Read My Lips

Over the course of the past two decades, transgender politics have become the cutting edge of sexual liberation. While the sexual and political freedom of gay people has yet to be fully secured, questions of who is sleeping with whom pale in the face of the battle by transgender activists to dismantle the idea of what it means to be a man or a woman. Riki Anne Wilchins's Read My Lips is a passionate, witty, and extraordinarily intelligent look at how society not only creates men and women—ignoring the fluidity of maleness and femaleness in most people—but also explains how those categories generate crisis for most individuals. It is impossible to read Wilchins's ideas and not be provoked in fundamental and mysterious ways.