March 31 is International Transgender Day of Visibility, a day dedicated to celebrating the accomplishments of transgender people while raising awareness of the work that still needs to be done to achieve trans justice.
And of course, we want to honor this day through books so we’ve gathered together 10 fiction & nonfiction reads that are international in flavor written by trans authors (or in one case, the loved one of a transgender person).
But before we get to the books, we wanted to raise some awareness of the staggering levels of discrimination & violence that transgender people face. According to the U.S. Trans Survey:
In the year prior to completing the survey, 46% of respondents were verbally harassed & 9% were physically attacked because they were transgender.
During that same time period, 10% were sexually assaulted, & nearly half (47%) were sexually assaulted at some point in their lifetime.
30% of transgender people were fired, denied a promotion, or experienced mistreatment in the workplace due to their identity in the past 12 months.
10% reported that a family member was violent towards them because they were transgender, & 8% were kicked out of the house because they were transgender.
The findings also paint a troubling picture of the impact of stigma & discrimination with 40% of respondents reporting attempting suicide in their lifetime, nearly 9x the attempted suicide rate in the US!
Most states & countries offer no legal protections in housing, employment, health care, & other areas where individuals experience discrimination based on their gender identity or expression. As noted by World Population Review, 1.4 million people in the US identify as transgender. There are other nations where being transgender is recognized, but there’s very little data on how many transgender people there are. Some nations, such as India, recognize transgender as a third gender. However, other nations are not open to this idea. In 36 European countries, a mental health diagnosis is required before a transgender person is legally recognized. 20 European countries even require the sterilization of transgender people.
As GLAAD notes, this is why “it’s necessary for trans people to be seen through authentic & diverse stories to reflect the actual lived experiences of trans people; both for themselves & for those people who believe they've never met a trans person.”
Written by an author from Canada:
Winner, Lambda Literary Award; Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction; A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
It's the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpected phone call from a distant family friend with a startling secret: Wendy's Opa (grandfather)—a devout Mennonite farmer—might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this revelation, but as Wendy's life grows increasingly volatile, she finds herself aching for the lost pieces of her Opa's truth.
But this isn’t a story about her Opa. It’s a slice-of-life story about Wendy. Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined.
“I have never felt as seen, understood, or spoken to as I did when I read Little Fish. Never before in my life. Casey remains one of THE authors to read if you want to understand the interior lives of trans women in this century.” —Meredith Russo, author of If I Was Your Girl
“A touching and beautiful novel.” —The Independent (UK)
Written by an author from India:
For readers of Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and David Mitchell comes a striking debut novel by a storyteller of keen insight and captivating imagination.
Named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post & a Lambda Literary Award winner.
On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man’s unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion so he agrees to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.
From these documents, spills the chronicle of a race of people more than human, ruled by instincts and desires ages-old. The tale features a rough wanderer in 17th century India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman—and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok’s interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.
Shifting dreamlike between present and past with intoxicating language, visceral action, compelling characters, and stark emotion, The Devourers offers a reading experience quite unlike any other novel.
“[An] extraordinary piece of meta-fiction: stories within stories . . . trans-genre, transgender and transgressive . . . Who gets what he or she wants and, above all, who has the moral right to their desires, is the heart of this remarkable, multi-layered novel.” —Maclean’s
Written by a Canadian author of East Asian descent:
American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book & Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as Adrienne MareeBrown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.
