Review of The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye: Complexly intersectional yet crystal clear.

The Transgender Issue: An argument for Justice, reclaims an increasingly  recognisable phrase in current media, culture, and politics.

Reframing the phrase by using it to analyse issues transgender people face, rather than pose, Faye meticulously deconstructs arguments that oppose the validity of trans people's existence.

The book avoids memoir – as Faye says, transgender people should not feel implored towards memoir to validate their experience – and instead prioritises educated and intersectional research and analysis.

As a trans person in the media, she writes about how easy it is to mine and expose intimate details of your personal life for trivial debate. She described some feeling financially pressured to deal in levels of candour and subsequent responsibility to create a very small window into what is a broad and diverse community.

Based on fact and research rather than anecdote, this book is a large window into the facts of the trans experience and its intersection with socio-political, socio-economic, and societal structures. It is also acutely self-aware of the limits of experience from which Faye is writing from the point of view of class and race.

It becomes clear early in the text with Faye’s sophisticated and understandable explanations just how much of the sensationalist and clickbait media narrative about trans people is fabricated, ill-informed, uneducated, and regurgitated non-fact. Particularly In her chapter about medical intervention, it becomes clear that a lot of what is accepted in the debate surrounding transition, particularly of young people, is simply not true.

This is a brilliant starting point for the book.

She eloquently explores the transgender experience in spheres such as medication, the prison system, homelessness, and sex work, whilst also analysing the fundamental institutional issues with the systems and realities themselves.

In her chapter on prison systems, for example, she explores the issue of prison as an institution and combines this with the additional trans experience of it.

Her arguments are completely waterproof and deeply nuanced. For example, when talking about sex work, she explains that we live in a society in which money is necessary for survival and there are limited options available to the marginalised. She critiques capitalism's exploitation of trans and non-trans workers alike and its flaws as a system as a whole.

Faye achieves a complexly intersectional text that is meticulously ensured to be understandable.