This colorful volume offers brief biographies of 11 LGBTQ people who made an impact in the arts: Audre Lorde, Freddie Mercury, RuPaul, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Chaz Bono, Billy Porter, Lena Waithe, Janelle Monáe, Kate Moross, and Rosie Jones. While most are inspiring, if short, summaries of each person’s life and impact, there are some egregious errors: “Chaz was assigned female at birth, but later came out as gay and then transgender after the media began to guess what his sexuality was.” Let’s review: being transgender is about one’s gender identity, not one’s sexuality.
The writing is also often poor, sometimes redundant or with misplaced modifiers, such as “Kate Moross told the world that they were non-binary on social media.” (Presumably, Moross is non-binary off social media as well.) “Different to” should be “different from.” Also, there are some design choices that just seem odd: Chaz Bono is shown holding a trophy, but we don’t know what it is for. I happen to know that it’s a GLAAD Media Award, because I have one, too—but this will be totally lost on young readers, even though the text notes that he has worked for GLAAD.
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.
While earnest and well-intended, this book has enough unclear or erroneous information about sex and gender that it should not be a recommended title.
