"Being a girl was something that never really happened for me." -Rae Spoon
Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures." In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.
Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across the United States and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender enlightenment. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.
Ivan E. Coyote is the author of six story collections and the award-winning novel Bow Grip, and is co-editor of Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Ivan frequently performs at high schools, universities, and festivals across North America.
Rae Spoon is a transgender indie musician whose most recent CD is My Prairie Home, which is also the title of a new National Film Board of Canada documentary about them. Rae's first book, First Spring Grass Fire, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2013.
This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Industry Reviews
"Ivan and Rae have written a magical, down-to-earth, painfully honest step beyond any predetermined transgender narrative that I know of. At times hilarious, at times heartbreaking, their storytelling is top-notch. This book is unputdownable." -Kate Bornstein, author of A Queer and Pleasant Danger
"Brutally honest, tenderly funny and totally real, this multimedia collaboration makes for a dynamic, beautiful and important piece of literature." -Michelle Tea, author of Valencia
"Thoughtful, revelatory, brave, intermittently angry, and often quite touching, Gender Failure acts as a terrific primer about transgender politics - past, present, and future." —Vancouver Sun
"Together, Coyote and Spoon step beyond a traditional trans narrative to deliver these vignettes in an organic, frank and artistic way. In relating these collected moments in which they had felt as though they were failures at gender, one realizes instead that it was gender -- and all its presumptuous rules -- that had instead failed them. Yet in spite of all that, the book remains hopeful, with the two managing to carve a space for themselves, regardless." —Rabble.ca