“In this brave and skillfully written collection of essays, Kai Cheng Thom dares to be really honest—to write truths that go beyond easy orthodoxy to her and our own messy, complex, real stories. As a suicide survivor and someone who does work around suicide in queer and femme communities, I deeply appreciate her clarity about how suicide shows up in queer and trans communities and the ways in which social justice, queer, trans and/or Black and brown communities turn on and hurt each other while trying to keep ourselves safe. This is a brave book, and an essential text for everyone trying like hell to create something that will come after the end of the world. Read it, and prepare to have your mind challenged and opened.” —Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Written by an author from the US of Bangladeshi descent:
Named a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
A vibrant debut novel, set in Brooklyn and Bangladesh, follows three young women and one family struggling to make peace with secrets and their past
For as long as she can remember, Ella has longed to feel at home. Orphaned as a child after her parents’ murder, and afflicted with hallucinations at dusk, she’s always felt more at ease in nature than with people. She traveled from Bangladesh to Brooklyn to live with the Saleems: her uncle Anwar, aunt Hashi, and their beautiful daughter, Charu, her complete opposite. One summer, when Ella returns home from college, she discovers Charu’s friend Maya—an Islamic cleric’s runaway daughter—asleep in her bedroom.
As the girls have a summer of clandestine adventure and sexual awakenings, Anwar—owner of a popular botanical apothecary—has his own secrets, threatening his thirty-year marriage. But when tragedy strikes, the Saleems find themselves blamed. To keep his family from unraveling, Anwar takes them on a fated trip to Bangladesh, to reckon with the past, their extended family, and each other.
“A Brooklyn-by-way-of-Bangladesh Royal Tenenbaums.”—The Denver Post
“Every detail in this rich novel is evocative of transformation. . . . A sensitive and subtle exploration of the experience of gender nonconformity across cultures. . . . A transcontinental, transgenerational tale of a family and its secrets.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Vivid and captivating. . . . Spell-binding and a page turner. . . . A very promising debut that explores family, love, loss, and the painful process of growing up in a way that is both timeless and modern.” —Bustle
Written by an author from the US of Mexican descent:
Winner of the 2016 Tiptree Award, longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, & Stonewall Book Award Honor
McLemore delivers a stunning and utterly romantic novel tinged with magic.
To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel’s wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in the trees and for how little anyone knows about his life before he and his mother moved to town. But as odd as everyone considers Miel and Sam, even they stay away from the Bonner girls, four beautiful sisters rumored to be witches. Now they want the roses that grow from Miel’s skin, convinced that their scent can make anyone fall in love. And they’re willing to use every secret Miel has fought to protect to make sure she gives them up.
The story unfolds like a fairy tale, but there’s real-world poignance in the relationship between the two leads, and in Sam’s growing acceptance of himself, a narrative thread informed by the real-life transitioning of the author’s husband.
“McLemore’s second novel is such a lush surprising fable, you half expect birds to fly out of the pages… McLemore uses the supernatural to remind us that the body’s need to speak its truth is primal and profound, and that the connection between two people is no more anyone’s business than why the dish ran away with the spoon.” —NY Times Book Review
Written by a variety of authors who identify as South Asian or Desi:
Moving Truth(s) is written to move us all. Closer to home. To bring conversations about gender and sexuality home to family and community. To serve ourselves and our families and communities in better understanding the lives of queer and transgender individuals by sharing our stories—our truths—and together move toward a place of inquiry and respect, such that “truth” itself is moved to a new place. How do we stay engaged with family, community and culture when we experience homophobia and transphobia? Where have we found support systems? Who have been our most active and sometimes least expected advocates? What do we need to do to help grow the kind of community we seek support from? These questions move us toward a new sense of truth, shifting us out of the false belief that being queer and/or transgender is necessarily at odds with family and community. Our stories help us move those ideas into a new light.
The rich, celebratory, and self-reflective personal narratives in this book offer something different in their overlapping approaches to discomfort, fear, silence, as well as forgiveness, patience and an active pursuit of a more loving way to navigate relationships with ourselves and with others. As a community-building project, this anthology was created from a heart-centered place involving not only collective editing and story-development, but also providing contributors room to expand, heal and connect with one another across boundaries of experience.
