The most recommended books about gender identity

I still say, the best way to get people to read a book is to ban it. If you want to understand gender diversity, then Gender Queer is a great place to start.

If you want to understand why this book is controversial, then I can’t help you. I think maybe some people are just scared of giving the rest of us the freedom to be ourselves. What I can say is, this book explained a lot to me—about me.

River McIntyre is a swimmer; at least that’s one element of their identity that’s safely and publicly established. But when he ends up “swimming” in the wrong place—a shark tank—it kicks off a journey of self-discovery that will change them forever. It’s such a brilliant path, taking place over the course of years and through different IDs and realizations, and I love the way everything—including River’s chosen name—always comes back to the water. 

As a parent (and a researcher), I’m so happy this book exists! It’s the best response to the argument that trans kids are new and, therefore, how we raise them is dangerously experimental. Where Gill-Peterson finds such kids historically is mainly in medical archives, where treatments were directed mostly at intersex children, many of whom we’d see as trans. She shows a fascination with the “plasticity” of the body in the early twentieth century, although predictably, possibilities for transforming bodies were viewed differently across racial lines. The best counter to conservative attacks, though, is his research into Val, a 1920s teen in rural Wisconsin who went to school as the gender she affirmed and had negotiated agreements about things like which bathroom she could use, over which we’re fighting a century later!

This had everything I love in a great book: myths and magic, a wise-cracking main protagonist, and an unpredictable ending.

Sunbearer Trials is a combo of Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, and Mexican mythology blended together into this incredible story. The world-building is beautiful and the characters feel so authentic and real. Highly recommend!

Profit and Pleasure is the most provocative Marxist intervention in queer theory.

Hennessy charges that queer theory’s focus on representation, identity, and subjectivity works to render the structures of capitalism invisible. Postindustrial capitalism produces “gender-flexible” and sexually diverse subjects to meet the demands of today’s globalized commodity system.

Queer theory, instead of addressing this development, has aided in our commodification by repressing the connections between the multiplication of identities and economic exploitation, connections that capitalism works to conceal. Queer theory needs to extend beyond the cultural purview of identity politics to address contemporary capitalism directly.

This book appealed to me so I could better understand the ideological agendas affecting women and girls. As a woman and a mom of daughters, I feel troubled by what I have been witnessing as the sex category of “female” is eliminated in certain contexts.

The author politically leans left, so I learned from her perspective about how our society is being shaped by new ideologies that affect the future of women’s rights, safe spaces, and fairness in sports. I felt alarmed when I read about what is happening but also grateful to the author for shedding light on the topic so I could be more observant and empowered when my safety and rights as a female are being infringed upon.

Stone Fruit is such a pleasure to flip through and enjoy for its beautiful drawings and line work. In the story the main character works through reconciling their relationship with their partner and themselves and their identity. The bond that they have with their niece is about ways of connecting, facing reality, and the cathartic potential of our creative minds. As a queer parent I really connected with how the relationship between the characters is about what we gift each other between generations or among peers, transcending the traditional family structures.

Saba Mahmood’s book is an intellectually stimulating and insightfully written study of a grassroots women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt.

Speaking to a North American audience, Mahmood challenged secular-liberal theorizations of human agency and views that depicted Muslim women in patriarchal societies as without agency. Her nuanced and multi-dimensional study evidenced a considerably more complex picture of moral choice, agency, and Islamist politics that centered on the women’s own understandings and interpretation of a complex religious and political landscape.

It is Mahmood’s balanced and reflexive approach that makes this book a deeply educational study for students and scholars alike.

This is a perfectly charming story about a boy who is way into ballet and baseball, written in the 1970s, but which still holds up today. And no one ever makes fun of him. Max is not necessarily Queer, but I consider it in the canon of kid’s books that address gender identity.

This list wouldn’t be complete without a first-person memoir, a woman’s lived experience in a woman’s voice. And what better memoir to choose than Winterson's searingly honest account of how she reclaimed her childhood through the power of language.

In writing that is naked and brave, Winterson reveals a childhood that was ghastly, even Dickensian, but that was the crucible for Winterson’s incendiary talent.