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Reviews tagging 'Transphobia'
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez
28 reviews
informative
medium-paced
This book does a very good job of raising awareness and confronting areas of blindness the general population just doesn't think about. A lot of the issues raised still need to be addressed, and this book is a good first step into the topics, but its held back by a couple things. There is a lack of intersectionality in the book, the most obvious being the complete lack of mention of trans people or lesbians, creating its own kind of data gaps. Its understandable if the author wasn't able to find information or chose to exclude it and focus on certain topics as long as that was clarified, but the lack of mention of either of those two groups is puzzling to me. I have also seen claims that the author is a Terf, which if true, very gross. There is some questionable language in the book and a complete lack of any kind of discussion of gender as a spectrum and an insistence on creating a binary. Regardless, in a book about the idea of challenging the default male, it ends up creating its own kind of default woman. This book felt like a very long journalism piece on various different pieces of discrimination that have become baked into society over a period of time, and it does a very good job at raising awareness of issues that many people don't even realize exist. However, it feels so large in scale that the topics become more shallow in nature, with proposed solutions being rather black or white. It is a great introduction to many of these topics, and I see it as a kind of stepping stone into further reading.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Transphobia
Transphobic and bioessentialist.
In the intro the author states:
In the intro the author states:
"But although I talk about both sex and gender throughout, I use gender data gap as an overarching term because sex is not the reason women are excluded from data. Gender is. In naming the phenomenon that is causing so much damage to so many women’s lives, I want to be clear about the root cause and, contrary to many claims you will read in these pages, the female body is not the problem. The problem is the social meaning that we ascribe to that body, and a socially determined failure to account for it."
She gets it right here! Trans women are women, and the same oppressive system that hurts cis women also hurts trans women. Because patriarchy does not care what kind of woman you are, only that you are not a man.
But later she says:
"The result is that when ‘brilliance’ is considered a requirement for a job, what is really meant is ‘a penis’."
Going against what she previous asserted she would do. Many trans women have penises and yet are still held back and overlooked by the same oppressive system.
I won’t even go into how she overlooks trans men and non binary people in the section talking about pregnancy…
Content Warnings
Minor: Transphobia
TERF rhetoric ugh. The book has some good parts but the author’s stances on intersectionality and trans women bleed through. Even if some of the stats in the book are noteworthy, it is exclusionary and gender essentialist in its core theses development.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Transphobia
challenging
informative
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexism
Moderate: Transphobia
challenging
informative
sad
medium-paced
Should be a 5 star, many incredible points and helpful statistics - however this writer completely erases the most invisible of women. It got super TERFy at the end :(
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Sexism, Transphobia, Sexual harassment
challenging
informative
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Biphobia, Child abuse, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Homophobia, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Slavery, Transphobia, Abortion, Pregnancy, Lesbophobia, Gaslighting, Sexual harassment, War, Classism, Deportation, Pandemic/Epidemic
The author is a TERF, this is a TERF book. Not to undermine the honestly good work and important information in this book, but you can't remove it from the author's views. While it starts out seeming reasonable enough-- I think it's understandable even if not great to not separate sex and gender-- the author eventually begins to build her argument into women being an immutable biologically separate organism with most things in life attributed purely to biology. Of course there's no proof of this because of the data gap. The studies will surely show she's right though, as they always say.
The book does start out acknowledging queer and disabled people, and it does talk about other countries with a non dismissive and non bigoted attitude, however the author is very quick to paint groups of people (such as western women, or British women) with a singular brush. Despite admitting that the so called standard male doesn't represent men in general, she's very argumentative in favor of a standard female model. It's hard to untangle her personal views on sex and gender from the rest of the book and the more you begin to think about it, the worse it gets.
I would generally not recommend this book, and while it is a nice organization of some studies I have heard most of them before elsewhere.
Being a book about sexism, you can expect a TW warning for basically literally every topic, albeit only passingly.
The book does start out acknowledging queer and disabled people, and it does talk about other countries with a non dismissive and non bigoted attitude, however the author is very quick to paint groups of people (such as western women, or British women) with a singular brush. Despite admitting that the so called standard male doesn't represent men in general, she's very argumentative in favor of a standard female model. It's hard to untangle her personal views on sex and gender from the rest of the book and the more you begin to think about it, the worse it gets.
I would generally not recommend this book, and while it is a nice organization of some studies I have heard most of them before elsewhere.
Being a book about sexism, you can expect a TW warning for basically literally every topic, albeit only passingly.
Content Warnings
Minor: Ableism, Chronic illness, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Toxic relationship, Transphobia, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Police brutality, Medical content, Trafficking, Mass/school shootings, Medical trauma, Stalking, Murder, Pregnancy, Gaslighting, Sexual harassment, Pandemic/Epidemic
This book is about how data often fails to account for (cis) women; however, it takes a binary understanding of sex and gender and does not consider how data also fails to account for trans or nonbinary experiences. I’m disappointed.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Transphobia
Found out the author is a TERF. Also, couldn’t take seriously the way the narrator was pronouncing urinal (she kept saying ur-EYE-nahl 🙃)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Transphobia
Minor: Sexual assault
informative
medium-paced
This book was highly informative and has highlighted a lot of issues I had previously not considered.
I sometimes found it difficult to follow which country some statistics came from.
There is no discussion or mention of trans-women at all throughout the book which I find a bit problematic and contradicts the idea of this book being about 'invisible women'.
I would still recommend as it contains a lot of important information.
I sometimes found it difficult to follow which country some statistics came from.
There is no discussion or mention of trans-women at all throughout the book which I find a bit problematic and contradicts the idea of this book being about 'invisible women'.
I would still recommend as it contains a lot of important information.
Content Warnings
Minor: Transphobia