Three Books That Tell Us to Smash Our Categories
Recommended nonfiction by Miller, Fox, and Waters
I’m still thinking about The Other Olympians by Michael Waters. I classify it with a couple of my other favorite nonfiction books of the past few years.
Here on Medium, you may have already seen that I found these photos of the athletes in Waters’s book.
At Gender Identity Today, I talked a little about how sports officials originally used sex verification in women’s sports to root out intersex people assigned female at birth as well as trans men — not trans women.
Now I want to draw connections between The Other Olympians and a couple other books.
‘Why Fish Don’t Exist’
Lulu Miller wrote Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life.
This 2020 book is about David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), a scientist whose passion was collecting fish. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species when Jordan was a boy. Darwin was “debunking…