhetorical device and forgetting (or unaware) that trans intersex people exist. Butler avoids using the word "disabled" and uses so many euphemisms to avoid it. The writing is just so, so inaccessible. There were some legitimately insightful points, but it was just too much of a slog to keep going.

I like climate utopias, so wanted to like this. The pacing and time jumps sucked. The attempts at "Cree futurism" felt inauthentic and inappropriate from a settler that didn't seem connected to Cree culture. I had a hard time buying the idea of moose as mounts, and a lot of the wordbuilding just didn't feel thought through.

I read it as part of QueeReads Montreal. A friend asked me what I thought of the intersex representation, and it confused me. The book doesn't have intersex representation. The Archaeans in the book are genetically engineered to have mixed sex characteristics. This isn't intersex representation - if it's normal for a given (sub)species, it's just how that (sub)species is. Intersex means having naturally occurring sex traits that are different from what is expected for your species.

So much of the attempts at looking like hard sci-fi were cringe. How do they have glass plating that lets you see inside a volcano? How are metal robot submarines navigating inside volcano magma? This stuff would have gone over so much better if the writing embraced being space fantasy rather than trying to pass it off as hard sci-fi.

Read as part of Intersex Book Club. I found the time jumps rather jarring, and the ending felt rushed. The book was full of gratuitous violence; it seemed like the goal was just to be edgy. The intersex rep was more explicit than I'd expected. Unfortunately it seemed only there for shock value. This may be why Elphaba's intersexuality got dropped from the adaptations - the author doesn't actually think or conceive of her that way and just wanted to be edgy. As an intersex person it feels kinda gross to have being intersex treated this way.

Definitely recommend reading the second edition over the first edition. The first edition felt like it was written without consideration that actually intersex people would be reading it, and doesn't do much to take care of the reader. The second edition actually seems to consider intersex people will read it.

Reis shows so many historical medical illustrations of intersex people that it feels a little nauseating. Many of them were clearly done under coercive circumstances. It really showed me why Swarr took such a strong "I'm not going to show you the visuals" stance when Swarr wrote her history of intersex in South Africa.

Reis does a very effective job of showing how intersex rights have always been deeply connected to issues of homophobia and transphobia. So much violence towards intersex bodies has been done out of fear we would grow up to be gay or trans. Anybody who has doubts that the "I" belongs in LGBTQIA+ needs to read this book.

I liked how Reis really lays out how MANY people were involved in the development and popularization of the optimal gender of rearing approach in medicine. Too often intersex history is written up with John Money as a singular villain. He didn't act alone, he built on what others of his time were doing (e.g. Hugh Hampton Young) and had collaborators like Joan and John Hampson. Reis does a good job of showing how this was a collective effort in medicine to "fix" intersex bodies rather than just a singular "bad apple".

Read as part of Intersex Book Club (first half in 2024, second half in 2025).

This book was SO intense. So many gut punches, Solomon is so good at hitting you where it hurts. This is a positive review I swear. It's such an incisive depiction of trauma and racism and antiqueerness. It was validating and made me feel seen.

I would have liked the intersex rep to be a bit more explicit. Ezri seems to have CAH or something like it, and discloses a ton of other diagnoses in the book but not a specific intersex variation. The OSDD representation was well done.

The 4/5 is because I felt the subplot with Ezri's daughter being abused by an internet predator was unnecessary. There's a lot of violence in this book that feels necessary to the story Solomon is trying to tell. This violence didn't feel necessary, and it only reinforced the stranger danger trope.

Overall I'd still recommend, but take care, this one is a heavy read.

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 for Intersex Book Club.)

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!