When reading this book, I had a hard figuring out who this book was for. Is it for an audience who wants education on gender identity b/c if so, this isn’t it. Is it for people who are immersed in gender studies? If so, it feels redundant. The best I could come up with is that it’s for Butler to say what they needed to say and have it recorded. 

The conclusion offered more pieces to why they wrote it and I wished it would’ve been included in the intro. There’s a lot to gender and we wouldn’t think so, but the people want to restrict who can be a gender, their tests only restrict everyone. There’s a lot of hate and gender has become a catch all boogeyman of a word that means different things to different groups. Butler does what they can to show how damaging this discourse is not just for love living outside the binary, but for democracies and free thought. It’s a big leap, but I think she’s successful. 

If this is your first exposure to their work, I’d try something else. It was approachable but I felt like I was missing stuff. It made me miss Maggie Nelson. Also, if you play a drinking game every time they say phatasma, you’ll need a new liver.