Just finished reading this. Like others have said a lot of the Marxist stuff won’t be anything new to anyone on this site, but as a cishet man the “portraits” of the different lgbt+ perspectives really stuck out to me. I could read hundreds of pages of different voices talking about their lives and the oppression they faced. They were inspiring and heartbreaking and really helped me empathize better with the struggles lgbtq+ people deal with. Wish there were more of them in the book.

Also the chapter on intersex people really fucked me up and pissed me off. I wasn’t aware of how common genital mutilation was performed on newborns, wtf.

Reading it now, it’s really beautifully written.

If for any reason you’re pushing back on this or putting it off, fucking don’t. Right from the book:

These questions can only be answered when we begin to organize together, ready to struggle on each other’s behalf. Understanding each other will compel us as honest, caring people to fight each other’s oppression as though it was our own.

Fuckin’ right :trans-hammer-sickle:

If you’re on the fence about reading this, you shouldn’t be! It’s an easy read and there’s literally no excuse not to. I read it while working 6 days a week at a plant. If my blue-collar ass can do it, so can you!

On the one hand I care about my trans comrades, on the other hand reading is for nerds. I guess I’ll be a nerd this one time.

I cleaned up and OCR’d your pdf :)

Now it prints much prettier and you can select/highlight text! No excuses about it coming out all grey or not being able to highlight! And as a bonus, the file size is now only 2 MB.

It will be here in libgen once it’s approved: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=5EF98483F41CC783D0E48EFF635EBA3E

Until then you can download it from https://partidopirata.com.ar/~unperson/trans_liberation.pdf

I’m about a third into it and it’s great. It’s mostly a compilation of speeches Leslie made at different events mixed with some personal background on the people that organised said events. It’s a quick and engaging read. It gives a wonderful feel for the beautiful mosaic that is human identity and the struggle that is being waged for people’s liberty of expression. As a cis manbrodude I’m learning a ton. Would recommend to literally everyone.

:heart-sickle:

“However, it is necessary to accept that there are tens of thousands of people in this country—perhaps millions — who want to express both a masculine and a feminine side — and many, many of those people are heterosexual.”

That’s such a goddamn good quote, its from Chapter 2. I would describe myself as a cishet man, and have never had much interest in drag, but sometimes I want to wear a dress. I look at women wearing dresses and I’m like, “damn, they look great in that, why are they for women only?”. I’d like to be able to express my feminine side like that - although I don’t know if it should even be described as feminine. I want to wear something that has been arbitrarily relegated to women. Does that make jeans masculine? Were the second-wave feminists who broke gender norms by wearing them expressing their masculinity or simply wearing something they liked?

This book is very good, its given me a lot to think about. Need to keep reading

I strongly prefer paper copies so I am picking this up from my school’s library this afternoon 😎 also my boyfriend said he’ll read it too

:leslie-shining: