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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 the idea of a divine plan,” as Miller writes, and Jordan accepted that evolution, not creationism, was true.
On April 18, 1906, an earthquake hit San Francisco. That was where Jordan stored his preserved fish. “Imagine,” Miller writes, “seeing thirty years of your life undone in one instant. Imagine whatever it is you do all day, whatever it is you care about, whatever you foolishly pick and prod at each day, hoping, against all signs that suggest otherwise, that it matters. Imagine finding all the progress you have made on that endeavor smashed and eviscerated at your feet.” Hundreds of species were on the floor, separated from their identity tags. They had once been cataloged, and now they “had become an amorphous unknown again.”
