Shelli's Reviews > This Book Is Gay

Let me be clear that I have only read the preview, but I found a couple of things disturbing enough that I had to point them out.

On the very first page, "Lesson One" is meant to list the premise of the book, the "this is just the way things are" assumptions, if you will:

•Sometimes men like men.
•Sometimes women like women.
•Sometimes women like men and women.
•Sometimes men like women and men.

So far, so good. It seems a good approach to just spell out the letters of the quiltbag one by one in super-simple terms.

•Sometimes people don't like anyone.

Awesome! Asexual folks are included right off the bat, when so often they are left off of the proverbial laundry list. But wait… that phrasing is awfully weird. Yes, it's supposed to fit with the light and casual phrasing used for Gs, Ls, and Bs, but the unintended consequence is that it makes the As look like reclusive, antisocial, people-hating hermits. While it's true I don't know anyone well who identifies as asexual, I doubt it's because they're all hiding out at home, hating the entirety of the human species. People in general – even the kids who comprise this book's intended audience – are going to understand that "Sometimes men like men" is code for "Some men like to have sex with other men". But in a book that purports to answer very basic and introductory questions, "Sometimes people don't like anyone" seems a truly terrible and needlessly "othering" way to paraphrase "Some people prefer not to have sex at all" or "Some people do not generally experience sexual desire".

Next up, and remember, we're still on page one here:

•Sometimes a man might want to be a woman.
•Sometimes a woman might want to be a man.

I may not know any asexual people, but I do know transgender people, and even if I didn't, I would know enough to know that they do not think of themselves as "really" the gender of their birth sex but would just like to switch it up and "convert" to the other one. In reality, the statement we hear from trans* folks over and over is, "I never felt like a {insert birth sex here}. I always knew that I was actually a {not my birth sex}; I just want to live my life as a {not my birth sex, but my real gender}, and have my appearance better fit how I feel on the inside." What transgender person would express their gender identity and expression struggle as, "Yeah, I'm a guy, but I want to be a woman"?!

The kicker here is that the author, James Dawson, now presents as Juno Dawson, a woman. Yes, a transgender person actually wrote that.

And maybe all this crappy wording would be mitigated if the author's next paragraph said something like, "Of course, I'm totally oversimplifying things here, so let's break it down." But the very next words (after a thankfully-inoffensive [but incomplete] genderqueer list item) are, and again I quote:

Ok, got it? It really is that simple.

I could end the lesson there, but I don't think a few pages would make a very good book, so I suppose I should go into a bit more depth…

upon which the seemingly put-upon author then embarks on a very general book introduction, about how it is the instruction manual everyone wishes they had been given upon coming out, and welcome to a fabulous club, etc. Hopefully, some better definitions and descriptions are presented later in the book, but it certainly doesn't happen in the preview. It's like that old adage says, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Further down on yes-this-is-still-page-two, Dawson clarifies just who all this "instruction manual" is for:

But this is a manual for everyone—no matter your gender or sexual preference.

Sexual preference??? Sexual PREFERENCE?? You mean that antiquated term that even the more enlightened members of the clergy and the GOP had started replacing years ago with the far more accurate and inoffensive (staggeringly so, by comparison) term sexual orientation? I mean seriously: sexual preference? On page freakin' two of a book you want scared, closeted kids to read? If I sound apoplectic, I am. As the kids today say, I can't even.

I don't know how the rest of the book is, but reading the reviews here, it appears to have committed some other sins and faux pas, but to be honest, it would have to be pretty spectacular and mow my lawn every weekend for a damn year to boot in order to redeem itself in my estimation for the sin tally it racked up by the end of page two. And the preview is of a later edition, so there has clearly been an opportunity to correct these errors of… what? judgement? These certainly go way beyond typos.

Well, this is certainly the longest I've ever ranted about a preview. I really do hope that Juno reads it and considers the implications of her careless words right at the beginning, and anywhere else she might have been sloppy or glib throughout the book. There is certainly a need for books like the one This Book is Gay aspires to be.