Hello and happy Sunday. I feel like this weekend has been great reading-wise; I posted some book recommendations yesterday, I finished a book and I started a new one that I’m really enjoying. The book I finished yesterday is an ARC of Pidgeon Pagonis’ memoir, Nobody Needs to Know. I got it via NetGalley in exchange for a review, so I’d like to thank them, the author, and the publisher for this opportunity.

Even though this is a short book, I took my sweet time reading it because right from the start I felt like I wouldn’t be able to consume it all in one sitting. Pidgeon Pagonis is an intersex activist, and I am very happy that thanks to their book, I now know who they are and everything they have done, are doing and will continue to do when it comes to the rights of intersex people.

I think this is the first book I’ve read that centers around an intersex person, and I know that it is the first written by one that I read. Reading this memoir was like reading three books about three different people, from them struggling to follow the rules society has established for girls and women, to realizing and coming to terms with the fact that they’d been lied to about their body and their identity, to advocating for the rights of intersex people and against unnecessary procedures that are ultimately harmful.

The way that the author narrates on their experiences and reflects on what they meant and how they impacted their life is something I don’t think I’d read before. I especially admire the way they talk about their parents, especially their mom. Pagonis always talks about their mother from a place of love, and I assume, forgiveness because she, too, was in a way lied to by the doctors. I cried a few times reading this book, especially towards the end when Pagonis described some encounters with their mom. I don’t usually read the acknowledgements in books, but I read them in this one and I also cried. This book has now made it to my mental list of “musts,” and I will for sure recommend it.