Had this book only contained the interviews without the inclusion of clinical or psychological of documents and studies, this would have been a five-star read. However, I have to say that I feel this is a great book for people curious about the subject with little knowledge going in. Coupled with a comprehensive glossary and explanations throughout each chapter, I believe it would be a good starting point for such readers.
The testimonies felt so true and sincere that I feel the purpose of this book was fulfilled, which is to make trans voices heard, figuratively speaking.

I had to DNF this book. Just in the first chapter there was SO MUCH wrong with it. It is a HARMFUL book. This book needs a few rounds of sensitivity reads and should never have been published as is. I put it down at 15%. It incorrectly quotes from the DSM 5 (of which I *DO* own a copy and was able to cross reference as well as check with friends who do work as licensed psychiatrists and psychologists) and incorrectly talks about Native Americans with regards to two spirit identities. It's like the author did the barest glance of what this identity is and then made wild leaps of assumptions and published the book. I reached out to a wide variety of people across a wide variety of tribes across North America (in the US and Canada) just on what I read in this book and ALL of them told me how wrong this book was in it's assumptions. And then there was the study about how trans men are more likely to be autistic. Which wasn't really true. It was one study that didn't really prove anything. Except for maybe bias in researching. It's been a year, literally a year, since I put the book down and have not picked it back up because I've been researching all of this stuff. As a genderfluid person myself, this book hurt me since my identity falls under the trans identity umbrella (whether I choose to claim that identity or not it still technically does). More importantly though, if the vast majority of my friends read this book, it would deeply hurt THEM. As the vast majority of my friends are trans identifying people. And I care more about them and people like them who might pick this book up.

I sincerely hope that no trans person picks this person up and hopes that this book is for them. And that no trans ally picks this up hoping that it will help them. It is a harmful trash pile.

I am sorry, but I am not going to read this book. I have heard that it had a lot of misrepresentation, and as a person who doesn't know much about the Trans community, I can not ignore others' thoughts.

I might need to stop requesting non-fiction books from NetGalley, because it seems like I haven’t been very successful with them. In this case I don’t know if I just didn’t read the description properly or didn’t understand it, but I thought Trans Voices: Becoming Who You Are was by a trans author and comprised longer-form interviews with transgender people. Instead, this inaccurately titled book is by a cisgender gay man who intersperses his medicalized, somewhat discomforting commentary with cherry-picked excerpts from interviews he conducted with trans people. (Also, the description itself is terrible and even worse than the book is.)

The structure of this book is great; Declan Henry doesn’t just address binary transgender people but specifically devotes a chapter to nonbinary people as well. He highlights issues of discrimination against transgender people, both overt—anything from slurs to physical and emotional violence—and more subtle—such as the way many countries do not fund/subsidize hormone treatments and gender reassignment surgery. And throughout the book, Henry makes it clear that the trans community is not monolithic:

> There is no single authentic expression of trans identity. Trans people have a wide diversity of appearances, personal characteristics, interests, experiences and viewpoints…. There are many degrees of transition and options available to trans people…. Surgical status is not a reliable indicator as to how a person identifies…. Trans people have many different opinions about terminology, with some preferring medicalised terms and others preferring community terms.

So, basically Henry is saying that different people prefer different labels; different people have differing opinions on how they want to perform their gender and how or whether they want to make a physical transition. This is all well and good, and it is a promising beginning to the book. I don’t have much doubt that Henry’s intentions are good here, that he just wants to share trans perspectives with others. But I don’t review a book on intentions. I review a book based on what I read and how it makes me feel, and Trans Voices made me (a cisgender man, for what it’s worth) very uncomfortable with Henry’s appropriation of trans voices.

I call it appropriation because instead of letting transgender people tell their story, he embeds quotations from interviews within a framework of his making. Some of these are mere paragraphs, a little bit of “authentic trans flavour” to whatever he has chosen to say at that point. Admittedly, others are longer (my electronic Kindle copy doesn’t do a great job of differentiating between quoted material and Henry’s words, with multi-paragraph quotes not having a quotation mark at the beginning of each subsequent paragraph like they should, and no other visual indicator) and hint at more developed narratives. Again, however, these “voices” are only used in service to Henry’s thesis, rather than the other way around. Hence, rather than a strong euphony of diverse trans experiences, we get a watered-down, overly academic and medically-fixated look at transgender-related phenomena through the eyes of Declan Henry.

As I mentioned earlier, Henry points out that surgery is not the be-all-end-all goal or metre-stick for understanding transition. Yet he certainly spends a lot of time talking about the details:

> For trans women, the most commonly undergone genital surgery is vaginoplasty…. However there are also other vaginoplasty techniques, using different tissues, and also some trans women may decide to undergo orchidectomy without any vaginoplasty. As previously mentioned, some trans women do not undergo any genital surgery as they feel either it’s not appropriate or necessary for them to express their identity, or they are fearful of surgical experiences, or there are health reasons.

or:

> Trans people assigned female at birth may wear chest binders whilst awaiting chest surgery. The binders are sometimes tight and often result in tissue damage, as well as chest infections because they make breathing shallower.

