The No-Nonsense Guide to Sexual Diversity
Vanessa Baird - 2001
In some countries, equal rights have been achieved and progress is being made against discrimination; in others, being gay still incurs the death penalty.This guide examines all the colors of the sexual rainbow, unearths hidden histories, and looks at contributions from medicine and science. It also includes a unique global survey of laws that affect sexual minorities.Vanessa Baird has been co-editor at New Internationalist magazine since 1986. Her previous books include, as compiler and editor, Eye to Eye Women.
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
C. Riley Snorton - 2017
Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives—ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible.Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.
PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
Carol Queen - 1997
PoMo: short for PostModern; in the arts, a movement following after and in direct reaction to Modernism; culturally, an outlook that acknowledges diverse and complex points of view.PoMoSexual: the queer erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation.
You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery
Dara Hoffman-Fox - 2016
Are you wrestling with questions surrounding your gender that just don't seem to go away? Do you want answers to questions about your gender identity, but aren't sure how to get started?In this groundbreaking guide, Dara Hoffman-Fox, LPC--accomplished gender therapist and thought leader whose articles, blogs, and videos have empowered thousands worldwide--helps you navigate your journey of self-discovery in three approachable stages: preparation, reflection, and exploration.In You and Your Gender Identity, you will learn: Why understanding your gender identity is core to embracing your full beingHow to sustain the highs and lows of your journey with resources, connection, and self-careHow to uncover and move through your feelings of fear, loneliness, and doubtWhy it's important to examine your past through the lens of gender explorationHow to discover and begin living as your authentic selfWhat options you have after making your discoveries about your gender identity
Super Late Bloomer: My Early Days in Transition
Julia Kaye - 2018
So when she began her gender transition in 2016, she decided to use her popular webcomic, Up and Out, to process her journey and help others with similar struggles realize they weren’t alone. Julia’s poignant, relatable comics honestly depict her personal ups and downs while dealing with the various issues involved in transitioning—from struggling with self-acceptance and challenging societal expectations, to moments of self-love and joy. Super Late Bloomer both educates and inspires, as Julia faces her difficulties head-on and commits to being wholly, authentically who she was always meant to be
"You're in the Wrong Bathroom!": And 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions about Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People
Laura Erickson-Schroth - 2017
Despite being prolifically covered in the media, much misinformation about the trans community persists. Bringing together the medical, social, psychological, and political aspects of being transgender today in the United States, " You re in the Wrong Bathroom!: And 20 Other Myths About Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People" unpacks the twenty-one most common myths about transgender people. Authors Laura Erickson-Schroth, MD, a psychiatrist, and Laura A. Jacobs, LCSW-R, a psychotherapist, address myths about trans identity ( all trans people are trapped in the wrong body ), sex and relationships ( most trans people do sex work and have HIV ), health and safety ( trans people are mentally ill and therapy can change them ), and history and community ( trans people and feminists don t get along )."
That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation
Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreBenjamin Shepard - 2004
This timely collection of essays by writers such as Patrick Califia, Kate Bornstein, Carol Queen, Charlie Anders, Benjamin Shepard, and others shows what the new queer resistance looks like. Intended as a fistful of rocks to throw at the glass house of Gaylandia, the book challenges the commercialized, commoditized, and hyper objectified view of gay/queer identity projected by the mainstream (straight and gay) media by exploring queer struggles to transform gender, revolutionize sexuality, and build community/family outside of traditional models. Essays include "Dr. Laura, Sit on My Face," "Gay Art Guerrillas," "Legalized Sodomy Is Political Foreplay," and "Queer Parents: An Oxymoron or Just Plain Moronic?"
To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History
Lillian Faderman - 1999
Lillian Faderman persuasively argues that their lesbianism may in fact have facilitated their accomplishments. A book of impeccable research and compelling readability, TO BELIEVE IN WOMEN will be a source of enlightenment for all, and for many a singular source of pride.
Femme in Public
Alok Vaid-Menon - 2017
Femme In Public (2017) is a collection of poetry by nonbinary artist Alok Vaid-Menon. In the author's words it "is a dream of what it could look like to celebrate transfemininity in public – both in ourselves and for the people who desire us (by which I mean: everyone, across time, always)."
Conundrum
Jan Morris - 1974
James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man’s man.Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman.
Conundrum
, one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
Ivan E. CoyoteAnne Fleming - 2011
The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.
The Social Justice Advocate's Handbook: A Guide to Gender
Sam Killermann - 2013
It is a couple hundred pages of gender exploration, social justice how-tos, practical resources, and fun graphics & comics.It offers clear, easily-digested, and practical explanations of one of the most commonly misunderstood things about people. Sam dissects gender using a comprehensive, non-binary toolkit, with a focus on making this subject accessible and enjoyable. All this to help you understand something that is so commonly misunderstood, but something we all think we get: gender.The book helps individuals better understand gender themselves (their gender and others'), and is a great resource for folks who are doing gender education work with others.Because gender is something we all deserve to understand.
Gender: Your Guide: A Gender-Friendly Primer on What to Know, What to Say, and What to Do in the New Gender Culture
Lee Airton - 2018
Gender is now a global conversation, and one that is constantly evolving. More people than ever before are openly living their lives as transgender men or women, and many transgender people are coming out as neither men or women, instead living outside of the binary. Gender is changing, and this change is gaining momentum. We all want to do and say the right things in relation to gender diversity—whether at a job interview, at parent/teacher night, and around the table at family dinners. But where do we begin? From the differences among gender identity, gender expression, and sex, to the use of gender-neutral pronouns like singular they/them, to thinking about your own participation in gender, Gender: Your Guide serves as a complete primer to all things gender. Guided by professor and gender diversity advocate Lee Airton, PhD, you will learn how gender works in everyday life, how to use accurate terminology to refer to transgender, non-binary, and/or gender non-conforming individuals, and how to ask when you aren’t sure what to do or say. It provides you with the information you need to talk confidently and compassionately about gender diversity, whether simply having a conversation or going to bat as an advocate. Just like gender itself, being gender-friendly is a process for all of us. As revolutionary a resource as Our Bodies, Ourselves, Gender: Your Guide invites everyone on board to make gender more flexible and less constricting: a source of more joy, and less harm, for everyone. Let’s get started.
A Murder Over a Girl: Justice, Gender, Junior High
Ken Corbett - 2016
12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and wear makeup and jewelry to school.Profoundly shaken by the news, and unsettled by media coverage that sidestepped the issues of gender identity and of race integral to the case, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial. As visions of victim and perpetrator were woven and unwoven in the theater of the courtroom, a haunting picture emerged not only of the two young teenagers, but also of spectators altered by an atrocity and of a community that had unwittingly gestated a murder. Drawing on firsthand observations, extensive interviews and research, as well as on his decades of academic work on gender and sexuality, Corbett holds each murky facet of this case up to the light, exploring the fault lines of memory and the lacunae of uncertainty behind facts. Deeply compassionate, and brimming with wit and acute insight, A Murder Over a Girl is a riveting and stranger-than-fiction drama of the human psyche.
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
Kai Cheng Thom - 2016
Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who live in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, Dearly blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, the protagonist joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.