Read This Book

Going Beyond the Gender Binary

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Patricia Elzie-Tuttle

Contributing Editor

Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. More of her written work can also be found in Body Talk: 37 Voices Explore Our Radical Anatomy edited by Kelly Jensen, and, if you’re feeling spicy, in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year, Volume 4 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently co-host of the All the Books! podcast and one of the weekly writers of the Read This Book newsletter. She lives in Oakland, CA on unceded Ohlone land with her wife and a positively alarming amount of books. Find her on her Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkTree.

Today’s book recommendation is a piece from the Pocket Change Collective, an imprint for small books that contain big ideas from some of the most prominent artists and activists of today. I, myself, feel fortunate to be alive at the same time as the author of today’s book recommendation, the writer, performance artist, LGBTQIA+ rights activist, and, dare I say, visionary, Alok Vaid-Menon.

Book cover of Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon

Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon

This book is a deconstruction, demystification, and reimagining of how we think about gender in the West. I am deeply impressed with the amount of substance and depth the author is able to reach in such a short book while also remaining accessible to the folks for whom thinking about gender beyond the binary, or even at all, is brand new.

Alok Vaid-Menon is gender non-conforming and transfeminine and writes from a place of both knowledge and love. They make it clear that gender non-conforming people are not the issue and that the real issue, which is indeed political, is the criteria used to define and evaluate gender. Throughout the book, they weave in anecdotes of their own experiences of gender and moving through the world as a gender non-conforming person with larger discussions of society, power, and discrimination.

The rules of gender and the gender binary are arbitrary and do not serve us as whole people. The author talks about how these rules are meant to control and how gender conformity is rewarded while gender creativity is punished. They dare to proclaim time and time again that just because things are the way they are that doesn’t mean that is the way they should be.

Alok posits that the variety of arguments against gender non-conforming people can be grouped into four categories: dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope. They wade through each category, easily unraveling the usually bad-faith arguments that people make against treating gender non-conforming people as people. These arguments range from “Singular they pronouns are not grammatically correct” to “this is just a new fad” to “gender is cultural but sex is biological” and more.

As I mentioned, this book is quite short but it contains multitudes.


That’s it for now, book-lovers!

Patricia

Find me on Book Riot, the All the Books podcast, Bluesky, TikTok, and Instagram.

Find more books by subscribing to Book Riot Newsletters.

If you found this post online and want reading recommendations in your inbox, sign up for Read This Book here!