What a brilliantly impactful book!

Ultimately, this book is about reconciling your internal identity with your perception of your external appearance. This includes a wide range of topics, from healthcare, to gender, to fashion, to disability, to tattoos. It’s about creating a healthy relationship with your body, with a focus on the specific challenges faced by different groups within the LGBTQ+ community.

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I would have read this in one sitting if I’d been able to, it was that readable! There was the perfect balance of research and personal experience, with testimonies from other people included throughout which brought in lots of different perspectives. This book took a truly intersectional approach, and was definitely the better for it.

A big focus of the book is unpacking not just the binary gender, heteronormative beauty standards that are upheld by society as a whole, but also a lot of the pressures experienced within the LGBTQ+ community. This includes the expectations placed on gay men to achieve the ‘perfect’ body type, or how trans people are expected to uphold a gender binary. There’s also discussion of how these issues impact each other: for example, the author discusses how they struggle to find masculine clothes that fit their body type. They take a very comprehensive view of how modern Western beauty standards can impact queer people, while still having an overall optimistic tone. In the best way, reading this book is like sitting down and chatting with a wise friend.

I received a free copy for review. All opinions are my own.