The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice


Shon Faye - 2021
    Despite making up less than 1% of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarised 'debate', which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system, and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalised people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.

Finding Nevo


Nevo Zisin - 2017
    Nevo was not born in the wrong body. Nevo just wants everyone to catch up with all that Nevo is. Personal, political and passionate, Finding Nevo is an autobiography about gender and everything that comes with it.

Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence


Nancy Manahan - 1985
    In new afterwords, the co-editors reveal how the book came to be and what happened to their lives when, for the first time in history, a lesbian book from a small publisher went mainstream. Each nun in these stories describes her individual and searing path in, or out of, the convent to discover and face the truth of herself. Still myth-shattering, the stories remind us of the courage required to live—and love—in congruence with our authentic selves. "Oblivious to the controversies that surrounded the initial publication of Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, whether they originated within the Catholic Church or the lesbian feminist movement, thousands of readers across the decades have embraced the book and found their lives changed by its message of empowerment." - Joanne E. Passet, Ph.D., Professor of History, Indiana University East

The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance


Matt Ortile - 2020
    Harassed as a kid for his brown skin, accent, and femininity, he believed he could belong in America by marrying a white man and shedding his Filipino identity. This was the first myth he told himself. The Groom Will Keep His Name explores the various tales Ortile spun about what it means to be a Vassar Girl, an American Boy, and a Filipino immigrant in New York looking to build a home.As we meet and mate, we tell stories about ourselves, revealing not just who we are, but who we want to be. Ortile recounts the relationships and whateverships that pushed him to confront his notions of sex, power, and the model minority myth. Whether swiping on Grindr, analyzing DMs, or cruising steam rooms, Ortile brings us on his journey toward radical self-love with intelligence, wit, and his heart on his sleeve.

Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows


Christine BurnsMark Rees - 2018
    From our television screens to the ballot box, transgender people have suddenly become part of the zeitgeist.This apparently overnight emergence, though, is just the latest stage in a long and varied history. The renown of Paris Lees and Hari Nef has its roots in the efforts of those who struggled for equality before them, but were met with indifference – and often outright hostility – from mainstream society.Trans Britain chronicles this journey in the words of those who were there to witness a marginalised community grow into the visible phenomenon we recognise today: activists, film-makers, broadcasters, parents, an actress, a rock musician and a priest, among many others.Here is everything you always wanted to know about the background of the trans community, but never knew how to ask.

We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics


Andrea Abi-Karam - 2020
    Writing in dialogue with emancipatory political movements, the intergenerational writers assembled here imagine an altogether overturned world in poems that pursue the particular and multiple trans relationships to desire, embodiment, housing, sex, ecology, history, pop culture, and the working day.

The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village


Samuel R. Delany - 1988
    Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city's new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.Winner of the 1989 Hugo Award for Non-fictionSamuel R. Delany is the author of numerous science fiction books including Dhalgren, other fiction including The Mad Man, as well as the best-selling nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He lives in New York City and teaches at Temple University. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany as one of the fifty most significant men and women of the past hundred years to change our concept of gayness, and he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to lesbian and gay literature.

Women


Chloe Caldwell - 2014
    The book is an urgent recall of heartbreak, a stark portrait of an identity in crisis.

A Quick & Easy Guide to Queer & Trans Identities


Mady G. - 2019
    A great starting point for anyone curious about queer and trans life, and helpful for those already on their own journeys!

Alec Baldwin Doesn't Love Me & Other Trials from My Queer Life


Michael Thomas Ford - 1997
    An irreverent, insightful, and wickedly funny humor collection that shows just how queer life really is.

How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned about Love and LGBTQ Parenthood


Trystan Reese - 2021
    Immediately, Trystan and Biff took in one-year-old Hailey and three-year-old Lucas, becoming caregivers overnight to two tiny survivors of abuse and neglect.   From this unexpected start, the young couple built a loving marriage and happy home—learning to parent on the job. They adopted Hailey and Lucas, tied the knot, and soon decided to try for a baby that Trystan, who is transgender, would carry. Trystan’s groundbreaking pregnancy attracted media fanfare, and the family welcomed baby Leo in 2017.   In this inspiring memoir, Trystan shares his unique story alongside universal lessons that will help all parents through the trials of raising children. How We Do Family is a refreshing new take on family life for the LGBTQ community and beyond. Through every tough moment and touching memory, Trystan shows that more important than getting things right is doing them with love.

Just One of the Guys?: Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality


Kristen Schilt - 2010
    Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions. Just One of the Guys? sheds new light on this phenomenon by analyzing the unique experiences of transgender men—people designated female at birth whose gender identity is male—on the job.Kristen Schilt draws on in-depth interviews and observational data to show that while individual transmen have varied experiences, overall their stories are a testament to systemic gender inequality. The reactions of coworkers and employers to transmen, Schilt demonstrates, reveal the ways assumptions about innate differences between men and women serve as justification for discrimination. She finds that some transmen gain acceptance—and even privileges—by becoming “just one of the guys,” that some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender, and that other forms of appearance-based discrimination also influence their opportunities. Showcasing the voices of a frequently overlooked group, Just One of the Guys? lays bare the social processes that foster forms of inequality that affect us all.

How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity


Michael CartEmma Donoghue - 2008
    One boy's love of a soldier leads to the death of a stranger. The present takes a bittersweet journey into the past when a man revisits the summer school where he had "an accidental romance." And a forgotten mother writes a poignant letter to the teenage daughter she hasn't seen for fourteen years.Poised between the past and the future are the stories of now. In nontraditional narratives, short stories, and brief graphics, tales of anticipation and regret, eagerness and confusion present distinctively modern views of love, sexuality, and gender identification. Together, they reflect the vibrant possibilities available for young people learning to love others—and themselves—in today's multifaceted and quickly changing world.

When I Knew


Robert Trachtenberg - 2005
    Wong, Arthur Laurents, Simon Doonan, Stephen Fry, Marc Shaiman, and Michael Musto share endearing anecdotes and stories about when they, their families, and everyone else knew they were gay.

Loving in the War Years


Cherríe L. Moraga - 1983
    This new edition—including a new introduction and three new essays—remains a testament of Moraga's coming-of-age as a Chicana and a lesbian at a time when the political merging of those two identities was severely censured.Drawing on the Mexican legacy of Malinche, the symbolic mother of the first mestizo peoples, Moraga examines the collective sexual and cultural wounding suffered by women since the Conquest. Moraga examines her own mestiza parentage and the seemingly inescapable choice of assimilation into a passionless whiteness or uncritical acquiescence to the patriarchal Chicano culture she was raised to reproduce. By finding Chicana feminism and honoring her own sexuality and loyalty to other women of color, Moraga finds a way to claim both her family and her freedom.Moraga's new essays, written with a voice nearly a generation older, continue the project of "loving in the war years," but Moraga's posture is now closer to that of a zen warrior than a street-fighter. In these essays, loving is an extended prayer, where the poet-politica reflects on the relationship between our small individual deaths and the dyings of nations of people (pueblos). Loving is an angry response to the "cultural tyranny" of the mainstream art world and a celebration of the strategic use of "cultural memory" in the creation of an art of resistance.Cherríe Moraga is the co-editor of the classic feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back and the author of The Last Generation. She is Artist-in-Residence at Stanford University.