Ann Travers

rating: 4.5 stars

I don't feel like I'm trapped in the wrong body. It's more that I'm trapped in other people's perceptions of my body.

When I wrote my BA thesis on a fictional genderfluid teen character last year, I looked into academic literature and all kinds of articles on transgender children. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong place, but I found that most of these articles were written /about/ transgender children, but from an outsider's perspective. In that regard, this book was refreshing for two reasons: it has a nonbinary author, and also many actual quotes from transgender and nonbinary teens and their parents. Most importantly, it lets the children use their own words to define their own identities. (One trans kid actually has a nonbinary parent and it's awesome!)

The other reason this book was incredibly refreshing is that it was published in 2018, when most other literature I found was published at least 10 years ago. The Trans Generation is so recent that it has a section on the first 10 months of Trump presidency, and how it changed the situation for trans people in the US.

This book focuses entirely on US and Canada, but it still does its best to interview diverse children of various identities and races. The author is white, but they consciously address their white privilege and talk about how they made steps to make sure their writing is inclusive.

Overall, I found this a really helpful overview on the situation of trans people in the US and Canada (as someone who doesn't live in either place). I also really appreciated the quotes from the actual trans children, and their self-definitions which were really interesting to read. Wish I was that confident in myself when I was 15 or younger.

I especially appreciated that there are sections that deal specifically with nonbinary people and how the issues they face are often different from binary trans people.… (lisätietoja)

Review also posted on my blog: https://bennilovesbooks.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/review-the-trans-generation-how...

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. This book has content warnings for discussions of transphobia/queerphobia, deadnaming, misgendering, bullying, abuse, and suicide, and for a graphic description of a trans child dying by suicide.

I usually get incredibly frustrated while reading academic work on trans people because most of the time it's littered with binarism and outdated/offensive terminology, so this book was a breath of fresh air for me because it was pretty spot-on for most of the book. Travers, who identifies as trans, did their research and their best to ensure that this book was as respectful toward trans kids as possible, and it was really effective. Overall, this book is very good and one that most trans people like myself will find reflective of their own experiences to some degree.

My favorite thing about this book is that it not only was respectful towards trans people, but it is also intersectional -- Travers goes into deep discussions about how race, class, disability, and sexuality all play a part in a trans person's experiences and acknowledges that these experiences are going to vary widely because of these factors. For instance, during one moment Travers tells a young trans person that things will get better as they grow up and go to college and move on with their life, and then later Travers realizes that the assumption they made that college is a certainty in that person's future was incredibly classist and they felt guilty for how they had phrased that conversation. The trans kids and teens who were interviewed have a variety of gender identities and backgrounds, and the mix of different perspectives from these kids and teens were a huge boon to the book and to our understanding of trans people's childhoods.

My largest issue with the book was how Travers approached being trans as being "disabled" by society -- in a sense, I get where they were coming from. They very eloquently discussed the medical vs. social models of disability and how with the social model it is society that creates barriers rather than the disability itself, and Travers expanded this to society "disabling" trans people as well. I get what they were going for here and agree that that is the essential effect that society has on trans people, however as a disabled person I felt that the terminology around trans people being "disabled" was co-opted in a way that tries to equate transness and being disabled when these are two very different things, and I don't feel that an abled trans person should really be describing themselves as "disabled" when they mean that society is creating barriers that cause them to be discriminated against. I felt that better terminology could have been used here. I did, however, appreciate the good understanding of how ableism comes into play regarding trans disabled people, and felt that that added to the larger discussion as a whole.

Aside from that larger terminology issue, this book adds a lot of value to discourse about the lives of trans kids and was a really thoughtful and insightful read. Though I disagree with some of the definitions of terms in the glossary, this book in general is a really great overview of how intersectionality affects trans youth and how trans youth are growing up in this generation. It's a great read, and I definitely recommend it.

Final rating: 4.5 of 5 stars… (lisätietoja)