This is a reading guide for trans and non-binary adults, not a ranking. Every book here is written, co-written or edited by someone who is publicly trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming, in their own words or in an interview or publisher's biography listed in the entry's sources. For each book you get who wrote it, what it is, why it might matter to you, criticism where there is some, and content notes.
That rule is narrower than most book prizes. The Lambda Literary Awards, the best-known LGBTQ+ book prizes in the United States, are open to authors of any gender identity. They added a transgender category in 1997, and by 2013, according to an op-ed in The Advocate, half of that category's winners had been books written or edited mainly by cis authors. The same piece noted that 2013 was the first year the trans fiction prize was both presented by and accepted by trans authors.
Identities and pronouns are given the way the authors state them. Some writers describe themselves with words from their own language or culture, such as travesti in Argentina and Brazil, and we use those words the way they do. Some people have changed their names since their books came out; we use the current name, and older editions may carry an earlier one.
Years are the first publication of the original. We do not link to shops. Content notes come from reviews and publisher descriptions, so treat them as a starting point, not a guarantee.
Novels
Fiction by trans and non-binary writers, from a 1993 working-class classic to recent literary, historical and speculative novels. Two of them first came out from small presses before bigger publishers picked them up.
Stone Butch Blues (1993, novel)
Made by: Written by Leslie Feinberg and first published in 1993 by Firebrand Books in the United States, later by Alyson Books, and finally as a 20th anniversary author's edition that Feinberg prepared in the last days of hir life. Feinberg identified as an "anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist" and preferred the pronouns she/zie and her/hir.
Jess Goldberg grows up working class and Jewish in Buffalo, New York, a masculine kid growing into a butch in the years before Stonewall. Jess finds the bars where butches, femmes and drag queens make a world together, and finds factory work, union organising and love.
Jess also meets relentless violence and contempt from police, bosses, doctors and other men with power. Across the decades, the novel follows Jess's search for a way to live in a body and a gender that fit, in a world that punishes every option. Feinberg called it "a lesbian novel and a transgender novel." In German, it is published by Querverlag as Stone Butch Blues, translated by Claudia Brusdeylins.
Why it matters. It has been sold by the hundreds of thousands and passed hand to hand, including inside prisons. June Thomas, writing in Slate, said Feinberg did more than any other individual to change how lesbian and bisexual feminists thought and talked about butch and femme identities and trans issues. It holds working-class politics, butch life and trans life in one story without asking you to pick one, and the New York Public Library places Feinberg at the front of the trans political movement of the 1990s.
Worth knowing. This is a hard book: Slate's June Thomas called it "no happy-clappy feelgood fest," and a second Slate critic found some dialogue "a little bit hokey." Writers refer to Jess differently (Slate uses she, the New York Public Library uses ze), which says something about how the book resists one label. Feinberg banned film adaptations and refused new commercial contracts for it.
Content notes: sexual assault, police brutality, homophobic and transphobic violence, antisemitism, a deliberately caused workplace injury, dehumanising treatment by doctors
Nevada (2013, novel)
Made by: Written by Imogen Binnie. First published in the United States in 2013 by Topside Press, a small, now-defunct press focused on literature by and for trans people, and reissued in 2022 by MCD x FSG Originals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) with a new afterword. Binnie is a trans woman and has said she wanted "a book about trans women that took our experiences seriously."
Maria Griffiths is nearly thirty, works in a used bookstore in New York City, and spends most of her life inside her own anxious head. After a breakup she takes her girlfriend's car and drives across the country.
In Nevada she meets James, a young man who is only beginning to wonder whether he might not be a man at all. He reminds Maria of her younger self, and she appoints herself his awkward trans role model. It is a road novel less interested in where the road goes than in the lies people tell themselves.
Why it matters. Nevada is a trans novel in which nobody transitions on the page: in her afterword, Binnie says she cut that part on purpose because the in-between phase is what fascinates people who never have to go through it. Critic Stephanie Burt wrote that it seemed to be the first book-length realist novel about trans women "not only written by one of us but written for us." Readers kept it circulating for years, and Torrey Peters says it shaped her worldview.
Worth knowing. Looking back for the reissue, Binnie told Them that she sees in the book a younger version of herself, a person who "lived with guilt and shame", and that she has grown a lot since. Maria's long, anxious inner monologue is the engine of the book, so readers looking for a plot-driven road trip may find it slow.
Content notes: drug use (heroin), depression and dissociation, frank talk about sex and sexuality
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017, novel)
Made by: Written by Andrea Lawlor and first published in 2017 by Rescue Press in the United States; reissued by Vintage (Penguin Random House) in 2019. Lawlor is non-binary and uses they/them; they have described their gender as "trans-ish" and said "transmasculine works for me."
It is 1993, and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town buzzing with politics and parties. He studies queer theory, makes zines, has a lesbian best friend and a busy dating life. He also has a secret: he is a shapeshifter who can change his body at will.
Moving between the Riot Grrrl scene and gay leather culture, from Iowa City to San Francisco, Paul lives as Paul and as Polly, looking for love, sex and a community that will see him.
Why it matters. If your gender has never sat still, Paul is a fantasy of total flexibility played for pleasure rather than pain. Lawlor told the Guardian that queer and trans cultural heritage is about putting pleasure, self-knowledge, art and humour first, and the book lives that out. It is also a precise, funny portrait of early 1990s queer life that does not look away from AIDS.
Worth knowing. Paul is not always likable: the Guardian's reviewer notes he treats his friends badly and commits petty theft, and Lawlor agrees he is unkind in many ways. The same review calls it a novel about sex, "lots of it."
Content notes: explicit sex, AIDS, homophobia and racism, internalised homophobia
Confessions of the Fox (2018, novel)
Made by: Written by Jordy Rosenberg and first published in June 2018 by One World (Penguin Random House) in the United States. Rosenberg, a professor of English, is trans (he speaks "as a trans person" in an interview with Vol. 1 Brooklyn) and his publisher's bio uses he.
Jack Sheppard and Edgeworth Bess were the most notorious thieves, jailbreakers and lovers of 18th-century London. Reeling from heartbreak, a scholar named Dr. Voth discovers a long-lost manuscript that claims to be their true confessions. In it, Jack is a trans man, and Bess, a sex worker, is the daughter of a Lascar sailor.
Voth annotates the manuscript in footnotes that grow into a parallel trans story of his own. Is it history or a hoax? The novel mixes a caper, a love story, prison breaks and an academic comedy.
Why it matters. Rosenberg writes a trans man into a real London legend and makes the case that trans people have always been in history, even when archives leave them out. Beneath the bawdy, witty surface, the Guardian's reviewer found "a subdued and hard-won account of how it feels to change gender." It is also angry, in a useful way, about policing, prisons and who gets to own the past. It was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Worth knowing. The Guardian's reviewer, while admiring it, called it a "bumpier read" than earlier queer historical novels, full of deliberate anachronisms and "a lot of progressive political point-scoring." The footnotes and pastiche are the point, but they ask for patience.
Content notes: explicit sex, police and prison violence, an abusive master, sex work
Freshwater (2018, novel)
Made by: Written by Akwaeke Emezi and first published in February 2018 by Grove Press in the United States. Emezi, an Igbo and Tamil writer born and raised in Nigeria, describes themself as a "nonbinary trans and plural person" and their publisher's bio uses they.
Ada is born in Nigeria with, as the book puts it, one foot on the other side. She is an ogbanje, a spirit child in Igbo cosmology, and the spirits who share her body narrate much of the story as "we". Emezi is clear that Ada is not possessed: the voices are sides of a single, plural self.
When Ada moves to the United States for college, a traumatic event wakes the fiercest of these selves, who take over her body and her choices. The novel follows the struggle for control between Ada and the beings who live in her, and her search for a way to be whole. In Spanish, it is published by consonni as Agua dulce (2021), translated by Arrate Hidalgo.
Why it matters. Emezi calls it an autobiographical novel, "a breath away from being a memoir," and has said that Western mental-health frameworks did not help them. The book reads a life, including gender and the body, through Igbo cosmology instead, which may land for anyone whose sense of self never fit the categories on offer. In 2019 it made Emezi the first non-binary trans author longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Worth knowing. Several reviews read the book mainly as a story about mental illness, while Emezi frames it through Igbo spirituality, so expect that tension in the coverage. After the Women's Prize longlisting, Emezi said they are not a woman and, in 2020, declined to submit future books after the prize asked about their "sex as defined by law".
Content notes: sexual assault, self-harm, disordered eating, heavy drinking, a suicide attempt
Little Fish (2018, novel)
Made by: Written by Casey Plett and published in 2018 by Arsenal Pulp Press in Canada. Plett is trans; she began writing about trans lives as a McSweeney's columnist in 2010, just after she transitioned.
It is the dead of winter in Winnipeg, and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. After her grandmother dies, a distant family friend tells her that her grandfather, a devout Mennonite farmer, might have been transgender himself.
Wendy dismisses it at first. But the following weeks bring blow after blow, to her job, her housing and her circle of friends, and she finds herself aching to understand who he really was and what the culture that shaped and rejected her took from them both.
Why it matters. It is a novel about trans women's friendships and everyday survival, told from the inside. Quill & Quire's reviewer wrote that Plett centres transness rather than downplaying it and honours "a loosely held trans culture." Meredith Russo said she had never felt as seen by a book. The grandfather thread asks how people lived before there were words for them. It won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and a Lambda Literary Award.
Worth knowing. Plett has chosen not to say which parts of the novel come from her own life, so the story is read on its own terms rather than as a confession. The warmth is real, but this is a heavy, wintry book.
Content notes: a suicide, sex work, heavy drinking, transphobic aggression and violence, misgendering, grief
The Thirty Names of Night (2020, novel)
Made by: Written by Zeyn Joukhadar, a Syrian American author, and published in 2020 by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster) in the United States. Joukhadar speaks of himself as "a trans person of color"; his own website bio uses both he and they.
Five years after a suspicious fire killed his mother, an ornithologist, a closeted Syrian American trans boy in New York has shed his birth name but not yet found a new one. He cares for his grandmother, avoids his neighbourhood masjid, his sister and his best friend, and his mother's ghost visits him every evening.
The only time he feels free is at night, painting murals in the old Manhattan neighbourhood once called Little Syria. There he finds the journal of Laila Z, a Syrian American artist who vanished more than sixty years earlier. Her story, told alongside his, uncovers queer and trans lives in his own community and a rare bird tied to his mother's past.
Why it matters. For trans readers from Arab communities, it offers something rare: a story in which being trans and belonging to a Syrian American family and neighbourhood are part of the same history, not a choice between them. Joukhadar has said that much of the novel is about queer and trans people fighting to see themselves as sacred. It won the 2021 Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.
Worth knowing. The publisher's copy calls the narrator a trans boy and Kirkus calls him a trans man, while Joukhadar describes him as a non-binary person who exists outside any framework that would make him readable to the cis people around him. The book holds both. It is lyrical and slow-building rather than plot-driven.
Content notes: grief and a parent's death in a fire, homophobia and other prejudice, being closeted, distress about his body
Detransition, Baby (2021, novel)
Made by: Written by Torrey Peters and first published in January 2021 by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in the United States. Peters is a trans woman; in an interview with The Rumpus she describes the comma in the title as "a painful knife's edge that you walk as a trans woman."
Reese is a trans woman in her thirties who has scraped together what, in the publisher's words, previous generations of trans women could only dream of: an ordinary, comfortable life. The only thing missing is a child. Then her girlfriend Amy detransitioned and became Ames, the relationship fell apart, and Reese slid into a self-destructive pattern of sleeping with married men.
Ames is not happy either. When his boss and lover Katrina, a cis woman, finds out she is pregnant with his child and is not sure she wants to keep it, he wonders whether the three of them could raise the baby together. The novel moves back and forth in time to show how they got here. In French, it is published by Libertalia as Detransition, Baby (2022), translated by Lena Lambla-Kerveillant.
Why it matters. Reviewing it for Vox, Emily St. James called it one of a handful of novels by trans people from a major publisher and one of very few to describe trans women's inner lives. It is written with trans readers in mind: funny, messy and unflattering when it wants to be. Peters writes about trans women of the same generation having to raise and teach each other, and she handles a detransition story without turning Ames into a talking point.
Worth knowing. When the book was longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction, an online open letter attacked Peters's nomination; the prize publicly condemned the attack and many authors backed her. On the book itself, St. James felt the dialogue sometimes clangs and that Katrina is less fully drawn than Reese and Ames.
Content notes: sex with controlling and often married men, infidelity, self-destructive behaviour, transphobia, an unplanned pregnancy and whether to continue it
Light from Uncommon Stars (2021, novel)
Made by: Written by Ryka Aoki and published in September 2021 by Tor Books (Macmillan) in the United States. Aoki, who is trans, grew up in Southern California's San Gabriel Valley, the child of Japanese American parents.
Shizuka Satomi is a legendary violin teacher who bargained with Hell for her music: she must deliver seven souls. She has delivered six. Katrina Nguyen, a young queer trans runaway and self-taught violinist who is running out of last resorts, could be the seventh.
Then Shizuka meets Lan Tran, a retired starship captain and interstellar refugee who runs a doughnut shop with her family. Set in the Asian American San Gabriel Valley, the novel braids music, found family, immigrant life, science fiction and a slow romance between women.
Why it matters. It takes transphobia seriously without making pain the whole story. Reactor's reviewer describes it as a love letter to music, immigrant communities and trans women of colour, especially at the start of their transition. Aoki told NBC News that if she had had a book like this growing up, "I would have had heroes." It is also simply a warm, strange, genre-mixing novel with three Asian American women at its centre.
Worth knowing. In Locus, Caren Gussoff Sumption praised its women but found the male characters two-dimensional "not-women" and felt the book became "much too sweet" for the weight of its stakes. Reactor's reviewer, by contrast, called it one of the best speculative novels she had read.
Content notes: transphobic and racist violence, a young trans character doing cam work to survive, bargains involving souls and Hell
Memoir and essays
Lives told by the people who lived them, and essays that argue with the world. Some of these authors are famous and some are not; what they share is that nobody else is telling their story for them.
Gender Outlaw (1994, essays)
Made by: Written by Kate Bornstein; first published in the US by Routledge, with a revised edition from Vintage in 2016. On their own site, Bornstein describes more than thirty years of writing about "what we now call nonbinary gender", being neither man nor woman; the publisher's bio uses she.
Part theory, part autobiography, part performance, Gender Outlaw argues that gender is something culture makes, not a natural fact that sorts everyone into two kinds. The book opens: "I know I'm not a man… and I've come to the conclusion that I'm probably not a woman, either." From there Bornstein mixes cultural criticism, personal history, dialogue and a full play, Hidden: A Gender, asking hard questions about identity, orientation and desire with a lot of wit.
Why it matters. Bornstein wrote a whole book from outside the binary decades before "nonbinary" was a common word, and did it with humour rather than apology. If most trans writing you have read is about arriving somewhere, this one is about refusing to choose. Kirkus noted that it sparks debate without putting readers on the defensive.
Worth knowing. It is a 1994 book; the 2016 edition adds a new introduction by the author. Bornstein has also drawn anger from some trans people, both for refusing to identify as a man or a woman and for past comments about women-only spaces, for which Bornstein apologised to activist Riki Wilchins, as Jacqueline Rose recounts in the London Review of Books (2016).
Content notes: frank discussion of sex and of transition, transphobia
Whipping Girl (2007, essays)
Made by: Written by Julia Serano; published in the US by Seal Press, with a second edition in 2016 and a third in 2024. Serano, a biologist, writer and musician, writes from her own experience as a trans woman, as the subtitle says.
A collection of essays arguing that the hostility trans women face is rooted not only in transphobia but in sexism, and in a culture that treats femininity itself as lesser. Serano mixes her own experience with research to take on the media's stereotypes of trans women, the biology versus socialisation debate, and the exclusion of trans women from parts of the feminist movement. The book gave many readers new vocabulary, including [[transmisogyny|trans-misogyny]]. Serano's website lists a French translation, Manifeste d'une femme trans et autres textes (Éditions Cambourakis, 2020), translated by Noémie Grunenwald.
Why it matters. If you have felt that the contempt aimed at you was about femininity as much as about being trans, this book explains why. Serano has said she was writing the book she wished she had had as a teenager. It is often taught as an introduction to trans issues, and it treats femininity, in anyone, as something worth defending rather than apologising for.
Worth knowing. Publishers Weekly found the writing "dense at times". In 2016 Serano told BuzzFeed News that she wrote as a white, middle-class, able-bodied trans person, and that the book does not cover the experiences of more marginalised trans people. The third edition keeps the same text with a few clarifying edits and a new afterword.
Content notes: transphobic and sexist media stereotypes, discussion of sexuality
Redefining Realness (2014, memoir)
Made by: Written by Janet Mock; first published in the US by Atria Books (Simon & Schuster). Mock describes herself on her own site as a trans woman of colour, and presents the book as the first memoir by a young trans woman.
Janet Mock's first memoir is a coming-of-age story about what her site calls her "unconventional girlhood in Honolulu, Dallas and Oakland". She writes about family, school, bullying, first loves, money, and the time she spent doing sex work on the streets of Honolulu, and about the women around her who showed her how to survive. She keeps stepping back from her own story to connect it to the wider situation of trans women of colour in the United States.
Why it matters. Publishers Weekly singled out its "political bite": Mock refuses the apolitical shape the trans memoir often had, and uses her life to talk about race, class and survival. If you are a trans woman of colour, or grew up without money or a safety net, this is a book that puts a life like yours at the centre rather than in a footnote. It debuted on the New York Times best seller list.
Worth knowing. Publishers Weekly found the prose of the early chapters "ill-fitting", though the book grows more confident as it goes. The scholar Julian Kevon Glover (Souls, 2016) argued that the media attention given to Mock and Laverne Cox rests partly on respectability politics, at the expense of trans women of colour whose stories look different. Mock followed it with a second memoir, Surpassing Certainty (2017).
Content notes: sexual assault, bullying, abuse, sex work
Trans Like Me (2017, essays)
Made by: Written by CN Lester; first published in the UK by Virago (subtitled A Journey for All of Us), then in the US by Seal Press in 2018 (subtitled Conversations for All of Us). Lester is a British trans activist, academic and musician who uses they/them pronouns; a 2011 PinkNews interview introduced them as genderqueer, and the New York Times described Lester as identifying as non-binary.
A collection of essays that takes the loudest public stories about trans people and turns them inside out: how the media words its coverage, how the parenting of gender-variant children gets portrayed, what feminist and LGBTQ movements have made of trans people, and where the pronoun "they" comes from (Lester finds it as far back as Shakespeare). Each topic is threaded through Lester's own experience of working out their gender.
Why it matters. It is a British non-binary writer's calm, well-researched take on the debates, useful for your own thinking and for the people around you who keep asking the same questions. Juliet Jacques praised how it breaks down myths about trans people and politics "with clarity and calm", and Susan Stryker called it an insider's guide for the uninitiated.
Worth knowing. It was written in the mid-2010s and engages with the debates of that moment (the Caitlyn Jenner coverage among them), so its examples come from that time.
Amateur (2018, memoir)
Made by: Written by Thomas Page McBee; published in the US by Scribner and in the UK by Canongate. McBee is a trans man: his own site notes that while reporting the book he became the first transgender man to fight at Madison Square Garden.
After his transition, Thomas Page McBee noticed how differently the world treated him as a man, and how often men seemed to want to fight him. So he took up boxing. The book follows months of training in Manhattan gyms toward a charity match at Madison Square Garden in 2015, and uses that training to ask why masculinity and violence are so tangled together in America. Along the way he talks to researchers about how boys learn to be men, and looks hard at his own new habits, from the way his voice now silences a meeting to the anger he feels rising in his fists.
Why it matters. The subject is masculinity itself, not only his path into it. McBee is honest about what changed when strangers began reading him as a man, including the unearned presumption of competence, and about not wanting to become the kind of man he had feared. As he puts it: "I did not want to become a real man … I was fighting for something better." It was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Wellcome Book Prize.
Worth knowing. In The New Republic, Jo Livingstone found that the reporter's approach gives the book "a heavy flavor of conclusion", and worried that this style of trans memoir risks treating transness as something to explain to cis readers, while crediting McBee for turning that anthropological eye on masculinity instead.
Content notes: boxing and street violence, references to childhood abuse, being outed without consent
I'm Afraid of Men (2018, memoir)
Made by: Written by Vivek Shraya; published in Canada by Penguin Canada. Shraya is a South Asian Canadian trans artist who works across music, literature, visual art and film; her publisher's bio uses she.
A very short book of autobiographical pieces about how masculinity was imposed on Shraya as a child and what it did to her. She moves through adolescence and adulthood: the harassment, the pressure to fit in, and the ways she learned to camouflage herself by changing how she walked, dressed and behaved in public. The book traces her path "from camouflage to a riot of colour", and asks how we might imagine gender, and what men expect of each other, differently.
Why it matters. It names a fear that many trans women and femmes carry and rarely see written down, and traces where that fear was learned. Kirkus called it "a book to carry with you" and noted how rarely a trans woman of colour's perspective gets room in these conversations. It was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award.
Worth knowing. It is under 100 pages: a series of sharp memories and reflections rather than a full memoir or a study of masculinity.
Content notes: harassment, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia
Sissy (2019, memoir)
Made by: Written by Jacob Tobia; published in the US by G.P. Putnam's Sons. Tobia's publisher bio describes them as a gender nonconforming writer, producer and performer from Raleigh, North Carolina, who uses [[they-them|they/them]] pronouns.
Jacob Tobia grew up in North Carolina wanting both Barbies and bugs, in a household with little room for a femininity that, as they write, came as naturally as their masculinity. The book follows them from preschool, where gender was policed hard, through church (the handbell choir was one of the few places they could let loose), high school friendships and Duke University, where they began to claim their femininity openly. It carries on into activism, the United Nations and the White House, mixing painful memories with a lot of jokes.
Why it matters. If you never fit either box and were told so early, Tobia is writing to you. Kirkus described it as a coming-of-gender story about a trans identity that refuses to be contained within the binary. It also spends real time on faith and family, including Tobia's relationship with their parents and with the church they grew up in.
Worth knowing. Kirkus called it funny and intelligent but said the author "sometimes overdoes the self-congratulation and snarkiness".
Content notes: bullying, gender policing in childhood, rejection by a church community
Beyond the Gender Binary (2020, essays)
Made by: Written by Alok Vaid-Menon, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky; published in the US by Penguin Workshop in the Pocket Change Collective series. Alok uses they/them pronouns and has been described as a gender non-conforming South Asian American writer, performer and speaker.
A short, pocket-sized book with one clear argument: gender is "a story, not just a word", a flexible and creative form of expression rather than two fixed boxes. Drawing on personal experience, Alok takes apart the social definitions that decide how people are allowed to look and live, and asks readers to see gender "not in black and white, but in full color". It is as much a call for self-expression and more inclusive love as it is an argument.
Why it matters. You can read it in an hour, which is the point: it is a calm, clear answer to questions [[nonbinary|non-binary]] and gender non-conforming people get asked constantly, and it is easy to hand to someone else. Alok has said that people accept gender non-conforming people "as long as we are entertaining them". This book asks to be taken seriously instead.
Worth knowing. It is 64 pages and published for readers aged 12 and up, so it works best as a starting point or a gift rather than a deep dive.
Faltas (2022, memoir)
Made by: Written by Cecilia Gentili; the first title from LittlePuss Press, a small US press. Gentili, who called herself a trans woman, grew up in Argentina and became a prominent New York advocate for trans people, sex workers and undocumented immigrants. She died in February 2024.
Faltas covers the first seventeen years of Gentili's life in Gálvez, a small city in Argentina's Santa Fe province. It is written as eight letters, each to someone who shaped those years: her mother, her grandmother, her father's mistress, a childhood friend, the town midwife, even her abuser's daughter. Running through the letters is the story of being groomed and abused through childhood and adolescence by an older man in town, and of a hometown that knew and did not stop it. The title is the Spanish word for mistakes, from a verb meaning to lack.
Why it matters. Gentili refuses to be only a victim in her own story. The letters are funny, sharp and morally complicated, and she said she "wanted the feeling of everything happening at the same time": pain, joy, comedy and love side by side. It won the Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award at the American Library Association's 2023 Stonewall Book Awards.
Worth knowing. This is a hard book: the abuse is at its centre, and Gentili is frank about sex and about how complicated her feelings were. She died in February 2024, about sixteen months after it came out.
Content notes: child sexual abuse and grooming, rape, transphobia, colourism, explicit sexual content
Pageboy (2023, memoir)
Made by: Written by Elliot Page; published in the US by Flatiron Books. Page is an actor and producer who came out as trans in 2020, writing: "I am trans, my pronouns are he/they."
Elliot Page looks back on growing up between divorced parents, acting professionally from the age of nine, and becoming famous after Juno while hiding who he was. The book is deliberately nonlinear, "because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear", and jumps between memories: teenage parties, crushes, family tension, relationships, film sets and the press. Its focus is less celebrity gossip than what it cost him to grow up, and become famous, while pushing his real self down.
Why it matters. It is a trans man's memoir from someone with a huge public profile, and it does not tidy his life up for a mainstream audience. Page is candid about shame, the years in the closet, and a columnist hinting at his sexuality just as Juno made him famous. Kirkus notes that he knows not everyone who wants to transition has his resources, and that he wrote it because representation matters.
Worth knowing. Reviews were mixed. In an AP review carried by the San Diego Union-Tribune, Donna Edwards said it "didn't live up to the hype", but found that this humanises its subject. Kirkus warns anyone looking for a Hollywood tell-all to look elsewhere: many people are left unnamed.
Content notes: sexual assault, bullying, abuse from family and peers, homophobic slurs and verbal abuse, self-harm, disordered eating, a stalker
History and non-fiction
Books about trans history, politics and culture, written by trans and non-binary people. None of them is a medical book, and our summaries stay away from medicine too.
Transgender Warriors (1996, non-fiction)
Made by: Written by Leslie Feinberg, author of the novel Stone Butch Blues; published in the US by Beacon Press. In a 2006 interview Feinberg said "I am a butch lesbian, a transgender lesbian". Feinberg died in 2014.
Feinberg set out to show that people who crossed the boundaries of sex and gender have always existed, gathering stories from many centuries and places, including Joan of Arc, whose execution Feinberg ties to her wearing men's clothing. The history is grounded in Feinberg's own experience of living outside gender norms, and the book includes profiles of contemporary trans people, among them writers, artists, historians and bodybuilders, speaking in their own words.
Why it matters. Kirkus called it "a much-needed project" in 1996. Feinberg uses "transgender" to include "everyone who challenges the boundaries of sex and gender", so butches, drag queens and people who never had a word for themselves all belong in the same story. It was written by a working-class activist rather than an academic, and its politics are front and centre.
Worth knowing. Kirkus found it readable but weighed down by repetition and "excessive polemics", and felt it sees only oppression and misses the playfulness of gender. Early pre-publication listings gave the subtitle as ending "to RuPaul"; the published title ends "to Dennis Rodman".
Content notes: historical persecution and executions, violence and harassment in the author's life
Transgender History (2008, non-fiction)
Made by: Written by Susan Stryker; published in the US by Seal Press, with a revised second edition in 2017 and a third edition in 2026. Stryker is a historian and founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly; The Advocate has described her as "herself a transgender scholar".
A compact history of trans life in the United States since the nineteenth century, readable without any background. Stryker walks through the major movements, writings and events, explains key terms in sidebars, and adds short biographies of trans pioneers. One thread runs through it: periods of growing acceptance, in the 1960s and again in the 2010s, have each been met with waves of backlash. The 2026 third edition was revised to include a longer, global history and an account of the latest anti-trans backlash.
Why it matters. It is trans history written by a trans historian, and its core message is simple: trans people have always been here, building communities and fighting for freedom. The pattern it traces, backlash following visibility, is a useful map for making sense of the present. Laverne Cox, praising the new edition, calls it "a touchstone".
Worth knowing. It is US history. Reviewing the first edition in Polare (2008), Tracie O'Keefe noted that it does not deal with Native American trans history, and objected to using "transgender" as an umbrella for all sex and gender diverse people. The third edition's longer global history may address some of this; we have not compared editions.
Content notes: historical discrimination, police harassment and anti-trans violence, backlash politics
Trap Door (2017, anthology)
Made by: Edited by Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton; published in the US by the MIT Press in its Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture series. Tourmaline is an artist, filmmaker and activist whose work centres Black trans experiences; Them has profiled her as a Black trans woman.
An anthology of essays, conversations and archival investigations built around a paradox. As the editors put it, trans visibility is "touted as a sign of a liberal society", yet it has arrived alongside heightened violence against trans people. Visibility is often granted only to those who conform to dominant norms, and the book asks whether those openings are doors or traps. Contributors including Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, CeCe McDonald, Juliana Huxtable, micha cárdenas, Dean Spade and Wu Tsang write about beauty, performance, activism and institutional violence.
Why it matters. If you have felt that being more visible has not made you safer, this book gives that feeling history and argument. It puts artists, organizers and scholars side by side, including movement elders like Miss Major Griffin-Gracy.
Worth knowing. It is an art and theory anthology, so voices and registers vary a lot and some essays are academic. Some editions and listings credit Tourmaline under a former name.
Content notes: anti-trans violence, policing and incarceration
The Transgender Issue (2021, non-fiction)
Made by: Written by Shon Faye; first published in the UK by Allen Lane (Penguin), with a US edition from Verso. Faye is a writer from Bristol and a former lawyer; The Guardian notes she deliberately did not make the book a memoir of her own experience as a trans woman.
Faye takes the phrase that turns trans people into a culture war talking point and reclaims it. Instead of a "debate" about trans people, she looks at the real issues trans people in Britain face across their lives: work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system, and their place in LGBTQ+ and feminist communities. Her argument is that trans liberation is bound up with justice and solidarity for all marginalised people. It has been translated into German as Die Transgender-Frage: Ein Aufruf zu mehr Gerechtigkeit (hanserblau, 2022), translated by Jayrôme Robinet and Claudia Voit.
Why it matters. It moves the conversation away from newspaper columns and talk shows toward poverty, housing and prisons, where many trans people's actual problems are. Fiona Sturges in The Guardian had expected fury and found instead "a cool dismantling of the myths and falsehoods". If you are tired of arguing for your existence, it gives you a clear, argued account to point to.
Worth knowing. Faye argues for liberation and a transformed society, not only for rights. Sturges (The Guardian) found her call to abolish prisons and the police unrealistic, and Sophie McBain (New Statesman) felt her uncompromising politics were at times "self-defeating", while calling the book "a bracing and vital corrective" to mainstream writing on trans rights.
Content notes: transphobic media coverage, suicide, violence and sexual abuse against trans people, poverty
Before We Were Trans (2022, non-fiction)
Made by: Written by Kit Heyam; published in the UK by Hachette in 2022 and in the US by Seal Press. Heyam describes themself as "a non-binary trans person (they/them or he/him)", a historian and writer based in Leeds.
A global history of people, from antiquity to the present, whose experience of gender defied the categories of man and woman. Heyam deliberately includes people who do not fit modern or Western trans categories, from the king of Ndongo to the Public Universal Friend, and uses their stories to show that what counts as a man, a woman, or gender itself has always been defined, contested and redefined. It is also a book about how to do history more humanely, ethically and with attention to race.
Why it matters. Popular trans history tends to go looking for people who resemble modern binary trans men and women. Heyam, drawing on their own experience of transition and of being non-binary, widens the frame, which matters if your gender never fit a neat before-and-after story. The New York Times Book Review called it "astute, self-aware and riveting". It was a Lambda Literary Award nominee.
Worth knowing. Heyam is careful not to stamp modern labels on people from the past, so if you want a simple list of trans people in history, the answers here are less tidy. That care is the point of the book.
A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024, non-fiction)
Made by: Written by Jules Gill-Peterson; published by Verso. Gill-Peterson is a historian of trans life (her earlier book is Histories of the Transgender Child) and has spoken about the harassment she has received "for being a trans woman".
Gill-Peterson's starting point is that the trans panic has not always been with us: it was invented. Her short history travels from New York, London and Paris to the colonial districts of the British Raj, the Philippines and Hawai'i, tracing how [[transmisogyny|trans misogyny]] emerged through imperial statecraft, in the policing of public space and criminalisation. She defines it as sexualising femininity as male in order to deem it threatening and justify reprisal.
Why it matters. Many trans women know the hostility they face is not quite the same as transphobia in general, but struggle to name it. Gill-Peterson says she wrote the book because the blanket term "transphobia" did not capture the aggression aimed at her. It helps explain why anti-trans politics obsess over trans women in sports and restrooms as if trans men did not exist, and places that in a long, global history.
Worth knowing. Writing for the Center for a Stateless Society (2024), Julianna Neuhouser argued that the book's treatment of Latin America is thin and orientalist, underestimating the problems transfeminine people face outside the imperial core while idealising their lives.
Content notes: colonial violence, policing and criminalisation, murder of trans women
Young adult
Written for teenagers, and read by plenty of adults who never had books like these at that age. Most have a trans or non-binary teenager in the lead, and several are romances or adventures first.
If I Was Your Girl (2016, young adult novel)
Made by: Written by Meredith Russo and published in May 2016 by Flatiron Books (Macmillan) in the United States. Russo is a trans woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and says she was just beginning her own transition when she started the book.
After surviving a brutal attack, Amanda moves to a new town in Tennessee to live with her father and start senior year where no one knows her. Her plan is simple: stay focused and get through the year.
Then she meets Grant, who is kind and attractive, and falls for him. The closer they get, the heavier her secret becomes: that she is trans, and that she has no idea how he, or the town, would react if they knew.
Why it matters. Russo wanted to write the book she needed as a teenager. Kirkus called it the story many trans teens and adults have been wanting: a sweet, believable romance that avoids both saccharine perfection and horrific tragedy. Russo also wrote an author's note that speaks separately to cis and trans readers. It won a Stonewall Book Award.
Worth knowing. Amanda is written as someone who [[passing|passes]] easily; a friend in the book says she "won the genetic lottery." Russo said she had to tweak a few things to make the novel work for a mainstream audience and used her author's note to address them, and Kirkus notes the book also questions the expectation that trans people must look a certain way.
Content notes: a past violent attack, fear of being outed, transphobia, mental illness
Dreadnought (2017, young adult novel)
Made by: Written by April Daniels and published in January 2017 by Diversion Books in the United States, the first book in her Nemesis series. Daniels is trans: she has said "I had been fired earlier in the year for being trans," and the book was promoted as an own-voices trans novel.
Danny Tozer is fifteen, trans, and not out to anyone. She is painting her toenails in an alley behind a mall when Dreadnought, the world's greatest superhero, dies in front of her and passes his powers to her.
The mantle remakes her body into the one she has always known was hers, so there is no hiding that she is a girl. Now she has to handle superhero politics, a father obsessed with "curing" her, a best friend who suddenly acts entitled to date her, and the cyborg who killed Dreadnought.
Why it matters. It is a proper superhero story, with flight, fights and big stakes, that happens to star a trans girl. It also takes on things trans readers know well: a parent's emotional abuse, the sexism that arrives once the world treats you as a girl, and a fellow hero who is an anti-trans bigot. Kirkus's Leila Roy called it fantastic across the board.
Worth knowing. Daniels said her anti-trans villain, Graywytch, first spoke almost entirely in real quotes from anti-trans activists, and that even after she toned her down some early reviewers found the character hard to believe. Roy found the scenes with Danny's father "horrifying and painful."
Content notes: emotional abuse by a parent, transphobic bigotry, sexism and street harassment, a friend who pressures her romantically, superhero violence
I Wish You All the Best (2019, young adult novel)
Made by: Written by Mason Deaver and published in May 2019 by PUSH, an imprint of Scholastic, in the United States. Deaver is non-binary and, like their protagonist Ben, uses only they/them pronouns.
Ben De Backer is eighteen and lives in North Carolina. When Ben comes out to their parents as non-binary, the parents throw them out of the house.
Ben's older sister Hannah, whom they have not spoken to in more than a decade, takes them in with her husband Thomas. Ben starts a new life at a new school, begins therapy and tries to find the confidence to trust people again, while a friendship with a classmate, Nathan, starts to become something more.
Why it matters. When it came out, Bitch described Ben as one of YA's first [[nonbinary|non-binary]] protagonists. The book stays with the practical aftermath of coming out and being rejected: somewhere to live, therapy, anxiety, deciding who to tell next. Kirkus found its portrayal of Ben's journey toward self-acceptance realistic.
Worth knowing. In 2019 Deaver said some readers kept using he/him for Ben and that the book was placed on lists of books about gay men, which frustrated them. Kirkus notes that Ben and their family are white.
Content notes: rejection by parents and being thrown out of home after coming out, family estrangement, anxiety
Cemetery Boys (2020, young adult novel)
Made by: Written by Aiden Thomas and published in September 2020 by Swoon Reads, an imprint of Macmillan, in the United States. Thomas has spoken of "my own experiences as a transgender Latinx person" and uses he/they.
Yadriel is a gay trans boy in a close-knit community of brujx in East Los Angeles, whose magic, granted by Lady Death, lets them heal the living and guide spirits into the afterlife. Because he is trans, his family and community will not let him go through the rite that would make him a brujo.
When his cousin Miguel seems to have died suddenly and no one can find him, Yadriel decides to prove himself by releasing Miguel's spirit. Instead he summons Julian Diaz, a boy with unfinished business who died the same day. The longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him go.
Why it matters. It is a ghost story, a mystery and a romance in which the trans boy gets to be the hero, the love interest and part of his culture all at once. Thomas wanted trans kids to read a book whose main character is trans without the story being only about being trans. In 2020 it became, according to Them, the first trans-centred novel by an openly trans author on the New York Times bestseller list.
Content notes: deaths of young people and grief, a family and community that refuse to recognise his gender
Felix Ever After (2020, young adult novel)
Made by: Written by Kacen Callender and published in May 2020 by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins, in the United States. Callender describes themself as "Black, queer, and trans"; NPR describes them as non-binary, and in 2020 they told Bitch that, like Felix, they found the word demiboy fit.
Felix Love is seventeen, Black, queer and trans, and on scholarship at a competitive Brooklyn art school, where he is chasing a place at Brown. He has never been in love and wonders whether he ever will be.
Then someone posts his pre-transition photos and his old name in the school gallery, followed by a stream of transphobic messages. Felix sets out to find out who did it, a search that shakes his friendships and leads him to question his own identity all over again. In Spanish, it is published by KAKAO BOOKS as Felix para siempre (2023), translated by Diana Gutiérrez.
Why it matters. Callender wanted a trans story that is romantic and fun, not only about coming out, with a Black trans boy at the centre who is worthy of love. The book also shows something rarely written: already knowing you are trans and then questioning your label again, which Callender says mirrors their own path from non-binary to demiboy. The [[deadname|deadnaming]] and harassment are real, but so are the friends and the romance.
Worth knowing. Kirkus called it "an exhausting read"; Callender replied that the review used offensive language and dismissed the trauma trans people face. In 2021 Callender announced that reprints would cut all mentions of Harry Potter and correct an error about a character's heritage, hoping to make the book "feel safer and more celebratory for trans readers."
Content notes: deadnaming, including by his father; a public outing with his old name and photos; transphobic harassment, including from other queer people; anxiety and self-doubt
Poetry
Collections by trans and non-binary poets, from spoken word you could read aloud to a friend to work that makes you slow right down. If you want to find more poets after these, the anthology Troubling the Line is a good map.
Wanting in Arabic (2002, poetry)
Made by: By Trish Salah, published by TSAR Publications (Toronto, Canada) in 2002, with a second edition in 2013. Salah was born in Halifax, is a poet of Lebanese and Irish heritage and uses she/her pronouns; a 2002 Xtra profile describes the book as drawing on her own transgender life.
Salah's first book of poems starts from two places at once: her trans life, and a polyglot, post-immigrant Lebanese family background that included a Maronite Catholic upbringing in Halifax. The poems take in family history, transgender life, everyday transphobia and the gendered roots of language itself, and the collection includes ghazals.
Her profile at Queen's University describes the book as investigating "diasporic trans and queer subjectivities" and the work of building community as a minority.
Why it matters. It came out in 2002, more than a decade before the other poetry collections listed here, and it is written by a trans poet of Lebanese heritage. If you live between languages, faiths or cultures as well as genders, Salah writes from that overlap without simplifying either side.
Worth knowing. The 2013 second edition won the 2014 Lambda Literary Award in the Transgender Fiction category, even though the book is poetry. Sources differ on the second edition's publisher: the Academy lists TSAR, Salah's Queen's University profile lists Mawenzi House.
Content notes: transphobia
Troubling the Line (2013, anthology)
Made by: Edited by TC Tolbert and Trace Peterson, published by Nightboat Books (US) in 2013. Tolbert often identifies as a trans and [[genderqueer|genderqueer]] feminist; Peterson has described herself as a trans-identified poet, editor and scholar in the anthology's introduction.
A large anthology (544 pages) of 55 trans and genderqueer poets, with a generous sample of poems from each. Every poet also contributes a "poetics statement", a reflection that gives context for their work.
The range is deliberately wide. Emerging and previously unpublished poets appear alongside well-known ones, and the styles run from narrative and lyric to conceptual and slam. The editors chose not to define trans or genderqueer poetry; Peterson wrote that they were "not interested in policing identity".
Why it matters. The poetics statements make this more than a sampler: you hear trans poets think about language, form and the body in their own words. Peterson wrote that she wanted readers to see "not just that we are writing ourselves into existence but that we are genuinely and undeniably here". It also works as a map for finding poets to read next.
Worth knowing. Nightboat calls it the first-ever collection of poetry by trans and genderqueer writers. There is a footnote to that: in the 1980s, trans activist Rupert Raj compiled an anthology of over 400 poems by poets who identified as transsexual, transgender or crossdressers, Of Souls and Roles, Of Sex and Gender. It was never published and is held at The ArQuives in Toronto.
Sympathetic Little Monster (2016, poetry)
Made by: By Cameron Awkward-Rich, published by Ricochet Editions (US) in 2016; his first full-length collection. Awkward-Rich is a Black trans man, a poet and a scholar of trans studies, and current bios use he/him.
Awkward-Rich's debut is a book about sadness and where it comes from. Many poems register what it is like to move through public space facing racism and transphobia, and others turn to family, especially his father.
A recurring series on the theory of motion thinks about transness as always being in motion rather than arriving at a fixed point. Asked about a line on being "two things / at once", he listed the splits he feels: boy and girl, Black and American, Black and trans, poet and critic. He also insists the book is full of jokes.
Why it matters. Trans lives are often expected to be told as triumph or as tragedy. Awkward-Rich stays with bad feelings without turning them into a lesson, and writes from a place where race and gender cannot be pulled apart. If you have felt split between communities, or tired of being asked to be inspiring, this book keeps you company. It was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
Worth knowing. Awkward-Rich has said he is ambivalent about his own use of sadness, because Black sorrow and trans sorrow are often consumed by readers in ways that reinforce the systems causing them. The book is written with that risk in view.
Content notes: racism, transphobia, depression and sadness, strained family relationships
There Should Be Flowers (2016, poetry)
Made by: By Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, published by Civil Coping Mechanisms (US) in 2016; her second book. Espinoza is a trans woman poet from Riverside, California, and uses she/her pronouns.
One unbroken run of poems, with no section breaks, centred on the speaker's life as a trans woman "in a world that insists on the erasure of trans voices". The voice is direct and confessional, and a title like "I'm in a Love/Hate Relationship with Having a Body" gives you the tone: wry, raw and tender at once.
Espinoza writes about the body, beauty and desire, and about staying alive. One poem asks how long she can keep "tricking you / into thinking what I'm doing / is poetry / and not me begging you / to let us live?"
Why it matters. Espinoza writes trans womanhood from the inside, without explaining it to anyone, and the plainness is the point. If you want poems that tell the truth about wanting beauty while being tired of fighting to exist, this is one. It is an earlier, rawer book than her later collection I Don't Want to Be Understood (Alice James Books, 2024).
Content notes: transphobia and erasure, violence, bodily distress, trauma and mental illness
Don't Call Us Dead (2017, poetry)
Made by: By Danez Smith, published by Graywolf Press (US) in 2017. Smith describes themself as a proud Black, queer, HIV-positive poet from St. Paul, Minnesota, is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns.
The collection opens with "summer, somewhere", a sequence that imagines an afterlife for Black men killed by police, a place where "everything / is sanctuary & nothing is a gun". From there the poems move through desire, mortality, and the dangers of living in a Black queer body in America.
Much of the book responds to Smith's HIV diagnosis, and it also takes on race and gender. One poem, "dear white america", went viral on YouTube.
Why it matters. This is a book where race, queerness, illness, desire and gender are never separated, because they are not separate in one life. If your transness sits alongside Blackness or illness rather than apart from them, Smith writes from that crossing, with anger and with joy. It was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, and in 2018 Smith became the youngest winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
Worth knowing. If you want poems centred on gender identity, know that its main subjects are Black life, police violence, sex and HIV, with gender woven through rather than at the centre, as reviewers including Stephanie Burt have noted.
Content notes: police killings of Black people, racism, HIV, death and grief, sexual content
Lord of the Butterflies (2018, poetry)
Made by: By Andrea Gibson, published by Button Poetry (US) in 2018. Gibson was a queer spoken-word poet who used they/them pronouns and wrote that learning the word [[genderqueer|genderqueer]] "felt like hearing someone say my name right for the first time in my life". Gibson served as Colorado's poet laureate and died in July 2025.
A collection of love poems, family poems and poems about gender, published as a companion to Gibson's spoken-word album Hey Galaxy. The opening poem, "Your Life", looks back at a childhood without words for who you are, and describes gender as being happiest "when you're not here or there, but in-between".
Other poems turn to a sister whose mugshot was all over the news, to living with Lyme disease, and to love, loss and grief. The tone moves between heartbreak and a stubborn hope.
Why it matters. Gibson was a spoken-word poet first, and the writing is plain on purpose: they told The Colorado Sun that spoken word made poems "you don't need a Ph.D. to understand". If you want gender written as feeling rather than theory, and you do not mind being moved, this is a good place to start.
Worth knowing. Gibson and their wife, Megan Falley, are the subjects of the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which won the Festival Favorite award at Sundance in 2025.
Content notes: homophobic name-calling, chronic illness, a family member's crime involving a gun, grief and death
feeld (2018, poetry)
Made by: By Jos Charles, first published by Milkweed Editions (US) in 2018 after winning the 2017 National Poetry Series. Charles is a trans poet and uses she/her pronouns.
feeld is a book-length sequence written in an invented English: spellings that look like Middle English, crossed with the shorthand of texting and the internet. Words are misspelled on purpose, so each one opens up and you have to read slowly. Charles has described the language as a kind of "lost Middle English", an answer to how few words English has offered for trans experience.
The poems move through bodies, speech, gender, fields and animals. The White Review names transphobia, the politics of bathrooms, the pressure of the biological body and the problem of speaking in the oppressor's language among its subjects.
Why it matters. feeld does not explain trans life in plain contemporary English. It builds a new vocabulary instead, which can feel like being spoken to in your own dialect rather than translated for someone else. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award, which put a formally daring book by a trans poet in front of a very wide readership.
Worth knowing. It is hard going at first. Even an admiring review in The White Review calls it "difficult to follow, for sure", and sees that as intentional, a way of slowing the reader down; Charles has said that finding the right word is itself hard work.
Content notes: transphobia, trauma, imagery of bodily harm
Comics and graphic memoir
Graphic memoir, manga and comics. A few were written with younger readers in mind and are worth your time anyway, and each entry says who the book was made for.
Shimanami Tasogare (Our Dreams at Dusk) (2015, comic)
Made by: A Japanese manga written and drawn by Yuhki Kamatani, serialised by Shogakukan from 2015 to 2018 (first in Hibana magazine, then online) and collected in four volumes; the English edition from Seven Seas (2019) is translated by Jocelyne Allen. Kamatani is x-gender (which Anime Feminist glosses as non-binary) and asexual, and is referred to as they in English coverage.
High schooler Tasuku Kaname is new to Onomichi, in Hiroshima, and terrified that he has been [[outing|outed]] as gay. At his lowest point, he meets a mysterious stranger who leads him to a drop-in lounge where a group of LGBTQ people spend time.
Over four volumes the story widens to the others who come there: gay, lesbian, transgender, asexual and questioning people dealing with discrimination, stereotyping and misgendering, sometimes clashing with each other, and finding some peace in the lounge. Translations include French (Éclat(s) d'âme, Akata), German (Wer bist du zur blauen Stunde?, Carlsen, translated by Alexandra Klepper) and Polish (Nasze marzenia o zmierzchu, Dango).
Why it matters. This is a manga about queer and trans life made by a creator who is x-gender and asexual, who also worked with the LGBT organisation Trois Couleurs on experiences not their own. The lounge's owner, who is asexual like Kamatani and says they are whatever gender someone else thinks they are, quietly holds the whole cast together. It was nominated for a Harvey Award.
Worth knowing. The main character is a gay teenage boy, so trans and gender-questioning characters are part of an ensemble rather than the centre. The opening chapter deals directly with suicidal thoughts.
Content notes: being outed, suicidal thoughts, homophobic bullying, misgendering and slurs
The Tea Dragon Society (2017, comic)
Made by: Written and drawn by Kay O'Neill, a cartoonist from New Zealand; first published as a webcomic, then as a hardcover by Oni Press (US) in 2017. O'Neill is non-binary and is referred to as they.
Greta, part goblin and part human, is learning her mother's trade of blacksmithing even though nobody needs swords anymore. After she rescues a tiny tea dragon lost at the market, she starts learning to care for these creatures, whose horns sprout leaves that are harvested for tea.
Told over four seasons, the book follows Greta's friendship with Minette, a shy girl with unreliable memories, and what she learns about the last two members of the Tea Dragon Society, Hesekiel and his partner Erik, who uses a wheelchair. It is short, gentle and warmly coloured.
Why it matters. Not every book you read has to be about being trans. This one, made by a non-binary creator, imagines a slow, kind world where a queer couple and a disabled character simply belong and nobody has to explain themselves. It won two 2018 Eisner Awards (Best Webcomic and Best Publication for Kids) and a 2018 Harvey Award.
Worth knowing. Reviews of this first book do not point to trans or non-binary characters, and it is written for readers of about 9 to 12. O'Neill introduces a non-binary character, Rinn, in the second book, The Tea Dragon Festival, and has said creating these characters helped them understand themself.
A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns (2018, comic)
Made by: Written by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson and drawn by Bongiovanni, published by Oni Press under its Limerence Press line (US) in 2018. Bongiovanni is genderqueer and uses [[they-them|they/them]] pronouns; Jimerson, their longtime best friend, is cisgender.
A short, funny nonfiction comic that explains what pronouns are, why they matter and how to use them. The two authors appear as themselves: Archie, tired of people not understanding gender-neutral pronouns, and Tristan, who wants an easy way to introduce them at his increasingly diverse workplace.
It covers what to do when you make a mistake and includes tips for people outside the binary on keeping themselves safe in a binary-centric world.
Why it matters. You may not need this book for yourself. You might need it for a parent, a manager or the friend who keeps apologising instead of simply correcting themselves. It does the explaining for you, with humour, and takes the cost of being misgendered seriously: Bongiovanni describes each misgendering as another brick in the backpack, adding up through the day.
Worth knowing. It is aimed mostly at people new to the idea, so if you already use they/them it will feel basic. It focuses on they/them and is very short.
Content notes: misgendering
Gender Queer (2019, graphic memoir)
Made by: Written and drawn by Maia Kobabe, first published by Lion Forge (US) in 2019, which announced a merger with Oni Press that year. Kobabe is [[nonbinary|non-binary]] and asexual and uses the pronouns e/em/eir.
Kobabe started these comics as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be non-binary and asexual. The book follows em from childhood through a bewildering adolescence into adulthood: fandoms, crushes, first relationships, coming out as bisexual in high school and, years later, as non-binary.
Kobabe built it from fourteen years of journals and has called it "an extended letter" to eir family about how eir experience of gender "has always been nonbinary, long before I had words to explain it".
Why it matters. It is a whole book about growing up non-binary, by a non-binary author, and it is honest about the unglamorous parts: discomfort in your body, clumsy conversations, family who love you but do not understand. Kobabe wrote it hoping other non-binary people would "see a reflection of their own experiences", and that the people around them would understand them better.
Worth knowing. It has been at the centre of US book bans. The American Library Association ranked it the most challenged book in the country in 2021 and 2022, and it stayed near the top in later years (second in 2024, third in 2025). Critics focus on a handful of sexually explicit drawings. The publisher marketed it to older teens and adults.
Content notes: a few sexually explicit drawings, masturbation, menstruation, body discomfort and dysphoria, confusing sexual experiences
Stage Dreams (2019, comic)
Made by: Written and drawn by Melanie Gillman, published by Graphic Universe, an imprint of Lerner Publishing Group (US), in 2019. Gillman is a queer non-binary cartoonist and uses they/them pronouns.
It is 1861. Grace, a trans woman and aspiring actress, has run away from her Georgia home and from conscription into the Confederate Army. Her stagecoach west is held up by the notorious outlaw the Ghost Hawk, who turns out to be Flor, a Latina bandit who wants one last big heist before settling down.
Flor means to hold Grace for ransom, but Grace talks her way into the plan: crashing a Confederate gala in New Mexico Territory to steal secret documents. What follows is a western caper and a romance that grows through flirtation and fond glances, drawn in coloured pencil.
Why it matters. Gillman wrote it because queer historical fiction is so rare, and because people act as if queer people were invented in the 1960s. Here a trans woman gets to be clever, brave and wanted in the Old West. Gillman has said they would rather hand young readers stories where queer and trans people have agency than ones where they end up victims.
Worth knowing. It is written for teens (the publisher lists grades 8 to 12) and is short, 104 pages, so adult readers may find it light.
Content notes: a stagecoach robbery and kidnapping, the Confederacy and the Civil War
The Best of Assigned Male (2021, comic)
Made by: Written and drawn by Sophie Labelle, published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers (UK) in 2021, collecting and expanding her webcomic Assigned Male, which she launched in 2014. Labelle is a trans cartoonist from Quebec, Canada, and uses she/her pronouns.
The comic follows Stephie, an 11-year-old trans girl, and her group of queer friends as they deal with school, family, relationships and the everyday experience of being trans. Labelle describes Stephie as a sarcastic young feminist who takes no nonsense from anyone, "an encyclopedia on legs".
This book gathers story arcs from the webcomic, adds material never published before, and includes Labelle's own written commentary for context.
Why it matters. It is made by a trans woman about a trans girl who answers back, with jokes, and without treating the child as a problem to solve. Labelle stresses that Stephie is not her but a character with her own voice. For adults it is a chance to meet the kid you might have been with the right words early, and an easy book to give to a young trans person or their family.
Worth knowing. It is written with young readers in mind (a library review recommends it for anyone over about 10), so parts are openly educational. Labelle has faced organised harassment for her work: in 2017, threats forced the cancellation of a Halifax launch for another of her books.
Content notes: everyday transphobia
Written in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish or Portuguese
Books first written in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish or Portuguese. For each one we list the translations we could confirm with a publisher, a library catalogue or the press. Some of these writers use words for themselves that do not map neatly onto English, and the entries explain those words the way the authors use them.
Several English-language books above have also been translated, and their entries say so where we could confirm it.
Viagem solitária (2011, memoir)
Made by: João W. Nery, Brazil, written in Portuguese, first published in 2011 (library records list Leya; Estadão names the Casa da Palavra imprint). It revisits his earlier memoir Erro de pessoa (1984). We found no translation. Nery (1950 to 2018) was a psychologist, writer and activist, remembered in Brazil as a pioneer for trans men who claimed his place as a man publicly even under the military dictatorship.
Nery tells his life from childhood through a difficult adolescence to adulthood, his transition in 1970s Brazil and his later life as a father. He had already told the first part, up to age 27, in Erro de pessoa; this book returns to that story thirty years on and carries it forward.
It helps to know what living under his own name cost him. In 2018 he told Estadão how, under the military dictatorship, he walked into a registry office, said he had no documents at all and obtained new papers as a man, a step that ended his career as a psychologist.
Why it matters. It is a first-person account of a trans man's life in Brazil over several decades, written by someone who then spent years in activism. Its reach went well beyond readers: it was one of the inspirations for the trans character Ivan in the TV Globo telenovela A Força do Querer, and a bill in Brazil's Congress, introduced in 2013 to guarantee the right to change name and gender on civil records, bears his name.
Worth knowing. The subtitle uses "transexual", the usual word in Brazil when he wrote.
Content notes: transphobia, a hard adolescence, the bureaucracy and fear of the military dictatorship, loss of his profession
Mam na imię Ania (2013, memoir)
Made by: Anna Grodzka, Poland, written in Polish, published by Wydawnictwo W.A.B. (Grupa Wydawnicza Foksal) in 2013. We found no translation. Grodzka was elected to the Polish parliament in 2011 as the country's first transgender MP.
The title means "My name is Ania"; Ania was also the name of the rag doll she confided in as a child. Grodzka tells her life from a childhood in which she fitted in with neither the girls nor the boys, through decades of hiding and living the life expected of a man, with a wife, a child and a job, to the decision to stop lying to herself and to those around her.
It is also a family book: about those closest to her, and about a birth family she only came to know as an adult. She grew up at a time in Poland when any difference was called deviance, and the book carries that weight.
Why it matters. In 2013, writing as what she called the only transgender MP in the world, Grodzka said trans people are "highly visible and yet almost invisible at the same time". This memoir, written while she was in office, is her own long account of a life she spent decades unable to tell, in Polish, for Polish readers.
Content notes: childhood bullying, years of hiding and self-denial, strain on a marriage and family
E se eu fosse puta (2016, memoir)
Made by: Amara Moira, Brazil, written in Portuguese, published by Hoo Editora in 2016, with comic strips by the cartoonist Laerte. We found no translation we could verify. Moira, a literary scholar who was then finishing a doctorate on James Joyce, describes herself as a travesti, the word many Brazilian trans women have reclaimed; she has said she feels "more travesti than doctoral student".
When Moira began her transition, she found that people could only picture a travesti as a sex worker. She got to know the travesti community, started doing sex work herself and kept a blog about it, with the same title as this book, to understand what she was going through.
The book reworks those posts. It moves between accounts of nights with clients, guesses at what those men want and why, the endless haggling over price, and her thinking about LGBT activism and what the work taught her about men, gender and her own life.
Why it matters. Sex work is written here by the worker, with humour and without asking for pity, by a writer who takes both literary theory and the street seriously. Moira said she hoped it would make people see travestis and sex workers through eyes that humanise them. She kept going: in 2024 she published Neca, a novel written in bajubá, which she describes as a street language that travestis created for protection and that became part of their identity.
Worth knowing. It is openly an argument as well as a memoir: Moira campaigns for the decriminalization of sex work and writes that it can also be a choice. If you want a neutral account, this is not it.
Content notes: explicit accounts of sex work, violence by clients including a sexual assault, transphobia
L'aurora delle trans cattive (2018, non-fiction)
Made by: Porpora Marcasciano, Italy, written in Italian, published by Edizioni Alegre in February 2018 with a preface by Stefania Voli. We found no translation. Marcasciano is a trans activist and writer who led Italy's Movimento Identità Trans (MIT) and sits on Bologna's city council; the subtitle calls this the story of "my transgender generation".
Covering about forty years, Marcasciano traces a trans genealogy from inside. She writes about the legendary trans women she knew, in a world pushed toward spectacle and performance because ordinary life was closed to them, where sex work was often the backbone of survival and the only word society offered them was a contemptuous one. Her own story runs through it, including time among the femminielli of Naples and a spell in jail in Rome.
She follows how that world became a movement: the birth of MIT and the fight that won legal recognition with Italy's Law 164 of 1982. The tone is ironic and full of anecdotes.
Why it matters. It is a history told by a woman who was there, about the women who came before the vocabulary did, and it refuses to tidy them up. She argues against the pressure to prove trans people are "normal". If you do not read Italian, her earlier memoir of the 1970s, AntoloGaia, appeared in English from Rutgers University Press in 2023 as AntoloGaia: Queering the Seventies, a Radical Trans Memoir.
Worth knowing. This is history with a point of view: Marcasciano defends her generation's choices on their own terms and openly rejects the goal of being seen as normal. If you want a neutral survey, look elsewhere.
Content notes: persecution and sexual violence against trans women, imprisonment, sex work
Las malas (Bad Girls) (2019, novel)
Made by: Camila Sosa Villada, Argentina, written in Spanish, published by Tusquets Editores (Argentina) in March 2019. Translations: English, Bad Girls (Other Press, 2022, translated by Kit Maude); French, Les Vilaines (Métailié, 2021, translated by Laura Alcoba); German, Im Park der prächtigen Schwestern (Suhrkamp, 2021, translated by Svenja Becker); Italian, Le cattive (Sur, 2021, translated by Giulia Zavagna); Polish (Wydawnictwo Filtry, 2024, translated by Maria Broda); Portuguese (Brazil), O parque das irmãs magníficas (Tusquets Editores). Sosa Villada describes herself as a travesti, a word used in Latin America by trans women who have reclaimed it from an insult, and she prefers it to "trans woman".
Córdoba, Argentina, in the 1990s. A group of travesti sex workers share the nights in Sarmiento Park and a boarding house run by the seemingly immortal Auntie Encarna. One night they find an abandoned baby and decide to raise him among themselves, in secret.
The narrator is called Camila, and the book draws on the author's own years in the city, but she insists she writes fiction. It moves between hard realism and the fantastic: one woman turns into a bird, another changes on full-moon nights. It is a novel about a chosen family as much as about the violence around it.
Why it matters. Travesti life is written here from the inside, with anger, jokes and tenderness, by someone who lived it. Sosa Villada refuses the cold vocabulary: in the book's preface she writes that she does not use "trans woman" because it does not reflect travesti experience in her part of the world. The novel won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize in 2020 and has been widely translated, which is why this entry lists so many editions: there is a good chance one is in your language.
Worth knowing. Sosa Villada later told El País (2025) that the book's success brought a pity she disliked, and that she felt she had fed the image of travestis as only poor and miserable. Her next novel, Tesis sobre una domesticación, was partly a response.
Content notes: violence against trans women, including murder; beatings, robbery and drugging by clients; sex work; deaths from AIDS
Mein Weg (2019, memoir)
Made by: Full title: Mein Weg von einer weißen Frau zu einem jungen Mann mit Migrationshintergrund. By Jayrôme C. Robinet, a writer, spoken-word artist and translator born in northern France and living in Berlin, written in German, published by Hanser Berlin in February 2019. We found no translation. Robinet writes about his own transition and uses he/him; he also co-translated Shon Faye's The Transgender Issue into German (Die Transgender-Frage, hanserblau, 2022, with Claudia Voit).
The title means "My journey from a white woman to a young man with a migration background", and it names the book's central discovery. Robinet grew up in northern France, moved to Berlin and began his transition there. As a dark beard came in, strangers started speaking to him in Arabic. In cafés, in changing rooms and at passport control, he found he was now read not only as a man but as younger and as foreign.
He uses that double shift to look at how gender, origin and age are assigned from outside, and at the prejudice and paperwork along the way.
Why it matters. Robinet has been read on both sides of several lines, and he writes down what changed: how people look at him, who assumes he is competent, how officials treat him. That makes the book useful beyond memoir, especially for [[transmasc|transmasculine]] readers curious about what being read as a man brings, including racism. It also questions why anyone should have to prove their gender to the state at all.
Worth knowing. Deutschlandfunk's critic Dirk Fuhrig found it illuminating on gender roles but called the prose heavy going, with a lot of academic jargon, and said not every idea in it is new.
Content notes: transphobia, everyday racism, bureaucratic hurdles to legal recognition
Un appartement sur Uranus (An Apartment on Uranus) (2019, essays)
Made by: Paul B. Preciado, a Spanish-born philosopher living in France; the texts first ran as columns in the French daily Libération, and the book came out in French from Grasset in March 2019, with a preface by Virginie Despentes, and in Spanish from Anagrama in April 2019 as Un apartamento en Urano. Translations: English, An Apartment on Uranus (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell); German, Ein Apartment auf dem Uranus (Suhrkamp, 2020, translated from the French by Stefan Lorenzer); Italian, Un appartamento su Urano (Fandango Libri). Preciado writes about his own transition and uses he/him.
Preciado began these columns under his former name and kept writing them after he became Paul, while traveling and while transitioning. They move between his own changing body and name and the news of those years: the rise of the far right in Europe, the Greek crisis, refugees at Europe's borders, the conflict in Catalonia, the Zapatistas in Mexico.
The title comes from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in 1864 used "Uranism" to name love between people of the same sex. Preciado imagines an apartment on Uranus, somewhere to live outside the modern sorting of people by gender, race, class and disability.
Why it matters. This is [[transition|transition]] written as political philosophy rather than confession, and it refuses to keep trans life in a separate box from borders, money and war. Preciado describes himself, in a line his publishers quote, as "a dissident of the sex-gender system". The pieces are short, so you can read one at a time and come back.
Worth knowing. Because these are newspaper columns written between 2013 and 2018, many respond directly to the news of that moment.
Content notes: transphobia, the far right, the treatment of refugees, political violence
Une histoire de genres (2021, non-fiction)
Made by: Lexie, the French activist behind the Instagram account Aggressively Trans, written in French, published by Marabout in February 2021. We found no translation. Lexie is a trans activist and art historian who began her transition in 2017.
A guide that speaks in two directions. For trans and non-binary readers, it gathers history, vocabulary and practical information, such as how to change your first name in France. For cis readers, it explains why the words matter, which intrusive questions not to ask, and how to recognise the usual transphobic arguments.
Lexie wrote it over about a year, much of it during the first Covid lockdown, and kept the direct voice of her posts, switching between "I" and a more explanatory register, with a glossary at the end. It uses the plural "transidentités" on purpose, to include non-binary people.
Why it matters. If you read French, it is a clear starting point written from inside the community, and one you can hand to a parent, a colleague or a friend without having to explain everything yourself. Lexie also names disagreements within trans communities rather than pretending there is one view.
Worth knowing. Much of the book is pedagogy aimed at cis readers, so parts may feel basic if you already know the ground, and practical details reflect France in 2021. In 2024 France Inter reported that Lexie receives death threats and violent messages online, and that several of her festival appearances had been cancelled because organisers feared trouble.
Content notes: discussion of transphobia and transphobic arguments, practical information about transition
Blutbuch (Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues) (2022, novel)
Made by: Kim de l'Horizon, Switzerland, written in German mixed with Bernese Swiss German, English and French, published by DuMont in 2022. Translations: English, Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025, translated by Jamie Lee Searle); French, Hêtre pourpre (Julliard, 2023, translated by Rose Labourie). Kim de l'Horizon is non-binary and identifies as neither woman nor man, like the book's narrator.
A narrator living in Zürich, far from the Ostermundigen house near Bern where they grew up, learns that their grandmother is losing her memory. The narrator, who shares the author's first name, sets out to gather what the family never said: the grandmother's hard childhood with a harsh mother and sisters who died or disappeared, the copper beech in the garden, and a line of women whose lives nobody wrote down.
The book keeps changing shape: scenes, essay, fairy tale, memoir, dialect words. The title plays on Blutbuche, the copper beech, and on "blood book".
Why it matters. The [[nonbinary|non-binary]] narrator is not explaining themselves to anyone. The real question is what language could hold a body and a family history that the usual words do not fit. In 2022 the novel won both the German Book Prize and the Swiss Book Prize, and Kim de l'Horizon became the first non-binary author to win the German prize. The jury said it was provoked and enthused by the book's urgency and invention.
Worth knowing. After the German Book Prize, Kim de l'Horizon received online hate messages, according to German media citing the publisher, and DW's Sabine Kieselbach noted that much of the backlash was not about the book's literary quality at all. Le Monde diplomatique's Pierre Deshusses admired it but called it experimental and, at times, unsettling.
Content notes: family trauma across generations, a grandmother's dementia, explicit sex and deliberately coarse language
La mala costumbre (Bad Habit) (2023, novel)
Made by: Alana S. Portero, Spain, written in Spanish, published by Seix Barral in May 2023. Translations: English, Bad Habit (4th Estate in the UK, 2024, translated by Mara Faye Lethem); French, La Mauvaise Habitude (Flammarion, 2023, translated by Margot Nguyen Béraud); German, Die schlechte Gewohnheit (Claassen, Ullstein, 2024, translated by Christiane Quandt); Italian, La cattiva abitudine (Mondadori, 2024, translated by Giulia Zavagna). Portero is a trans woman and has said that the neighbourhood, the period and part of the experience in the novel are her own.
San Blas, a working-class neighbourhood of Madrid, in the 1980s and 1990s, the years after Franco. The narrator, Álex, is a child everyone calls a boy, who knows early that the world of men is not hers. Around her are heroin, poverty and neighbours she turns into fairy-tale figures and saints, among them older trans women who carry the scars of the dictatorship's police.
It is a coming-of-age novel told in the first person, looking back. Portero writes with a Catholic and pop imagination at once: in Álex's world, Lily Munster and Madonna become angels.
Why it matters. It puts a trans girl's childhood inside a precise class and a precise moment in Spanish history. As the Guardian's reviewer put it, Álex moves through a world of violence and petty cruelties with compassion, and even the hardest scenes are told without self-pity; her wit is how she refuses to be only a victim. It became a bestseller in Spain and won several prizes there, including the Dulce Chacón and Almudena Grandes prizes.
Content notes: harassment and sexual abuse of a trans girl, a brutal sexualised beating, heroin use and a death from overdose, poverty
Where to go from here
Libraries are worth using for all of this. Gender Queer has been among the most challenged books in US libraries, and asking your local library to order the books you want, or borrowing the ones it has, helps keep them on the shelves.
If a word in an entry is new to you, the glossary explains it. If you would rather watch than read, the companion guide is trans and non-binary films and series.
Reading lists go out of date. If you find a mistake, an identity or pronoun we got wrong, or a book that belongs here, the contact page reaches us.
Wren · Editor
Wren is the name the T4TSpace blog is published under. The posts are written by the small team that builds the app, and signed with one name so the voice stays the same from one piece to the next.