I’m not sure I can find the right words to describe what exactly bothered me about this book, but I will try my best. 

The writing style made this book worse than it needed to be. It did it a disservice. It made things sound too simple. I saw other people comment on the book’s dry humour. I like dry humour, yet nothing in here was humorous to me. 

There was so much casual racism and sexism. It was jarring. The author choses to leave other people’s actions and words mostly uncommented. However, Thomas rarely ever says something about it to the other people in the book either. With the transphobia it’s one thing. It can be a powerful tool as a trans person to let the insensitivity look extra stupid. I didn’t feel that way about the racism and sexism. It just felt inconsiderate. It felt normalising and just made me upset. 

Nothing in this book goes deep. That is obviously a conscious choice, yet I don’t get that choice. It makes most of the content feel unimportant. It didn’t feel like it enriched me in any way. It feels like the kind of book a cis person would read so they can then say they can understand the trans experience, yet they wouldn’t. It makes me question who this book is for. For trans people all of this might be obvious. The dysphoria and transphobia would probably be confrontational. To cis people it wouldn’t be all that informative. To a transphobe, it might go over their head how bad transphobia is. 

The book just keeps on telling me things. Small anecdotes. Nothing more than that. That is, quite frankly, not enough. 

I had to force myself through this. While I could warm up to the writing a little more as time went on, I never truly enjoyed it.