Without getting too giddily geeky about queer theory and history, the T in LGBTQ+ is different from the rest of those initials in all sorts of ways. Pride reading lists are often light on the T too. So for Pride month, here’s a short Trans Pride reading list with two adult novels, two YA novels, and two (well, 2-4) memoirs for your trans reading pleasure. Not trans yourself? Not looking for trans reads? You’ll love these books anyway. I highly recommend them no matter who you are or what you read.
Fiction
A Burning swans from terrorist attack to political thriller, slum to government party palace, sectarian violence to the perils of social media, all via three interwoven narrative threads, one of which is sewn by the lovely Lovely, a transgender woman and struggling actor and one of my favorite characters of the year.
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
Yes, the title has three S’s in the center, but that’s because there’s a lot going on here. Frankissstein features not only transgender characters but transhuman ones, not to mention Mary Shelley, cryogenics, artificial intelligence, time travel, and buckets of strangeness and humor and smarts.
YA Fiction
You know how we need diverse books? Pet is a diverse book. It’s diverse in its diversity. Pet offers diversity in gender and racial identities but also disability, also family makeup, also utopia and dystopia, monsters and myths. Emezi, a nonbinary author, has written here a nonbinary novel that crosses genres with breathtaking abandon.
If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo
In lots of ways, If I Was Your Girl is an old school, coming-of-age, teen romance. Amanda moves to a new high school for a fresh start, makes friends, meets a boy, worries he’ll discover a part of her she’d rather leave in the past. In other ways, it’s far from typical. In If I Was Your Girl, a transgender author presents a transgender protagonist to show us how life is hard and different for a trans teenager, and also exactly the same.
Memoir
She’s Not There and/or Stuck in the Middle With You by Jennifer Finney Boyland
Boylan is a transgender columnist, activist, and author of sixteen (!!) books, among them these two memoirs. Roughly, She’s Not There tells the more or less beginning of her gender transition (and all the other many transitions for many people it entails). Stuck in the Middle With You tells about life getting back to — again, more or less — normal in the years that come next. Both are wonderful.
Redefining Realness and/or Surpassing Certainty by Janet Mock
Sorry to be so predictably indecisive, but let me again offer you a trans activist and memoirist and again argue for reading both of these books. Gender, sexuality, race, class, youth, ambition, heartbreak, and hope, Mock’s memoirs are a journey, and they’re ones everyone will learn from.
