Gender Failure
by Ivan E. Coyote, Rae Spoon
If I had to put the way I felt about Gender Failure in a couple of words, those words might be "behind the times." I would have been ecstatic to read this before about 2012 or 2013 (ask me why [b:The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard|15713728|The Collection Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard|Tom Léger|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347857275s/15713728.jpg|21382135] marks a watershed in transgender fiction and memoir---but that's another review), but it was published in 2014.
That's partly for intensely personal reasons: my own butch-identified top surgery was in February 2014, two months before "Gender Failure" was published, and after years of desperate searching for people who had made a similar journey. I felt a peculiar kind of hollowness as I read Coyote's words about the decision and the process (both emotional and bureaucratic), knowing how much it would have meant to me six months before, and not quite feeling it.
It's also political: Spoon and Coyote are (like me) the kind of white masculine-presenting female-assigned people who get undue attention in trans (and queer) communities, who take up so much of the airtime that people of color, trans women, and transfeminine people can hardly get a word in edgewise. Coyote at least makes an effort to talk about the disparity. Spoon seems... oblivious. One more work of white transmasculine memoir doesn't literally take the place of the books that non-white, non-transmasc trans people are writing, but that doesn't exactly let them off the hook either.