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As a kid, I didn’t identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Even without the language to describe who I really was, I was always on the lookout for stories about other people who felt like I did—for stories, in other words, like the ones on this list. But I never found them. As the books below beautifully illustrate, the spectrum of transgender experience, and our childhoods in particular, are so rich and diverse. My hope is for these and other books like Cactus Country to encourage more trans and queer people to tell their stories so that kids like us can find characters that represent them.
Maia Kobabe’s book is the book I wish I could’ve read growing up. I was struck so many times by the similarities Kobabe’s story shared with mine, as a kid with many of the same questions and feelings about my gender that e did.
With immersive and evocative illustrations that I couldn’t help but linger over, Kobabe’s graphic memoir took me on a refreshingly frank gender journey that was never afraid to delve into the uncomfortable.
It is also the most challenged and banned book in the country at the moment, which I think speaks volumes about the story’s capacity to change lives.
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns,
thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical
comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable
with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely
cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the
mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come
out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and
facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to
explain to eir family…
I had so many questions as I grew up. Why was I so different to other boys. Then, some 20 years ago, I started to find and talk to others like me. I realised I was transgender, ‘born in the wrong body’ as the saying goes. From that point on I began to work for the LGBTQ+ community as I also negotiated the personal and difficult path of transitioning from male to female. My passion for activism continues to this day, shown in my role as Chair of Dublin LGBTQ+ Pride and delivering workshops, presentations, and lectures to multinational companies and government bodies where I encourage everyone to see the beauty in diversity.
I loved this book! The author has interviewed lots of trans people and has nicely captured the diversity of the different expressions of gender which is such an important part of being transgender. It covers all aspects of transitioning such as hormones, surgeries, coming out, sex and sexuality, and other areas.
The challenges faced by the trans community are also covered, from transphobia, discrimination, and hate crime to accessing vital health care. Declan Henry has provided valuable insights and lessons for the LGBTQ+ community and all who wish to be an ally to the trans community.
Bronze Winner for the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the category of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Non-Fiction
Foregrounding the voices of transgender and non-binary people, this honest and insightful book is a compilation of the voices of those who have decided to undergo transition - both male-to-female and female-to-male. Drawing on over one hundred interviews with individuals, the book details the diverse experiences and challenges faced by those who transition, exploring a range of topics such as hormone treatments; reassignment surgeries; coming out; sex and sexuality; physical, emotional and mental health; transphobia; discrimination; and hate crime, as well as highlighting the lives…
I had so many questions as I grew up. Why was I so different to other boys. Then, some 20 years ago, I started to find and talk to others like me. I realised I was transgender, ‘born in the wrong body’ as the saying goes. From that point on I began to work for the LGBTQ+ community as I also negotiated the personal and difficult path of transitioning from male to female. My passion for activism continues to this day, shown in my role as Chair of Dublin LGBTQ+ Pride and delivering workshops, presentations, and lectures to multinational companies and government bodies where I encourage everyone to see the beauty in diversity.
This is a lovely and well-written young adult book of a girl who explores her sexuality and faces the many challenges of being a teenager in modern Ireland.
There are no holds barred in the telling of some of the incidents, and the protagonist Lauren ends up facing every teenage girl’s worst nightmare. Acceptance of difference is a strong theme through the novel and recent Irish referendums on Equal (Same Sex) marriage and legislation to legalise abortion in Ireland are seen from a young person’s valuable point of view.
Here's what Lauren knows: she's not like other girls. She also knows it's problematic to say that - what's wrong with girls? She's even fancied some in the past. But if you were stuck in St Agnes, her posh all-girls school, you'd feel like that too. Here everyone's expected to be Perfect Young Ladies, it's even a song in the painfully awful musical they're putting on this year. And obviously said musical is directed by Lauren's arch nemesis.
Under it all though, Lauren's heart is bruised. Her boyfriend thinks she's crazy and her…
I had so many questions as I grew up. Why was I so different to other boys. Then, some 20 years ago, I started to find and talk to others like me. I realised I was transgender, ‘born in the wrong body’ as the saying goes. From that point on I began to work for the LGBTQ+ community as I also negotiated the personal and difficult path of transitioning from male to female. My passion for activism continues to this day, shown in my role as Chair of Dublin LGBTQ+ Pride and delivering workshops, presentations, and lectures to multinational companies and government bodies where I encourage everyone to see the beauty in diversity.
