11corvus11's reviews
886 reviews

I won this book from a goodreads giveaway.

I gave up on it about 100 pages short of finishing the nearly 500 page book. It is obvious that a lot of research went into this book. But, this story could have been told and told better in a third of the space and time. I was not a huge fan of the author's writing style, especially her insistence of commenting on womens looks, how they've aged, and their bodies.

I gave it three stars for time and effort and telling of a story I was interested in. But, honestly, you can read wikipedia and get most of the story for free https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Medical_Center_and_Hurricane_Katrina

I read this while coming off of psychiatric drugs and found it validating and helpful. It does not shame people for taking or not talking drugs and makes information about drugs, how and why they work (or don't work), and methods to come off them accessible. It is a quick read and a good start.

This book is smart, witty, funny, and necessary. That said, it is extremely frustrating to read a book about neurosexism that is so incredibly ignorant of intersex and transgender people. Part 2 could be trashed entirely or needs to be completely revamped as it contradicts the very informative parts 1 and 3.

Part two fails again and again and ends up upholding the very gender binary she seeks to expose as fraud. She speaks of intersex people being coercively assigned female or male at birth, being nonconsensually put on hormones, and having their genitals surgically mutilated to meet society's gender and sex expectations in dry binary terms without thinking for a second to challenge this abuse of intersex children based entirely in male doctors' discomfort with gender and sex ambiguity- not because they present any danger to children. She also upholds the binary insistently despite acknowledging great sex differences within each person regardless of assigned sex. I'm not saying that I expected her to dismantle the gender binary completely, but is it so odd to assume that someone drawing conclusions about false brain sex differences would also acknowledge this false binary? Also, using intersex and trans peoples bodies as a cool way to study and reinforce false gender binaries goes against the intentions of this book completely. At least, it seems so.

Despite the glaring misunderstandings of intersex people and transgender people, the book gets 4 stars due to it being well written, entertaining, humorous, and well researched, while covering an important topic and debunking a lot of bad science about gender differences. But, Fine really needs to center the experience of more transgender, intersex, queer, multiracial, and other people of diverse class backgrounds for her book to make the necessary statements it seeks to make.

Note- I read the first edition. There is a tiny chance she may have addressed these issues in a later edition.

This book is difficult to rate and review. I found it incredibly interesting, very accessible, and also flawed in many ways. I read a lot of radical literature so when I move over to science on occasion, I notice many things. unsurprisingly from a field dominated by white straight men.

What I enjoyed were the writing style being accessible and not trying to show off with academic language most people don't understand, the many studies and discussions of morality, and even the author sharing how his own theories differed from other researchers' even when I disagreed. These alone made the book an easy an fast read.

There were many things I struggled with as well. There is a lot of discussion of violence towards nonhuman animals in this, including in animal research where they are harmed to study "empathy" without any discussion of the empathy and compassion one must lack in order to put animals through this in research. There are also many incorrect assumptions about nonhuman animals (macaques never imitate each other, other animals don't show compassion, etc) that are shown to be untrue (and are obvious to people who show empathy, understanding, and compassion towards other animals even outside of studies.) It is full of anthropocentric conclusions drawn from animal research that demean animals complete with a few shots at people who believe in animal rights missing out on veal and somehow even hurting humans by saying we shouldn't harm animals, comparing it ignorantly to abortion.

He also makes many statements centered in white male experience. He highlights many studies claiming distinct biological differences in the brains of men and women, something repeatedly shown to be inaccurate in better studies. He makes claims like- nobody cared about racism until recently. What he means is slavery and genocide were more publicly accepted by white colonizers in the past than they are now. Pretty sure black folks and native folks cared about racism forever. He will say hunter gatherer societies (now shown to be scavenger gatherer) were egalitarian. Then as a side note will mention women were oppressed. Sorry dude, that's not egalitarian. You can say more egalitarian amongst men or something. There are more things like this.

This is odd because the book brings great attention to racial bias, in/out group struggles, and moral developments in different cultures. He does this rather well at times but in the end, defaults back to centering his own experience. I can't completely blame him since he's probably never been told to do otherwise. But, I'd like to see this written with more attention to diversity in more places than inside a laboratory.

I wanted to love this. Like the reviewers did. I needed to love it. Parts of it were good, especially the advice about the internet and the haters. But, overall, parts of it made me more sad. You can tell the demographics of the person who wrote this book. I don't mean that in a bad way. I am glad this book helped many people, probably of similar demographics. Queer, disabled, sick, no car, lack of a support system? A lot of this shit won't be possible. And while I appreciated the part on how not to work a shit job by creating your own thing as advice of what to do next after becoming an "ex-worker" it really leaves out those of us who are currently ex-workers because we can't work at all. So, in the end, I got some good tips from this book and also felt lonely reading it.

I really enjoyed this book. It takes you on a journey of both judgement and humanization. It makes you think without telling you what to think. As a person who often finds myself stuck in a deep rift between complete anti-psychiatry and mental illness industries, I enjoyed the process of this book and the lessons therein.