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My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely |  | Author: Kate Bornstein
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $35.95
Buy Used: $13.95
as of 9/2/2010 22:41 CDT details
You Save: $22.00 (61%)
Seller: Bookbyte123
Rating:  reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7 x 0.7
ISBN: 0415916739
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.3
EAN: 9780415916738
ASIN: 0415916739
Publication Date: December 18, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Kate Bornstein's 1994 book of autobiographical theory, Gender Outlaw, drew a line in the sand about the whole boy/girl thing. "Who needs it?" America's most active transgender activist questioned. Now, in My Gender Workbook, Bornstein has assembled a collage of simple exercises, quizzes, puzzles, and essay questions that systematically break down our ingrained ideas about how women and men--and whoever is in between--should act. Bornstein's breezy, "hey, let's all discover who we might really be" style works to make this potentially threatening material accessible and even intriguing to almost all readers. Just glance down, check out who--or what--you thought you were, and get ready to answer a few questions.
Product Description
In My Gender Workbook, Kate Bornstein brings theory down to Earth and provides a practical guide to living with or without a gender. Using a unique, deceptively simple and always entertaining workbook format, Bornstein gently but firmly guides you to discover your own unique gender identity. She also takes aim at recent efforts to naturalize gender differences, putting books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus squarely where they belong: on Uranus. If you don't think you are transgendered when you sit down to read this book, you will be by the time you finish it!
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| Customer Reviews:
 Very helpful! August 31, 2009
K. Kriesel (Chicago, IL)
If you're confused about gender (yours, others', in general, etc.) this book will help you clear up so many issues. However chatty, in Bornstein's regular style, this is so helpful. I HIGHLY recommend it. Bornstein also makes the connection between gender, race, class, etc. in ways that most writers avoid.
Still working through it August 17, 2009
Shaina Smith (Lee's Summit, MO USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My Gender Workbook is an easy-to-read book but it's taking longer to get through than I expected due to the mental exercises Kate presents. I purchased this book hoping to understand more about gender and I'm finding the more I learn, the more confusing gender becomes to define. I recommend this book to anyone who feels gender should be challenged, or feels gender challenging. I also recommend it to anyone who feels there is no grey area in gender. My Gender Workbook will challenge you to analyze gender and everything the majority of us were raised to believe about it.
Excellent introduction to nonstandard gender August 7, 2007
S. Kooiman
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Kate Bornstein's writing is a pleasure to read! My Gender Workbook is a great way to start looking at nonstandard genders if you're used to thinking in strictly binary terms. While there's room in her viewpoint for girly girls and manly men, there's definitely a bit of bias towards transsexual and genderqueer folks. The quotes from different sources in the sidebar create a variety of perspectives on gender, in case you don't identify too strongly with Kate Bornstein's personal story (which, let's face it, isn't common to most of us).
If you're already breaking the gender binary- that is, if you're the sort of person who'd be interested in this book- then likely it wouldn't provide much more than some much-needed encouragement. However, if you're new to transgressing gender, then this is probably the book for you.
 Well-Meaning, and Sometimes Well-Done, But Often Flawed February 27, 2006
A. Venegas-Steele (Atlanta, GA, USA)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
There is stuff here that is good, and all of it is well-meaning. That said, this book is very much a mixed bag.
It suffers from having little sense of who it's audience is. I'd certainly wager that a large majority of people who are reading this book are feminists, queers, or transpeople - or, like myself, *all* of these - and a lot of it is very basic, even frustratingly so, for these people, and this simplicity often shifts back and forth with more advanced stuff. This means that the beginners who do read this may well get lost, and that the people who get the basics will get bored. A lot of it also feels simply cheesy, and even if I wasn't already familiar with the theories and practices presented, I think I would feel condescended to.
It also seems somewhat more MtF oriented than FtM; I can't really give a specific example, but it seemed to have more of a by-and-for trannygirls vibe. I suppose this is part of the problem with having the whole book on genderqueerness written by one white, MtF, middle-class person. Ze certainly tries to give voice to people of different backgrounds, and often succeeds, but having side comments and self-descriptions is different than having real input. This isn't so much an issue of specific instances; rather it's the assumption that one person's experience - any one persons experience, no matter how gender-transgressive they are - is sufficient to write what tries to be a guide to transgressing gender and identity; I think this book would have been much better as a collaboration.
That said, a lot of it is very good. It certainly will help some people understand some more things about themselves, their own (lack of) gender(s), and gender as a whole. The very least it will do is reassure trans/genderqueer/gender-variant people in it that they are not alone, no matter how much it seems so - a worthy goal.
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