This was one of my favourite books recently. I picked it up in a charity shop out of curiosity as the two boys were extremely famous Irish actors and theatre designers, albeit being born in the UK.
Their relationship was illegal for the entirety of their lives but their talent and fame allowed them the liberty to walk hand in hand down Dublin’s fashionable Grafton Street in the 1950s, receiving only smiles and acknowledgements. The brilliant telling of their story covers all aspects of life in Ireland from the early 1900s, the difficulties they faced, financial and personal, but the love they felt for each other shines through every page.
If you can get a copy and have any interest in gay Irish culture and theatre I thoroughly recommend it.
The Ireland of the inter-war years was an island of remarkable contradictions. In spite of the highly moralistic attitude of Church and State, including an official censorship of publications, there existed a heady atmosphere of laissez-faire. Artistic life in Dublin possessed a piquancy never found before or since, accentuated during the war years when Ireland's neutrality resulted in intense social activity centred on the international embassies. Two inseparable figures of genius dominated the artistic scene in Dublin during this period: Hilton Edwards and Micheal MacLiammoir. Both were actors of formidable range and power. Edwards was also one of the finest…
I had so many questions as I grew up. Why was I so different to other boys. Then, some 20 years ago, I started to find and talk to others like me. I realised I was transgender, ‘born in the wrong body’ as the saying goes. From that point on I began to work for the LGBTQ+ community as I also negotiated the personal and difficult path of transitioning from male to female. My passion for activism continues to this day, shown in my role as Chair of Dublin LGBTQ+ Pride and delivering workshops, presentations, and lectures to multinational companies and government bodies where I encourage everyone to see the beauty in diversity.
I was taken down a rabbit hole, exploring other aspects of 19th and 20th-century Irish and British gay culture.
This very comprehensive biography of Ireland’s leading playwright whose many amusing quotes are now part of everyday language deals predominantly with his sexuality, going into considerable detail in parts. Wilde was, as per his name, pretty wild!
His life was a true roller-coaster, from the height of his fame with many books, poetry, and stage productions making him a household name worldwide. Yet he was a troubled soul and the author of the biography has researched his subject intensively and has delivered possibly the ultimate work about this notable gay icon.
In The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, Neil McKenna provides stunning new insight into the tumultuous sexual and psychological worlds of this brilliant and tormented figure. McKenna charts Wildes astonishing odyssey through Londons sexual underworld, and provides explosive new evidence of the political machinations behind Wildes trials for sodomy. Dazzlingly written and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde offers a vividly original portrait of a troubled genius who chose to martyr himself for the cause of love between men.
As a kid, I didn’t identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Even without the language to describe who I really was, I was always on the lookout for stories about other people who felt like I did—for stories, in other words, like the ones on this list. But I never found them. As the books below beautifully illustrate, the spectrum of transgender experience, and our childhoods in particular, are so rich and diverse. My hope is for these and other books like Cactus Country to encourage more trans and queer people to tell their stories so that kids like us can find characters that represent them.
KB Brookins’ book is one of the most dynamic memoirs I’ve read in a long time.
Brookins describes a coming of age at the intersection of multiple overlapping—and at times conflicting—identities: as transgender and nonbinary, as a Black American, as a Texan, as an adoptee raised in a religious household, and many more. Their story of navigating a complicated, and at times painful, childhood and adolescence to grow into the accomplished writer, poet, and artist they are will resonate with anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong.
By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.
Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.
“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about…
As a kid, I didn’t identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Even without the language to describe who I really was, I was always on the lookout for stories about other people who felt like I did—for stories, in other words, like the ones on this list. But I never found them. As the books below beautifully illustrate, the spectrum of transgender experience, and our childhoods in particular, are so rich and diverse. My hope is for these and other books like Cactus Country to encourage more trans and queer people to tell their stories so that kids like us can find characters that represent them.
Fairest by Meredith Talusan is an incisively observant memoir of class, ability, and whiteness, among many other subjects.
I was so enthralled by Talusan’s compelling story about living with albinism and passing as white, first in the Philippines as a child, which led to a television acting career, and later in the United States as an adult. Talusan’s deft descriptions of her journey from childhood stardom to her education at Harvard to her eventual coming out and transition hooked me from the first page and made this book so difficult to put down.
Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction
"Talusan sails past the conventions of trans and immigrant memoirs." --The New York Times Book Review
"A ball of light hurled into the dark undertow of migration and survival." --Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A love story with the heart of Austen classics and a reflective journey of becoming that shift our own perceptions of romance, identity, gender, and the fairness of life.
Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to…
As a kid, I didn’t identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Even without the language to describe who I really was, I was always on the lookout for stories about other people who felt like I did—for stories, in other words, like the ones on this list. But I never found them. As the books below beautifully illustrate, the spectrum of transgender experience, and our childhoods in particular, are so rich and diverse. My hope is for these and other books like Cactus Country to encourage more trans and queer people to tell their stories so that kids like us can find characters that represent them.
Will Betke-Brunswick’s book is a gem of a graphic memoir that skillfully navigates both hope and loss.
As much a story about coming of age in a queer body as an illness narrative, I was struck by the playful tone of the illustrations (Betke-Brunswick depicts themself and other human characters as penguins) juxtaposed against the serious nature of the subject matter—the slow goodbye and ongoing grief of losing a mother to cancer. It’s a combination that doesn’t seem like it should work, but the resulting story is resonant and unforgettable.
A Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Comics
A Modern Mrs. Darcy's Best Book of Fall
A Shondaland Best Book of November
“Filled with moments of tenderness and humor.” ―Library Journal, Starred Review
An unexpected and poignant debut graphic memoir about a close-knit family approaching loss, and the wonder and joy they create along the way.
During Will Betke-Brunswick’s sophomore year of college, their beloved mother, Elizabeth, is diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. They only have ten more months together, which Will documents in evocative two-color illustrations. But as we follow Will and their mom…
Born into a family with friction between parents, I never thought relationships could get much worse. When my parents divorced, father became estranged, then died by apparent suicide, memoirs by diverse voices opened my world and made me feel less alone. When I went through a sexual and gender identity crisis of my own, they helped me navigate the turmoil in my own life. I spent more than twenty-five years writing professionally for corporate and academic employers before writing biography and memoir became a coping skill.
I was writing my book when I saw the cover of this memoir on the library’s “new books” display. I wasn’t looking for another transition story but discovered that it crossed into “murder investigation” and was hooked. Lorimer’s life took him from the prairies to Vancouver, where he worked for the police department, and included a mid-life transition, with echoes to my arc. His connection to the horrific Pickton serial murder case between 2002 and 2007, involving missing, vulnerable women, makes his own story all the more poignant.
Inspiring and honest, this unique memoir of gender transition and coming-of-age proves it's never too late to find your true identity.
Since he was a small child, Lorimer Shenher knew something for certain: he was a boy. The problem was, he was growing up in a girl's body.
In this candid and thoughtful memoir, Shenher shares the story of his gender journey, from childhood gender dysphoria to teenage sexual experimentation to early-adult denial of his identity-and finally the acceptance that he is trans, culminating in gender reassignment surgery in his fifties. Along the way, he details his childhood in booming…
I'm a veteran author, journalist, and journalism professor who has taught over 1000 students. At the age of 50, through a memoir I began writing, I fell down a rabbit hole of memory and began to suspect I had been sexually abused as a child. The man was a close family friend, who liked to call himself my grandfather. He did not speak English. My parents were immigrants and the usual difficulties of retrieving memories from childhood were complicated by the fact that they were all in the Czech language. For years I read everything I could find about childhood sexual abuse and then everything I could read about psychoanalysis.
This book narrates many kinds of trauma but the essay on sexual assault is worth buying the book.
A Canadian actor, director, and writer, Polley recounts her three-decade-long silence about Jian Ghomeshi, the hip, popular host of a hit CBC talk show. She moves from the ’90s to 2017, zeroing in on her flickering memories of assault, her reluctance to speak about it, her examination of that reluctance, her interrogation of other women in her situation, of lawyers, and her thoughts about it now.
It begins when she is outed on Twitter: “Wonder why Sarah Polley never spoke out about being assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi. #HerToo. She was the woman who stayed silent. Ask her.” Brilliant account of why women who are sexually abused do not speak out.
“A visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays.” – Vanity Fair
*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub, and AV Club*
Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present
These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way…
