I loved experiencing their lives with them. As a non-binary person who has to hear themself constantly misgendered because people don’t understand a singular they, I felt vindicated. While my life didn’t perfectly match their’s, I still found myself relating to the emotions they had about their gender. I had the same reactions they had when they recounted the time when they first heard the singular they pronoun. Coyote spoke a lot on their top surgery, the process they went through to get it, and the aftermath.
Spoon spoke a lot on their career and how their shifting gender would often affect their career as well as how people treated them. Spoon and Coyote alternate the stories that they tell, largely focusing on a specific topic throughout the book. But Gender Failure really hit my feelings on the nose. I couldn’t read this book in public because I had so many warring emotions about this book and the subject that I knew I would just break. Gender has always been a stingy topic for me, just because I have so many confusing thoughts on it and some things people said weren’t even close to how I felt. I have read few books that have gotten my feelings about my gender correctly on the page.
Why this book?: We had to read an excerpt of this book for a class, and that excerpt was so good that I asked my professor if I could borrow the book from them. Order now.Having lived their lives with the struggle of being gender non-conforming in a binarist world, Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote recount moments of their lives as they began to realize they didn’t fit within the gender binary. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work-compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered.Ĭare Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone.
Then came spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members-letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent decades on the road, telling stories around the world.
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