Key Details
- Narration: C. Riley Snorton self-narrates, bringing a measured academic cadence that suits the density of the archival argument while remaining accessible to engaged non-specialist listeners.
- Themes: Race and trans identity, archival erasure, historical embodiment
- Mood: Dense and revelatory, with an undercurrent of moral urgency
- Verdict: A rigorous and necessary intervention in trans studies that redraws the historical map of Black and trans experience in America.
Black on Both Sides is an audiobook that refuses the easy consolations of both progressive celebration and conservative denial. C. Riley Snorton's argument is structural and historical: that the construction of transgender identity in America has depended, from its very foundations, on the erasure of Black trans lives and on a racial logic that shaped how gender mutability was understood, regulated, and represented across more than a century and a half of American history. Snorton delivers this argument with precision and with evident stakes, and the decision to self-narrate makes the listening experience feel like something between a careful lecture and an ethical confrontation with what the archive reveals.
The book begins with Christine Jorgensen, whose celebrity in the postwar era became the dominant frame for American understanding of trans identity. Snorton does not dismiss Jorgensen's significance, but he displaces her from the center of the story to reveal what her prominence obscured: a much longer and more complex genealogy of trans and gender-nonconforming life among Black Americans, stretching back to the medical experiments conducted on enslaved Black women and forward through the legal and legislative violence of the present day.
Snorton Pauses Where the Archive Gets Dense
What the self-narration accomplishes here is a kind of intellectual intimacy. Snorton does not perform the text; he moves through it with the same careful deliberateness visible in the prose, pausing at moments where the archival evidence is dense, letting complicated sentences land without rushing past them. For listeners accustomed to more theatrical academic narration, this measured quality might require some adjustment. But it suits the material: this is a book that asks to be thought alongside, not simply processed and filed away.
The archival methodology is one of the book's genuine strengths. Snorton draws on an extraordinarily varied range of sources, including legal records, medical literature, Black literary texts, and legislative histories, to build an argument that is cumulative rather than polemical. He is not simply asserting that race has been ignored in trans studies; he is demonstrating, source by source, how that erasure was actively produced and then reproduced across generations of scholarship and public discourse. The section on the murder of Phillip DeVine alongside Brandon Teena in 1993 is particularly striking. DeVine has been written out of most accounts of that crime, and Snorton's reconstruction of that erasure connects the historical argument to contemporary patterns of anti-Black and anti-trans violence with real documentary force.
This Amazing Intervention Targets Existing Frameworks
One listener described the book as an "amazing intervention in trans studies," and that word, intervention, is exactly right. This is not a survey or an introduction to the field. It is a targeted disruption of existing frameworks, offered with scholarly rigor and personal investment. The listener who reviewed it specifically for its usefulness to archiving methodology and Black trans studies was responding to exactly the right dimension of the project: the book is partly a demonstration of what archives can and cannot recover, and what that silence itself reveals about how power decides which lives are worth documenting and which are permitted to simply disappear from the record.
Eight Hours That Reward Sustained Attention
At eight hours and fifty-one minutes, the listening experience is substantial. This is genuinely challenging material, and it rewards the kind of attention you bring to a dense academic text rather than the kind you bring to narrative nonfiction. Those who engage with it attentively will find a work of sustained intellectual ambition that opens up the history of race and gender in America in ways that are difficult to un-see afterward. A reviewer described it bluntly as slapping the listener in the face with truth, which captures something accurate about the experience of encountering evidence you did not know existed on a subject you thought you understood.
The book's argument about slavery and gender construction is one that demands repeated engagement. The claim that medical experiments on enslaved Black women provided conceptual foundations for later understandings of gender mutability is supported in detail rather than asserted, and that detail rewards careful listening more than a single pass can fully deliver.
Built on Critical Race Theory and Trans Studies
The book assumes familiarity with the basic frameworks of both critical race theory and trans studies. Listeners without that background will not be lost entirely, but some sections, particularly those engaging with theoretical arguments about gender construction and archival methodology, will move quickly over ground that deserves more time if you are encountering these concepts for the first time. Snorton writes for an academic audience first, and the audiobook format does not substantially change that orientation.
The historical chapters covering slavery and antebellum Black life are among the most accessible and, in terms of revelatory power, the most affecting sections of the full runtime. Listeners should allow themselves time to sit with those passages rather than moving through them at standard background-listening speed, which this material cannot and should not accommodate.
Reorganizes Your Thinking, Once You've Built the Foundation
Scholars and serious readers working at the intersections of race, gender, and American history will find this essential. Anyone engaged with contemporary debates around anti-trans legislation who wants a historical framework for understanding where those pressures originate will find the later chapters particularly useful. This is not the place to start if you are new to either Black studies or trans studies; the book works best as a companion to other foundational texts. But as the kind of audiobook that reorganizes your thinking about an entire field and its constitutive silences, it earns its considerable difficulty many times over.
