tired of reading yet another trans/gender 101 entirely centered around white people and their normative narratives? tired of feeling like you must be _this_ tall to be trans enough to belong in the ~community~? tired of feeling like the white trans community is erasing your experiences? having gender feels but not understanding how they fit into the current white hegemonic discourse on gender? decolonizing trans/gender 101 is a short, accessible (and non-academic) critique of many of the fundamental concepts in white trans/gender theory and discourse. written for the indigenous and/or person of colour trying to understand how their gender is/has been impacted by whiteness and colonialism.

In her first book, sociologist Strings (sociology, Univ. of California, Irvine) explores the historical development of prothin, antifat ideologies deployed in support of Western, patriarchal white supremacy. Beginning in the aesthetic ideals circulated by Renaissance thinkers and artists and bringing her narrative up into the 1990s, Strings charts how white Europeans and Anglo-Americans developed ideals of race and beauty that both explicitly and figuratively juxtaposed slim, desirable white women against corpulent, seemingly monstrous black women. The work is divided into three sections. The two chapters in the first part consider how Renaissance white women and women of color were depicted as plump and feminine, separated by class, yet belonging to the same gender. The second part of the work charts the rise of modern racial ideologies that yoked feminine beauty to Protestant, Anglo-Saxon whiteness. Later chapters and the epilogue consider how Americans normalized the "scientific management" of white women's bodies for the purpose of racial uplift, a project that continued to situate black women as the embodied Other. The author does not address fat from the angle of health or previous attitudes white Europeans held towards corpulence.