This colorful volume offers brief biographies of 10 LGBTQ people who made an impact in STEM fields: Alan Turing, Lynn Conway, Sally Ride, Ben Barres, Megan Smith, Ann Mei Chang, Nergis Mavalvala, Polly Arnold, Audrey Tang, and Jack Andraka.
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 glossary definitions are just poor. “Pardoned” is not “to remove someone’s conviction of a crime.” That’s “pardon” or “pardoning.” “Pardoned” is “to have one’s conviction of a crime removed.” “Atoms” are not “the smallest building blocks of the universe.” Atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are themselves composed of smaller particles.
While earnest and well-intended, this book has enough unclear or erroneous information that it should not be a recommended title.
