Quick Take
- Narration: C. Riley Snorton reads their own text with the measured authority of a scholar who has lived with this material for years, which no hired narrator could replicate.
- Themes: race and gender, trans history, archival recovery
- Mood: Scholarly and careful, with passages of genuine emotional weight
- Verdict: Dense, important academic work that rewards patient listeners with a framework for thinking about Blackness and transness that is not available anywhere else.
I finished this one over the course of a week, mostly in the early mornings before the day got loud. That was the right pace for it. C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides is not a book that yields easily to distracted listening. It is an academic text in the best sense: careful, sourced, and building an argument that requires you to hold multiple threads in mind simultaneously. One reviewer described finishing it in the early hours of Trans Day of Visibility, and that timing felt almost too fitting. This is a book about moments of visibility and deliberate erasure, and it asks you to sit with both.
The author narrates their own work, which matters here more than it usually does. There is a particular quality to hearing a scholar speak their own argument, a precision in the pauses, a sense of which sentences carry more weight than others, that a hired narrator simply cannot fake. Snorton’s reading voice is clear and controlled, academic without being cold. Some listeners will find the density demanding, but the payoff is a reading experience that feels like intellectual partnership rather than passive consumption.
Our Take on Black on Both Sides
The book’s animating project is to recover what Christine Jorgensen’s celebrity obscured: the existence of other mid-century trans narratives, specifically Black trans narratives, whose erasure has shaped how trans identity gets understood and represented. Snorton traces intersections between Blackness and transness from the mid-19th century to contemporary anti-Black and anti-trans legislation, drawing on an archive that includes medical records, legal documents, literary texts, and newspaper accounts.
The chapters on medical experiments conducted on enslaved Black women are among the most difficult in the book and among the most important. Snorton argues that slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the conceptual foundations for understanding gender as mutable, a lineage that trans studies has not sufficiently reckoned with. The final chapter on Phillip DeVine, murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, brings that historical argument into tragic proximity with the present. A reviewer described this as a book that slaps you in the face with the truth, and that is not wrong, though Snorton’s method is more careful than violent. The force comes from the evidence rather than rhetoric.
Why Listen to Black on Both Sides
The author narration is the strongest argument for the audio format here. Snorton controls the pacing of complex paragraphs in ways that clarify structure without simplifying argument. For listeners who find academic prose easier to follow when heard rather than read, this is a genuine advantage. The eight hours and fifty-one minutes require sustained attention, but reviewers consistently describe returning to the text and finding new connections, which suggests the material rewards re-listening as much as rereading.
What to Watch For in Black on Both Sides
This is scholarly work, and it reads like it. Listeners expecting personal narrative, accessible pop history, or a straightforward chronological account will find themselves in different terrain. The methodology involves archival interpretation, which means Snorton spends time establishing what the evidence can and cannot support. That rigor is part of the book’s integrity, but it slows the pace for listeners expecting more propulsive storytelling. The appendices on Black literary texts expressing what Snorton calls Black men’s access to the female within are some of the most intellectually rewarding sections but require patience with close reading of historical texts.
Who Should Listen to Black on Both Sides
Essential for anyone working in trans studies, Black studies, or the intersection of both. Also valuable for historians of medicine, scholars of the antebellum period, and readers who want to understand the historical roots of contemporary anti-trans and anti-Black legislation. Not the entry point for a general audience with no prior reading in either field; the book assumes familiarity with academic discourse even when it does not require extensive background knowledge. Listeners who want an accessible introduction to trans history would be better served starting elsewhere before returning to this.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this audiobook accessible to listeners without a background in gender or trans studies?
Partially. Snorton writes with care and defines key terms, but the text assumes a reader who is comfortable with academic argument and literary analysis. Listeners new to trans studies will benefit more from some prior reading before tackling this.
Why does the author narrate their own work, and does it improve the listening experience?
Yes, substantially. Snorton controls emphasis, pacing, and the weight given to individual arguments in ways that reflect scholarly intent. Hearing the author read their own close readings of historical texts adds a layer of interpretive clarity that a hired narrator would not provide.
How does the book handle the story of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena?
With care and historical rigor. Snorton uses DeVine’s story to demonstrate how the erasure of Black victims from dominant trans narratives has distorted the history of trans violence. The chapter is sobering and treated with respect for the complexity of the archive.
Is this an atheist or anti-religion text given its LGBTQ+ Studies genre tag?
No. The book is a work of Black trans history and critical theory. It does engage with the antebellum church’s role in justifying slavery, but that is incidental to its central argument about the intersections of race and trans identity.