Written by an author born in the Republic of Niger, who studied in Rhode Island, worked in the south of Spain, & now lives in Canada:
Independence Day meets Lord of the Flies in this “thrilling and imaginative” debut about two young outsiders forced to fight off alien invaders in a post-apocalyptic city. (Fonda Lee)
When the aliens invade, all seems lost. The world as they know it is destroyed. Their friends are kidnapped. Their families are changed.
But with no adults left to run things, young trans-girl Violet and her new friend Bo realize that they are free. Free to do whatever they want. Free to be whoever they want to be.
Except the invaders won’t leave them alone for long. . .
This “warm, thrilling adventure about what happens after the end of the world” is for fans of Paolo Bacigalupi and Ann Leckie. (Cherie Priest)
“An exciting twist on a hostile-alien-takeover drama. . .exhilarating.” —Washington Post
“An energetic, nonstop adventure.” —Chicago Tribune
Written by a variety of authors from Tamil Nadu, a state in southeastern India:
Aravanis or hijras have long been the invisible yet hyper-visible subjects of a societal gaze that reduces them to stereotype. Imagined as often as looked at or talked about, simultaneously revered and cursed, they have, in the process, been refused individual histories, lives and identities, even selves. Yet the community continues to challenge and subvert this view, persistently refusing to allow itself to be shamed or victimized. Some of the greatest recent victories in this ongoing battle for rights have been won in Tamil Nadu, where the government first began to recognize many of the rights of the hijra community.
The stories in this volume chronicle, in their own words, the lives of many of the aravanis who were part of this groundbreaking change. These landmark narratives—chronicles of pain and courage, of despair and triumph—are amongst the first accounts of hijra lives to be produced entirely by the members of the community themselves.
View on Amazon | Unavailable via Bookshop.org | SecondSale used book
Written by an author from Australia:
Min Lee is a workaholic who can’t say no. She substitutes sleep with Red Bull and, through a combination of repression and bad habits, has managed to score herself a luxury apartment, a fabulous boyfriend and the approval of her billionaire CEO. Things are looking pretty awesome… well, apart from those body image issues that constantly plague her.
But Min thinks she's got everything worked out. She's arranged her comfort zone and has zero desire to look outside of it… or, so she tells herself.
It’s not until a troubled schoolgirl tracks her down from the Internet, stalks her to her home and noses her way into life that Min begins to admit that something is wrong in her perfect world. Something that she's never thought about before, and doesn’t even want to think about. Something that has the power to ruin all her relationships and dismantle everything in her life she’s worked so very hard for.
What if “she” isn’t the right word for Min at all?
Written by an author from Canada:
Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Transgender indie electronica singer-songwriter Rae Spoon has six albums to their credit, including I Can't Keep All of Our Secrets. This first book by Rae (who uses “they” as a pronoun) is a candid, powerful story about a young person growing up queer in a strict Pentecostal family in Alberta.
The narrator attends church events and Billy Graham rallies faithfully with their family before discovering the music that becomes their salvation and means of escape. As their father's schizophrenia causes their parents' marriage to unravel, the narrator finds solace and safety in the company of their siblings, in their nascent feelings for a girl at school, and in their growing awareness that they are not the person their parents think they are. With a heart as big as the prairie sky, this is a quietly devastating, heart-wrenching coming-of-age book about escaping dogma, surviving abuse, finding love, and risking everything for acceptance.
“First Spring Grass Fire will be meaningful to anyone who has struggled to fit in. By telling these stories—of being different, queer, raised in a rigid belief system you didn't choose, trying to be yourself within circumstances you can't control—Rae Spoon illustrates the triumph in reclaiming and controlling your own identity. This moving collection is a story of what we do to find a place, physical or intangible, that we can call home.” —National Post
“The prose is concise without ornamentation; emotionally moving because of its raw honesty. While issues of gender and sexuality certainly underline the majority of the narrator's existential despair, the book works because it pushes the reader to understand the humanity of the narrator rather than simply a trans or lesbian narrative. It demonstrates the commonality of grief, loss, fear, pain, love, and longing.”
—Lambda Literary