11 Books for Transgender Day of Remembrance

To honor the lives lost to violence against trans people, this Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) we selected 11 books by trans authors or about transgender experiences and subjects. Check out one of these books to learn about TDOR, supporting trans people, and how to advocate against the violence and hate crimes committed against our transgender community.

To learn more about our LGBTQ+ library, visit gaycity.org/libray-information.

1. A Princess of Great Daring!

Written by Tobi Hill-Meyer, Illustrated by Elenore Toczynski

When Jamie is ready to tell people that she’s really a girl inside, she becomes a princess of great daring by playing a game with her best friends to gather her courage. She’s pleased (but not surprised) that her questing friends turn out to be just as loyal and true as any princess could want.

2. Becoming a Visible Man

By Jamison Green

Written by a leading activist in the transgender movement, Becoming a Visible Man is an artful and compelling inquiry into the politics of gender. Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment.

3. Best Transgender Erotica

By Hanne Blank and Raven Kaldera

Best Transgender Erotica brings together twenty stories by writers of every gender. The first book to celebrate exclusively gender-bending, -crossing, and -breaking sexuality through erotic fiction, Best Transgender Erotica includes representations of many forms of the `trans` identity. Whether blurring the line between masculine and feminine, or making the transition from female to male, or vice versa, these characters (and authors) had to put on their sexiest, most alluring, heart-racing show in order to make the cut.

4. For Today I am a Boy

By Kim Fu

Peter Huang and his sisters—elegant Adele, shrewd Helen, and Bonnie the bon vivant—grow up in a house of many secrets, then escape the confines of small-town Ontario and travel from Montreal to California to Berlin. Peter’s own journey is obstructed by playground bullies, masochistic lovers, Christian ex-gays, and the ever-present shadow of his Chinese father.

5. God Loves Hair

By Vivek Shraya

First self-published to acclaim in 2011, Vivek Shraya’s first book is a collection of twenty-one short stories following a tender, intellectual, and curious child of Indian origin as he navigates the complex realms of sexuality, gender, racial politics, religion, and belonging. Told with the poignant insight and honesty that only the voice of a young mind can convey, God Loves Hair is a moving and ultimately joyous portrait of youth that celebrates diversity in all shapes, sizes, and colors. A Lambda Literary Award finalist in the category of children’s books. The stories are accompanied by the award-winning full-color illustrations of Juliana Neufeld.

6. Read My Lips:

Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender

By Riki Anne Wilchins

Read My Lips burst on the scene in 1997 without precedent. It was unique, radical, endearing, outrageous, and very funny. It stood the orthodox academic and medical theories about transexuals on their heads. At last, a trans-intellectual built a theoretical foundation of transgenderism in accessible language, and, most importantly, laid out the tools to fight back against gender oppression. Now re-published as a canon of trans-writing—a book that has influenced queer academics and genderqueer folk everywhere for more than fifteen years—its message remains radical.

7. The First Man-Made Man:
The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution,

By Pagan Kennedy

In the 1920s when Laura Dillon felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body, there were no words to describe her condition; transsexuals had yet to enter common usage. And there was no known solution to being stuck between the sexes. Laura Dillon did all she could on her own: she cut her hair, dressed in men’s clothing, bound her breasts with a belt. But in a desperate bid to feel comfortable in her own skin, she experimented with breakthrough technologies that ultimately transformed the human body and revolutionized medicine. From upper-class orphan girl to Oxford lesbian, from post-surgery romance with Roberta Cowell (an early male-to-female) to self-imposed exile in India, Michael Dillon’s incredible story reveals the struggles of early transsexuals and challenges conventional notions of what gender really means.

8. The Gender Frontier

By Mariette Pathy Allen

Mariette Pathy Allen documents the lives of extraordinary individuals, their partners, families and friends. Through photographs and short texts, the reader is offered an intimate connection to the book’s subjects and insight into how their own lives are affected by gender. As Allen says, “Transgender people offer the rest of us a potentially exhilarating vision of fluidity, freed from traditional roles or definitions. They make vivid the questions: What is the essence of humanness beyond masculinity or femininity?”

9. Thriving While Trans: A Love Manual

Edited by Cody Pherigo

Thriving While Trans: A Love Manual is a literary project that centers testimonies of transgender thriving and resilience. TWT gives trans artists a place to publicly revise and claim a trans narrative that highlights the immense amount of strength, creativity, love, and intelligence steeped in transgender lives.

10. To my Trans Sisters

Edited by Charlie Craggs

Dedicated to trans women everywhere, this inspirational collection of letters written by successful trans women shares the lessons they learned on their journeys to womanhood, celebrating their achievements and empowering the next generation to become who they truly are.

Written by politicians, scientists, models, athletes, authors, actors, and activists from around the world, these letters capture the diversity of the trans experience and offer advice from make-up and dating through to fighting dysphoria and transphobia.

By turns honest and heartfelt, funny and furious or beautiful and brave, these letters send a clear message of hope to their sisters: each of these women have gone through the struggles of transition and emerged the other side as accomplished, confident women; and if we made it sister, so can you!

11. Transgender Care

Recommended Guidelines, Practical Information & Personal Accounts
By Gianna E. Istrael and Donald E. Tarver II, M.D.

By empowering clients to be well-informed medical consumers and by delivering care providers from the straitjacket of inadequate diagnostic standards and stereotypes, this book sets out to transform the nature of transgender care. In an accessible style, the authors discuss key mental health issues with much attention to the vexed relationship between professionals and clients. They propose a new professional role; that of the “Gender Specialist.”