A review by jvillanueva8
x+y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender by Eugenia Cheng

2.0

This was horrible, which is disappointing because I had such high hopes. The whole book felt like the classic situation where a STEM researcher decides they can solve a problem without acknowledging that there are entire fields of study devoted to it, so they sloppily execute a “solution” that ignores most of the relevant variables and context. Cheng did not deliver on the mathematical methods and thinking that was promised. This was a poorly written attempt to distill endlessly complex issues into two new invented words. At one point she even claims her writing is a response to “feminism that argues we need to change the whole system but doesn’t offer any suggestions for how to do so.” Perhaps we could turn to Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Sociology, Philosophy, literally any of the fields that grapple with these questions every day. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.