On the phone, we commiserate about the heatwave sweeping Europe and Asia. I sense acutely how their practice as both a lawyer and a writer is reflected in the act of communing across (and bringing together) disparate times and places.<\/p>\n
Pride and Prejudices, their new and first individually authored book, depicts different struggles for queer rights with a scope that is at once panoramic and intensely personal.<\/p>\n
In a style typical of creative non-fiction, in which an author is present in the story they’re telling, Yoshida intersperses references to case law with their personal experience.<\/p>\n
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Michael Kirby has described Yoshida’s book as one that will “galvanise” readers. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
The evolving narrative stretches from Oscar Wilde’s persecution to contemporary battles for child care, reproductive rights and trans existence. It includes the author’s memories of coming “fully out of the closet” at 23 to starting a family and becoming pregnant just before the pandemic, in the midst of adopting a masc\/genderqueer identity that left them wondering: “Could I manage nine months in drag?”<\/p>\n
Yoshida is impelled to fight for a more considered recognition of queer lives, and Pride and Prejudices imagines how the law can tell queer stories differently.<\/p>\n
It critiques states, families and communities that disseminate damaging narratives about queer lives as wrong, invalid or dangerous.<\/p>\n
A person’s identity, Yoshida argues, is never just a question of individual personhood. It includes a person’s community, children, battles for housing, bodily autonomy, freedom of movement and health care.<\/p>\n
For Yoshida, describing and making sense of queer experience is a matter not only of safety and survival, but of flourishing, too.<\/p>\n
For many, sharing queer stories is an act “of joy”, they say.<\/p>\n
Kate Rowe’s powerful queer memoir<\/a><\/p>\n From pain to pride, queer trailblazer Kate Rowe shares her survival tips.<\/p>\n Yoshida’s latest book emerged after a conversation with Jennifer Robinson, the Australian lawyer with whom they wrote How Many More Women?<\/p>\n That book investigated how laws around issues like defamation and sexual violence can silence women.<\/p>\n Robinson asked what Yoshida was going to do next.<\/p>\n “Top surgery,” they recall answering.<\/p>\n “It felt like the tide seemed to be turning and trans rights were starting to be curtailed, so I was worried. [Robinson] was saying, you know, you should write about this, you should talk about your journey.”<\/p>\n The idea appealed to Yoshida, who thought sharing their story might help other trans folk.<\/p>\n “I felt, in so many points of my life, I’ve had to research the law and find things where, if I were straight, everything would have been obvious,” they say.<\/p>\n Power in stories<\/p>\n Growing up in Northern Ireland, Yoshida struggled with coming out, a process that began in their mid-teens.<\/p>\n “Ireland’s story is a very hopeful one of change, of the criminalisation of homosexuality until the 90s \u2014 then suddenly, in 2015, you’ve got self-identification for trans people and gay marriage coming in with a referendum.<\/p>\n “The message really is that we need to continue to fight for our legal rights. Because if we don’t, they’re for somebody else to take away.”<\/p>\n “I still read judgements and I can’t perceive the human in what they’re talking about,” Yoshida says.<\/p>\n As an example, they mention the US Supreme Court’s upholding of a Tennessee judgement banning gender-affirming care. Wading through pages of legal minutiae and technical argument, they recall reading only one of the justices “asking questions about the plaintiffs, about the individuals involved”.<\/p>\n