Five books to challenge your thinking on work, food, beauty & sex

Reni Eddo-Lodge is the London based, award winning author of the Jhalak Prize winning, bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

At the Guardian, she tagged five "books to challenge your thinking on work, food, beauty and sex," including:

In the media bunfight about the legitimacy of trans people’s lives, Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness is a must read. It drags the conversation out of the gutter, instilling empathy but also forcing those of us who support trans rights to reconsider exactly how we are doing so.

For a long time, my support stopped at “trans women are women”. It seemed that anything was better than the vitriol heaped on them by the press. But reading Mock’s first memoir helped me understand that I was practising a kind of gender colour-blindness. I’ve never had to fight for my gender to be recognised, neither have I faced harassment for trying to do so. And while both cis and trans women are subject to vicious sexual violence because of our gender, I realised that there is a luxuriating ease in which I can opt in or out of the world’s more obvious gender markers (make-up, heels) without my gender being wholly doubted – or my participation being taken as confirmation that I am an upholder of the patriarchy because I like lipstick.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue