5 Essential Books For Exploring Transgender Identity & Sexuality
Powerful memoirs for trans and gender non-conforming people
Whether it’s the soul of the author or the person reading them, stories open windows into unexplored places. A great book makes even the familiar feel like a new discovery. And a great memoir?
If you’re not ready to take that first step, here’s how to first take a joyful review of where others have been.
5. Trans Power: Own Your Gender
Waterstones Booksellers Description:
In this radical and emotionally raw book, Juno Roche pushes the boundaries of trans representation by redefining ‘trans’ as an identity with its own power and strength, that goes beyond the gender binary.
Through intimate conversations with leading and influential figures in the trans community, such as Kate Bornstein, Travis Alabanza, Josephine Jones, Glamrou and E-J Scott, this book highlights the diversity of trans identities and experiences with regard to love, bodies, sex, race and class, and urges trans people — and the world at large — to embrace a ‘trans’ identity as something that offers empowerment and autonomy.
Powerfully written, and with humour and advice throughout, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of gender and how we identify ourselves.
4. Top to Bottom
Description by Finn the Infinncible:
Top to Bottom is a profound and pioneering memoir. It is the first of its kind to dedicate an entire book to the surgical and emotional process of phalloplasty, from a single trans masculine perspective.
Initially, I planned to include my phalloplasty experience as part of my transgender memoir. However, the further into my journey I traveled, the more I realized that my phalloplasty experience needed a book of its own.
Phalloplasty is an intense and profound journey, which changed me in many unexpected ways. There simply was not enough room in a broader memoir to do the journey justice. Therefore, I turned my lower surgery experience into a book of its own.
By dedicating an entire book to the process, I have been able to dive deeply into this multi-layered experience.
3. Trans: a Memoir
“Six weeks before sex reassignment surgery (SRS), I am obliged to stop taking my hormones. I suddenly feel very differently about my forthcoming operation.”
In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery — a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a serialised national newspaper column. Trans tells of her life to the present moment: a story of growing up, of defining yourself, and of the rapidly changing world of gender politics.
Fresh from university, eager to escape a dead-end job, she launches a career as a writer in a publishing culture dominated by London cliques and still figuring out the impact of the Internet. She navigates the treacherous waters of a world where, even in the liberal and feminist media, transgender identities go unacknowledged, misunderstood or worse. Yet through art, film, music, politics and football, Jacques starts to become the person she had only imagined, and begins the process of transition. Interweaving the personal with the political, her memoir is a powerful exploration of debates that comprise trans politics, issues which promise to redefine our understanding of what it means to be alive.
Revealing, honest, humorous, and self-deprecating, Trans includes an epilogue with Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, in which Jacques and Heti discuss the cruxes of writing and identity.
2. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience? How can we awaken within ourselves desires that make it impossible to settle for anything less than a fulfilling life? Editor adrienne maree brown finds the answer in something she calls “pleasure activism,” a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work.
Drawing on the black feminist tradition, including Audre Lourde’s invitation to use the erotic as power and Toni Cade Bambara’s exhortation that we make the revolution irresistible, the contributors to this volume take up the challenge to rethink the ground rules of activism. Writers including Cara Page of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, Sonya Renee Taylor, founder of This Body Is Not an Apology, and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs cover a wide array of subjects — from sex work to climate change, from race and gender to sex and drugs — creating new narratives about how politics can feel good and how what feels good always has a complex politics of its own.
Building on the success of her popular Emergent Strategy, brown launches a new series of the same name with this volume, bringing readers books that explore experimental, expansive, and innovative ways to meet the challenges that face our world today. Books that find the opportunity in every crisis!
1. Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the 2015 WOMEN’S WAY Book Prize • Goodreads Best of 2014 Semi-Finalist • Books for a Better Life Award Finalist • Lambda Literary Award Finalist • Time Magazine “30 Most Influential People on the Internet” • American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book
In her profound and courageous New York Times bestseller, Janet Mock establishes herself as a resounding and inspirational voice for the transgender community — and anyone fighting to define themselves on their own terms.
With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering readers accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population. Though undoubtedly an account of one woman’s quest for self at all costs, Redefining Realness is a powerful vision of possibility and self-realization, pushing us all toward greater acceptance of one another — and of ourselves — showing as never before how to be unapologetic and real.
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