An informed, judicious, sensitive consideration of the falsehoods and hazards of contemporary trans activism.
How zealous activists have misrepresented biology and endangered women.
Joyce, a senior staff journalist at the Economist, provocatively challenges the now common assumption among progressives that, regarding social classifications, self-determination of gender identity ought to have priority over any underlying biological reality. Offering carefully researched analyses of the scientific view of human sexual dimorphism, the psychology of gender dysphoria, and the medical and personal tolls associated with transitioning, the author argues that a refusal to acknowledge biology has, among other injustices, caused enormous and unnecessary harm to many children and threatened safe spaces for women. Joyce explains how trans-rights ideologues have spread falsehoods about what contemporary research actually demonstrates about the immutability of sex and encouraged an egregiously one-sided public discourse. “When it comes to whether sex or gender identity should take precedence in law and everyday life,” writes the author, “the conflict has been treated as if only trans people are affected, and there has been no negotiation at all.” Joyce’s work is impressively logical, nuanced, and empathetic in restoring balance to such negotiations. Particularly astute is the author’s critique of how specialists in the West now typically counsel parents of children who present with gender dysphoria, often resorting to dubious or outright false assertions about how this disorder tends to proceed without medical intervention—or understating the risks of surgery or hormone therapies. Also excellent is her discussion of the practical and moral problems generated by an undiscriminating acceptance of trans women as women in single-sex spaces such as public bathrooms as well as in professional sports and the penal system. Furthermore, Joyce’s recommendations for how a just society might balance the rights of trans people with those of the rest of its members are profoundly compelling.
An informed, judicious, sensitive consideration of the falsehoods and hazards of contemporary trans activism.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-861-54372-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
