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There is one glaring omission to Burack’s work: She does not refract her
analysis through race and socioeconomic class to an appreciable extent.
While addressing these issues is not her primary objective, it would be
helpful to understand how anti-gay rhetoric is understood and espoused
by the large numbers of African American and Latino/a Protestant evan-
gelicals. Do they share the same attitudes as whites in the Christian right?
Why and why not? How do they understand comparisons to the civil rights
movement frequently made by LGBT activists? How is anti-gay rhetoric
of the Christian right informed by white privilege and neocolonialism?
How is it related to increasing middle-class status of many evangelicals
and support for free market capitalism? While Burack notes these issues
in passing, she does not subject them to the fierce analysis she applies to
Chick, Love Won Out, and Robertson’s and Falwell’s post–9/11 comments.
Too challenging for all but the most advanced undergraduates, this
book is most useful to scholars of religion, politics, and queer studies. It is
especially relevant to the LGBT community and its allies who struggle to
understand how many evangelical Christians can simultaneously preach
sincere compassion and virulent animosity without perceiving any ten-
sion. Burack skillfully unpacks the complex interplay of faith, politics,
psychology, and rhetoric in the axiom, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”
For those of us in California and across the United States preparing for
a long siege on same-sex marriage, this book is a sobering assessment of
what we are up against.
ANNE ENKE
The issue of bisexuality might also be germane here, given its part in the
frustrated relationship between gender identity, sex, and sexuality. While
it is a category demanding its own ethnography, it would be interesting
to know whether the term has valence among any of the trans-interested
people with whom Valentine worked.
Equally provocatively, Valentine focuses exclusively on people who
were assigned male sex at birth (people on a male-to-female [MTF] spec-
trum), and suggests that people on a female-to-male [FTM] spectrum have
a different and perhaps even separate institutional history for reasons of
gender hierarchy, feminism, and the ways that gender is classed and raced.
This insight requires further inquiry. In what contexts are people on an
FTM spectrum actually more visible and institutionally integrated than
people on an MTF spectrum? If, as Valentine suggests, the institutional
history of transgender that began in the 1950s with transsexualism is
concerned with assigned-at-birth male people, how do we simultaneously
narrate a more recent transgender liberation movement in which people
on an FTM spectrum have been at the forefront, not only in the academy
and social service institutions, but also on the streets?2 We need a more
extensive race and class as well as gender analysis if we are to better
understand how an FTM movement emerged in the early 1990s, and to
better understand why it might look as though MTF and FTM are separate
institutional and social movement histories.
This is also a matter of timing. Valentine’s fieldwork took place in the
mid–1990s, and much has changed since then, including the visibility of
people on an FTM spectrum in the same neighborhoods that Valentine
discusses. Works such as The Aggressives, U People, and Still Black
document a vibrant and exceptionally diverse culture of male-identified
female-bodied people of color, many of whom identify as female and/or
lesbian but live “as men” in New York City and elsewhere.3
What the reader realizes after reading Imagining Transgender is that if
any of these histories have a coherent institutional narrative, they diver-
sify infinitely, it seems, at the local level. While the term transgender
purports to gather all ways of “being” sex/gender non-normative under
one umbrella, people make meaning of themselves moment to moment
within a neighborhood or a club, a set of friends, and available means
of obtaining food, shelter, clothing, health care, and also pleasure. It is
the responsibility of those who theorize, activate, and implement social
services to recognize the nuances, complexities, and multiplicities of
transgender in micro- and macro-contexts.
Imagining Transgender proceeds through sophisticated and multilay-
ered analysis. It offers a new way to approach gender and the institutions
that name and manage it, and this is a provocative contribution. Perhaps
the biggest challenge is that so few readers come to the book with even a
Book Reviews 203
Notes
1. The term cis-gender (derived from Latin cis, meaning “on the same side”
and gender) has been in use since the early 1990s to refer to consistency and
congruence or alignment of sex/gender across social and personal contexts.
Cis- and trans- are commonly used in chemistry and other sciences to distin-
guish states; the term cis-gender was possibly coined by microbiologist Dana
Leland Defosse in 1994, and has since gained increasing use among activists
and academics. Trans author and biologist Julia Serano also uses the term
cis-sexual to refer to consistency and alignment of physical sex (Serano, Julia.
2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating
of Femininity. New York: Seal Press).
2. For example, activists and authors such as Leslie Feinberg, Lou Sullivan, and
Holly Devor might be credited with bringing widespread attention to the
existence of a movement increasingly cohering under the term transgender;
activists and scholars such as Dean Spade (co-founder of Sylvia Rivera Law
Project), Shannon Price Minter (Legal Director of the National Center for
Lesbian Rights), Richard Juang and Paisley Currah (co-editors of Transgender
Rights), and Bobby Noble (author of Maculinities Without Men) have focused
on the ways in which race and class hierarchies influence institutional
approaches to gender.