2 Books Like Beyond Limits

"Standardizing Sex" is the history of transgender medicine from the 1920s through 2000 in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Slagstad argues that trans medicine in Scandinavia can only be interpreted through the lens of the history of the welfare state. Teams of specialized physicians decided whether or not a person qualified for hormones, surgery, or mental health care until the early 1990s, when bureaucratic changes necessitated the shift to a model that made psychiatrists into gatekeepers and others into functionaries. Along the way, the reader learns more about the medical journey of Christine Jorgensen in the early 1950s and meets trans people who shaped Scandinavian medicine as much as that medicine shaped them. In the conclusion, Slagstad notes that present-day trans medicine is still based on a sexual binary and asks, "what would a trans medicine not based in a binary of sex look like?" That's a good question for the… show more.

"Passing Strange" is the true story of Clarence King, a nineteenth-century American explorer and surveyor and his Black common-law wife, Ada Copeland, who knew him as James Todd. King persuaded Copeland that he was a Black man who passed as white, when in fact the reverse was true, and lived a double life until telling her the truth on his deathbed when he passed in 1901. Copeland outlived King for more than 62 years, dying at age 103 in 1964. Though Copeland left few records behind of her thoughts during her long life and the betrayal that shaped it, Sandweiss used archival materials to draw a convincing picture of how a Black woman in Copeland's situation might have felt and perceived her situation. Sandweiss's extensive research and sense of narrative drama keeps the reader engaged in the story and King and Copeland in their memory, long after finishing the book.