If I had to put the way I felt about Gender Failure in a couple of words, those words might be "behind the times." I would have been ecstatic to read this before about 2012 or 2013 (ask me why The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard marks a watershed in transgender fiction and memoir---but that's another review), but it was published in 2014.

That's partly for intensely personal reasons: my own butch-identified top surgery was in February 2014, two months before "Gender Failure" was published, and after years of desperate searching for people who had made a similar journey. I felt a peculiar kind of hollowness as I read Coyote's words about the decision and the process (both emotional and bureaucratic), knowing how much it would have meant to me six months before, and not quite feeling it.

It's also political: Spoon and Coyote are (like me) the kind of white masculine-presenting female-assigned people who get undue attention in trans (and queer) communities, who take up so much of the airtime that people of color, trans women, and transfeminine people can hardly get a word in edgewise. Coyote at least makes an effort to talk about the disparity. Spoon seems... oblivious. One more work of white transmasculine memoir doesn't literally take the place of the books that non-white, non-transmasc trans people are writing, but that doesn't exactly let them off the hook either. ( )

This book is a powerful storytelling about how gender failed the writers. Written in essay form, the book is easy to read, but the concepts very thought provoking for any reader; consoling for the transgender folk. ( )

Before I read this, I read another book each by Coyote and Spoon. Told from alternating POVS, Gender Failure is a a two-person memoir bout retiring from or messing with the gender binary. I really liked it and I would recommend it to to, oh, everyone. ( )

Wonderful set of essays from the authors outlining their journey beyond the gender binary. ( )

A book of essays that tell the narrative of two performers who see themselves outside the gender binary. I found this book enlightening and thought provoking, making me look at the concept of gender, and respecting a person's gender identity, in a new light. ( )