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transforattention's reviews
28 reviews
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning by Maggie Nelson
4.0
Deeply interesting if you have any kind of conceptual art background or knowledge.
Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer
0.0
this book is wildly unhelpful. there's a personality quiz (i scored 26 in all categories which means i don't have a personality) and a random mid-book promise of massive weight loss by "hacking" reward based learning. i could not roll my eyes harder. this book is not a book- it's an infomercial for the author's habit-breaking "program" (app). let me summarize for you: anxiety is a habit you need to break and the answer is mindfulness. also, if you buy my app, you'll get skinny thereby solving all your problems. you're welcome!
i cannot emphasize enough the frustration i feel trying to educate myself about anxiety and being fed this surprise fatphobic app-pitching nonsense.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Fatphobia
Healing Through the Vagus Nerve: Improve Your Body's Response to Anxiety, Depression, Stress, and Trauma Through Nervous System Regulation by Amanda Armstrong
the author of this book is not a doctor or scientist, nor has done any studies on the vagus nerve, nor includes anyone else's research. just a reminder to take pop science books like this with the massive serving of salt they require.
Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman
these books are all really fun! unfortunately the quality of writing is declining with each book, and the jokes are getting worse (as-in stolen from twitter and/or boring basic punching down on women and sex workers via sizeism and transphobic derivative nonsense) which is a bummer! because the plot is a blast otherwise. i assume that's a side effect of writing and publishing sequels so rapidly- it's hard to write good jokes, let alone quickly. if we lived in a world that compensated authors appropriately, or everyone appropriately, there'd be fewer novels in this series and they'd be higher quality. the talent is there.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Misogyny and Sexism
Minor: Fatphobia and Transphobia
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
i detest this phase of activist language, and have yet to see it used responsibly or accurately. it made this otherwise valuable book extremely difficult to read. you can absolutely talk about the effects of sexism and patriarchy without excluding masculine women or otherwise assigning the label femme to those who do not want it. there are absolutely ways to do that, that don't feel like i have to choose between detransitioning or being villainized by my own community.
language like this enables the ongoing erasure and exclusion of transmen, butches, and dykes in queer and activist spaces. it enables turning a blind eye towards the violence masc folk endure. it tells masc people we don’t belong, we’re traitors, and that our presentation is oppressive. it’s my stepmom buying me women's products. it’s strangers telling me “i’m not transphobic, i think trans men should die too.” it’s kicking butch women out of the women’s bathroom. it’s telling us we’re not feminists for "rejecting" femininity. it's rolling eyes at me when i talk about getting assaulted. it's misgendering me when i don't pass. it's assuming it knows me. it's erasing my girlhood, or confining me to it. it's putting new labels on the same boxes. it's violent and it’s absolutely unacceptable.
to do all this and then use the suicide of a trans man as a device to discuss your own pain is deeply hurtful. following this with an essay against exclusively femme suicide... why do you hate us? i understand you mean no harm, but you are causing it.
if you're transmasc or non binary as in anti-binary, this book will be alienating.
the macro aggression of folks replacing man and woman with masc and fem is such a strong pain point for me. the transfiguration of expression to power is misguided and flattening. using masc and fem in this way is highly presumptuous and extremely exclusive to folks who present with their assigned gender, or present with the same gender aesthetics they’ve been raised to perform. it upholds the very binary it’s pretending to transcend. polishing the turd, so to speak.
the macro aggression of folks replacing man and woman with masc and fem is such a strong pain point for me. the transfiguration of expression to power is misguided and flattening. using masc and fem in this way is highly presumptuous and extremely exclusive to folks who present with their assigned gender, or present with the same gender aesthetics they’ve been raised to perform. it upholds the very binary it’s pretending to transcend. polishing the turd, so to speak.
for those who try to claim trans people of all genders are accurately represented in their behavior by this presentation binary, i would argue that you’ve internalized terf rhetoric, transmuted gender essentialism, and ask that you do some self reflection. gender nonconforming people exist and our experiences do not fit neatly into cis categories of power and exploitation.
i detest this phase of activist language, and have yet to see it used responsibly or accurately. it made this otherwise valuable book extremely difficult to read. you can absolutely talk about the effects of sexism and patriarchy without excluding masculine women or otherwise assigning the label femme to those who do not want it. there are absolutely ways to do that, that don't feel like i have to choose between detransitioning or being villainized by my own community.
language like this enables the ongoing erasure and exclusion of transmen, butches, and dykes in queer and activist spaces. it enables turning a blind eye towards the violence masc folk endure. it tells masc people we don’t belong, we’re traitors, and that our presentation is oppressive. it’s my stepmom buying me women's products. it’s strangers telling me “i’m not transphobic, i think trans men should die too.” it’s kicking butch women out of the women’s bathroom. it’s telling us we’re not feminists for "rejecting" femininity. it's rolling eyes at me when i talk about getting assaulted. it's misgendering me when i don't pass. it's assuming it knows me. it's erasing my girlhood, or confining me to it. it's putting new labels on the same boxes. it's violent and it’s absolutely unacceptable.
