The 2004 James Tiptree, Jr. Award: Special Mention

Summary | Winner | Short List | Long List | Special Mention

JURY

Margaret McBride, chair (mm), Judith Clute (jc), Alan DeNiro (ad), Ursula K. LeGuin (ukl), Cecilia Tan (ct)

Will Roscoe Changing Ones
St Martin's Griffin, 2000

--Nonfiction that would be of interest to anybody interested in the Tiptree. It is about "berdache" -- men who took/take women's roles and women who took/take men's roles, or as Roscoe calls it, third and fourth genders, in Native American societies and cultures, from first contact through the present. I have never read anything that gave me so many and such useful different ways to think about sex/gender. (It involves in fact a total, non-European, non-binary redefinition of gender.) It is extremely well written; the scholarship and research is as careful as it is readable. It is generous-hearted (he never sneers at anybody because they didn't know what we know, or were benighted for one reason or another). It is tough-minded. It is a splendid book.--ukl

Samuel R. Delany Stars in my Pockets like Grains of Sand
20th anniversary republication

The prologue has images that have stayed in my head since I first read it (my memory was accurate when I reread it too). The rest of the book will "play with your head"-a culture with the ability to decode your perfect sex partner down to precise details and what an amazing variety of sex and gender partners they have! "When there are so may paths and parameters along which and around which women-young, old, human, evelm, male, female, and neuter-can develop both community and communion to be passed on to others, why should you restrict yourselves to direct egg-and-sperm relations?"--mm


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