Books
Keio Yoshida
Pride and Prejudices
Keio Yoshida’s Pride and Prejudices: Queer Lives and the Law is a personal gut punch into how queer lives intersect with the law. A trans human rights lawyer and barrister, Yoshida’s legal activism and lived experience lays bare the messy reality of navigating law and identity. From their coming out as a lesbian in religiously and socially conservative Northern Ireland, through their pathway to parenthood across multiple European countries, to their gender transition, Yoshida gives us the harsh truth: LGBTQIA+ rights and protections are hard-won and never guaranteed.
Yoshida dissects how international law reforms spark progress but also shows how precarious and vulnerable to political whims that progress is. The legal system, which should be a shield to protect queer lives, is often used as a sword against us. Case in point? Trump’s United States, where “free speech” is twisted to override anti-discrimination laws, ban books with queer folk and erase LGBTQIA+ education in schools, and where so-called gender-critical feminists weaponise trans human rights. Yoshida states, “the enemy of feminism is male violence, male gendered oppression of women, the patriarchy, not trans people”.
There are no dusty law books in sight as Yoshida weaves personal stories through their legal analysis, making complex legal concepts easy to grasp. By centring queer lives – whether navigating the challenges of bodily autonomy and gender-affirming care or dealing with the cost and hoop-jumping of queer parenthood – Yoshida gives us the human scale of the legal system and the lived reality of the struggle for recognition, safety and dignity for queer people worldwide. They make the case that legal wins are just the start. The real battle, Yoshida writes, is to “turn hearts and minds away from prejudice and towards pride”.
Despite legal setbacks and social backlash, Yoshida is defiantly hopeful. While there is still no dedicated and binding convention for queer rights in international human rights law, the Northern Ireland of their youth is now one of the most legally progressive states in the world for queers.
Pride and Prejudices is a call to action: to safeguard queer rights, ensure bodily autonomy and remove medical gatekeeping, enshrine the right to self-expression, dismantle discriminatory laws, protect rainbow families and fight for trans rights. Yoshida’s radical call: move beyond mere non-discrimination towards positive affirmation of queer lives. Their message? “It gets and will get better”, but only if we keep living our lives and living our truths, and only if we keep fighting with courage and compassion.
Scribe, 256pp, $32.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 26, 2025 as "Pride and Prejudices".
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