to do all this and then use the suicide of a trans man as a device to discuss your own pain is deeply hurtful. following this with an essay against exclusively femme suicide... why do you hate us? i understand you mean no harm, but you are causing it.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicide and Transphobia
Minor: Incest, Self harm, and Sexual violence
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong
0.0
author did not do basic research into some of the studies he referenced. there are many studies debunking the microbiome of autistic kids being a cause of autism. autism is not a disease you can cure, and autistic kids needs acceptance rather than patronizing attempts to "fix" them. when you are a picky eater, your microbiome changes as a result of said eating. knowing he didn't do this basic google search level debunking makes the rest of the book impossible to take seriously. pop science at it again, dipping its toes gently into eugenics.
if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is! let's use some critical thinking here people!
proposing a bunch of "hypothesis" that are actually just biggoted societal views disguised as science is exhausting. i just wanted to learn about microbes???? damn dude
if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is! let's use some critical thinking here people!
proposing a bunch of "hypothesis" that are actually just biggoted societal views disguised as science is exhausting. i just wanted to learn about microbes???? damn dude
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism and Fatphobia
Death's End by Cixin Liu
perhaps the most poorly written woman i have ever read, submerged in some of the most exhausting and uncreative gender essentialist nonsense. the most wildly sexist ideas of womanhood and femininity, paired with the occasional disturbing notion of masculinity. truly confusing how this adult man has gone his entire life without having met or spoken to a woman. brutally distracting from the interesting and creative intergalactic plots.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexism
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
- Loveable characters? No
a bit too, uh, class-traitor-brown-nosing-the-wealthy for me, thanks. neither this book, nor its anti-hero are as morally complex or interesting as they strive to be- the not-all-billionaires undercurrent was not doing what it was trying to. probably the most beautifully written sex scene i've ever read.
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris
5.0
robust call to action, infinitely valuable
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
4.0
when people state who they're attracted to, a carafe of discomfort is poured into my being. i find myself listening for people like or not like me and the reasons given for my inclusion or omission, sucked in by the dehumanization of incidentally ranking my desirability. seeing this in the introduction made this book a little difficult for me to get into. i had to pause and investigate my discomfort in order to continue reading.
who we are attracted to is inherently political, and when someone states they're most attracted to masculine women, effeminate men, and trans men, boxes are created. what i hear is: my attraction to trans men is separate and distinct from my attraction to men. what i hear is: trans men is a category i see as separate from, and outside of, men. what i hear is: transmisogyny keeps me interested in trans people who aren't women.
describing a generalized "who" we are attracted to is almost always harmful in some way to some people. an inverse is necessarily created. it is important we investigate who we find attractive, who we don't, and what political messaging has and continues to influence those inclinations. what were the first pieces of media you had an erotic reaction to? growing up, what did your family members say about different body sizes? how much transphobic rhetoric have you incidentally been witness to? how much of that was directed towards trans women? how has the misogyny around you shaped your opinion of femininity? how diverse was your upbringing, and what were community reactions to multi racial dating? how centrally was whiteness associated with beauty in your community, your schooling, your books, movies, and tv shows? how has colorism affected those norms? have any cultural taboos affected you, and how? how can we recognize the way society has shaped our desires without putting anyone down, singling anyone out, and without shaming ourselves?
how can we, the people both named and unnamed in desirability politics, not get bogged down by the endless unsaid-but-ever-present statement of, "i could never be attracted to you," or, "i am attracted to you because i don't see you for who you are"?
where's the chapter on deconstructing our attraction? how can we talk about pleasure without the politics of who we desire to experience pleasure with? adrienne marie brown touches on this within the context of herself, her relationship to gay sex, and what scenarios she and we as a culture fantasize about, but never who.
what is the best way to engage with the work of those we respect and find political kinship with, while honoring the critiques we have for said work? can the author of this book hold both awe for octavia butler's work, and critique her eroticized and unproblemitized age gap narratives, without having to re-assign an acceptable meaning to them? can i endlessly appreciate this work, while critical of how the author states her attraction, and critical of the missing questions and complications of who we desire? of the popular widespread use of the word "bodies" when we mean "whole ass human beings"? of the shrinking objectification of whole ass human beings to their bodies?
yes, but only by investigating and honoring our discomfort and critique. this book is full, worth reading, worth taking in, and worth investing real critical engagement and thought into. reading between the lines, finding the problems within a narrative, and contending with the pet peeves of language and its implications, is too, a pleasure.