These types of sentences are the rule rather than exception. This is what made me so uncomfortable with this book. This language is so clinical; it feels invasive, and it makes me feel like a voyeur. I know we aren’t talking about any one specific person here, and certainly, as a cisgender person, I could benefit to understand the surgeries that trans people might have or the other techniques they use to express their identity. But if I’m going to learn about these things, I’m better off hearing it from an actual trans person who isn’t going to reduce it to a matter of meat.

It’s just so dehumanizing. And in a book proposing to give a voice to trans people, of all things. Remember, Henry is writing this as a gay man who feels that it’s his responsibility to educate people about the misrepresented, unknown trans community. How would he feel if a straight person decided to write a book called Gay Voices like this one, and started talking in clinical detail about how gay men have sexual intercourse? That would be just as inappropriate as this book. (It probably exists, come to think of it.)

Also, what’s up with that cover?! I normally don’t care much about covers, but I don’t know what the artist/marketing people were thinking here. That the person appears androgynous I understand, but monochromatic with that splash of colour? Is that supposed to be symbolic for this book “shedding light” on the hidden stories of trans people? Then that positioning of the title so it covers the person’s mouth, figuratively saying, “Don’t worry, poor trans person! I, Declan Henry, will speak for you and give you a voice!”

Picard_facepalm.jpg

I am reminded of the way settlers co-opt and colonize Indigenous issues all the while claiming to give Indigenous people a voice. At the time of writing this review, CanLit is embroiled in something of a controversy over Joseph Boyden. For a while, many Indigenous people have been questioning his claims of Indigenous heritage and pointing out inconsistencies in how he represents himself, and this news is finally bubbling to the surface of the mainstream press and wider Canadian consciousness (including my own). One of the reasons this is so upsetting, as far as I understand it, is because Boyden has been profiting off assuming a role that is not his; at the same time, he provides sanitized picture of Indigenous cultures and issues that cleaves to what settlers would like to see.

Henry would have you believe that transgender people do not have much of a voice, and so it is necessary for outsiders to step into their community, interview them, and talk over them. Henry, unlike Boyden, is at least clear about his identity. But by speaking over trans people, he is erasing them, exactly counter to his stated objective. Trans Voices ignores the fact that trans people already have a voice, have multiple voices, and they have been talking and shouting and making media about their experiences long before this book was a gleam in Henry’s eye.

I think the most dangerous thing about Trans Voices is that, on the surface, it seems so good. Like I said at the top of this review, I didn’t pay enough attention and thought this would be a very different book. I can only imagine that many cis people are going to pick this up, read it, and think they somehow “understand” trans people better now—or worse, they’ll start transplaining to trans people using the medical terminology they’ve gleaned from this. Reading a book about a marginalized community of which you are not a member does not suddenly give you the ability to speak for them, or of them, or about them. By this token, I can’t stand up and yell about how this book should anger trans people—that’s not my call to make. (At least two trans people, judging from the foreword and afterword, liked this book. That is their prerogative.) I’m yelling about how this book angers me and, as a cisgender person, I’m telling my fellow cis people not to read it.

Go read an #ownvoices book instead. By the time you’re reading this I’m going to have read If I Was Your Girl, so check back for my review of that.

Review will be up on Goodreads on January 20.

~ I received an eARC from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. ~

The author of this book is a gay social worker, not a trans person, so I was hesitant, but I gave it a shot because he had worked & interviewed trans people, including those who identify as non-binary.

I firmly believe that awareness and knowledge break down ignorance and bigotry and can create a world where everybody can get on with their business without interference or prejudice, thus allowing people to become whoever they want to be. Therefore it is the voices in this book that will reach out to you when descriptions of their experiences are conveyed because they are coming from lived lives, rather than from me as a mere spectator. Ultimately, I hope these voices will draw closer to what it is like to be a trans person in today's world.
I had high hopes after that statement, but the inclusion of research "connecting" being trans to being autistic killed this book for me, as someone on the autism spectrum and as a generally informed human being.

The study quoted [found here] is problematic because for a long time, the only reason that people assigned female at birth were taken to be diagnosed because they weren't presenting as ladylike or as pliable as their parents wanted them to be, which plays into gender identity. It gets ignored in so many of us, or it's misdiagnosed. None of that was discussed within any of the study writings linked above, despite that they mentioned that all of this was self-reported. Not to mention, the study was not able to prove its hypothesis, so it shouldn't have been included except as a theory.

Because I know this about this particular study, I don't trust the author to be accurate throughout the rest of the book, and I won't be continuing. If this book had been just the stories from the trans people that the author interviewed, I would have enjoyed it. I'll stick to books by trans people about their own experiences.