This colorful volume offers brief biographies of 10 LGBTQ people who made an impact in on social change: Bayard Rustin, Barbara Jordan, Ian McKellen, Marsha P. Johnson, Bobbie Lea Bennett, Sylvia Rivera, Laverne Cox, Arsham Parsi, Jonathan Van Ness, and Kian Tortorello-Allen. While most are inspiring, if short, summaries of each person’s life and impact, there are some egregious errors, notably that Harvey Milk (who doesn’t get a full profile, but is mentioned) was not “the first openly gay man elected as governor in the history of California.” He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, not to the governorship. If a book about queer people gets wrong a basic fact about arguably the most famous LGBTQ rights activist in U.S. history, it’s hard to place faith in any of its information.
Additionally, to say on the page about transgender pioneer Marsha P. Johnson that the Stonewall Riots started the “gay rights movement” (as opposed to the “LGBTQ rights movement”) feels a poor choice.
As with all four books of the series, the biographies are prefaced by two pages about “Having Pride,” which explain what it means to be LGBTQIA+, what each of the letters means, and what it means to have pride. At the end are tips on how to “Be an Ally!” as well as a glossary. Unfortunately, the book’s definition of “sex” is misleading, telling us, “A person’s sex is to do with their biology. It can refer to the biological sex they were assigned at birth, or it could be the sex they identify with.” This conflates the ideas of sex and gender in a confusing way—gender being how people identify—and many people do not like the term “biological sex,” preferring “assigned male [or female] at birth,” as Planned Parenthood notes. The book goes on to define gender identity as “a person’s idea of how they are masculine, feminine, a mixture of both of these, or neither of them,” which feels fine, but the explanation of “What Is Transitioning?” is again weak. While it rightly notes that “Transitioning means a different thing to every person,” and could either involve medicines and surgery or dressing differently and changing one’s name,” it never includes the key fact that either way, the point of transitioning is to live as the gender with which one identifies.
Other definitions in the glossary are just poorly written, for example, “Services” are “things that are there to help people with things such as health care and housing”—but “things” is pretty vague.
While earnest and well-intended, this book has enough unclear or erroneous information that it should not be a recommended title.
