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A review by sfletcher26
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality by Helen Joyce
challenging
slow-paced
1.5
Not the worst book of the year, but it's close.
Going into the book, I was aware that the viewpoint expressed by Joyce was going to be very different from my own, but I did try to go into it with an open mind. I wanted to try to understand her point of view and that of those opposed to transgender rights. This, however, wasn't the book I was hoping it would be. Sadly, on the whole, it's a straw man polemic filled with pejoratives that knows no subtlety nor nuance. It does not even try in the slightest to be even-handed. Transgenderism for Joyce is either not real, a mental illness, a pharma plot designed to sell more product and or a left-wing conspiracy designed to turn back the tide of feminism.
What's worse, though, is the fact that this is so badly referenced. There are a cursory further reading suggestions at the end but nothing else. As she is a journalist, I would have expected her book to have provided a full reference list of sources, but there is nothing. It's, therefore, impossible to know exactly how she has used her sources or, for that matter, what her sources were. So, every time I thought 'That's something that might be worth exploring more', I had nowhere to start. My better angel wonders whether she was just sloppy; my darker angel, what she's not saying.
Going into the book, I was aware that the viewpoint expressed by Joyce was going to be very different from my own, but I did try to go into it with an open mind. I wanted to try to understand her point of view and that of those opposed to transgender rights. This, however, wasn't the book I was hoping it would be. Sadly, on the whole, it's a straw man polemic filled with pejoratives that knows no subtlety nor nuance. It does not even try in the slightest to be even-handed. Transgenderism for Joyce is either not real, a mental illness, a pharma plot designed to sell more product and or a left-wing conspiracy designed to turn back the tide of feminism.
What's worse, though, is the fact that this is so badly referenced. There are a cursory further reading suggestions at the end but nothing else. As she is a journalist, I would have expected her book to have provided a full reference list of sources, but there is nothing. It's, therefore, impossible to know exactly how she has used her sources or, for that matter, what her sources were. So, every time I thought 'That's something that might be worth exploring more', I had nowhere to start. My better angel wonders whether she was just sloppy; my darker angel, what she's not saying.