Written as a corrective to the standard “trans 101,” b. binaohan’s decolonizing trans/gender 101 looks at how we treat gender, without placing white, Western experience as the neutral centre of the map.

binaohan examines the ways colonialism, whiteness and racialisation structure the language through which gender is made legible in the first place. The result is deliberately accessible, conversational and resistant to academic gatekeeping: a short book interested less in producing the definitive account of transness than in showing why such accounts so often erase the people they claim to include. 

Across sections on language, identity, “coming out,” femininity and the closet, binaohan keeps returning to a central problem. All categories that appear descriptive, are rarely politically innocent. The book is especially concerned with Indigenous and people-of-colour experiences of gender, and with the limits of frameworks that detach gender from histories of race, colonialism and power. It remains a useful little anti-primer — compact, argumentative and refreshingly uninterested in making the subject tidier than it is. 

Biyuti Publishing, Toronto, 2014. First edition paperback. Light shelf wear and faint rubbing/marking to covers; internally clean and very well preserved.