Transgender Awareness Week Reading List
November 13-19 is Transgender Awareness Week.
This Friday, November 20th is Trans Day of Remembrance.
We remember those murdered. We fight for those who are still alive.
"Transgender Day of Remembrance seeks to highlight the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence. I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost. With so many seeking to erase transgender people -- sometimes in the most brutal ways possible -- it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice."
- Transgender Day of Remembrance founder Gwendolyn Ann Smith
What books are on your list? What books are we missing?
Alok Vaid-Menon’s ‘Beyond the Gender Binary’ or Jia Qing Wilson-Yang’s award winning ‘Small Beauty’.
Mona, Executive Director at Queer Yukon has some fab book reccomendations!
Mona’s reccomendations:
Image description: Picture of the cover of Kai Cheng Thom’s book ‘Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars’, an illustrated pink purple and blue book cover with hands with painted nails holding a cigarette, high heels, lipstick, a needle, ants, a mermaid tail, and cake.
FIERCE FEMMES AND NOTORIOUS LIARS: A DANGEROUS TRANS GIRL’S CONFABULOUS MEMOIR"
By Kai Cheng Thom
“With Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, you really get the sense of creativity and invention that comes from becoming your own woman – an artist of your own identity […] This is writing at its best. Enjoy being touched by the sparkle, warmth, community, violence and fierceness of the world Kai Cheng Thom has created.” – Emma Watson
Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir is the highly sensational, ultra-exciting, sort-of true, coming-of-age story of a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents’ abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who make their home in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles.
From Metonymy Press
Available in the DWS library!
GENDER FAILURE
By Ivan E. coyote and Rae Spoon
“Being a girl was something that never really happened for me.” -Rae Spoon
Image description: Picture of the covers of Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoons book ‘Gender Failure’ that has a picture of both authors sitting beside each other wearing suits and holding their hands in their laps.
Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted "gender failures. " In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.
Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across Canada and the US and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae's personal journeys from gender failure to gender self-acceptance. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it's a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.
From Arsenal Pulp Press
Available in the DWS library!
Little Fish
by Casey Plett
Image description: Picture of the cover of Casey Plett’s novel ‘Little Fish’ that has text over an illustrated winter street scene
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. Can Wendy unravel the mystery of her grandfather's world and reckon with the culture that both shaped and rejected her? She's determined to try.
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.
From Arsenal Pulp Press
FROM THE STARS IN THE SKY TO THE FISH IN THE SEA
Text by Kai Cheng Thom
Illustrated by Kai Yun Ching & Wai-Yant Li
Image description: Picture of Kai Cheng Thom’s book cover ‘From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea’ which has an illustration of a child with a fantastical horns and a cape following them.
In the magical time between night and day, when both the sun and the moon are in the sky, a child is born in a little blue house on a hill. And Miu Lan is not just any child, but one who can change into any shape they can imagine. The only problem is they can't decide what to be: a boy or a girl? A bird or a fish? A flower or a shooting star? At school, though, they must endure inquisitive looks and difficult questions from the other children, and have trouble finding friends who will accept them for who they are. But they find comfort in the loving arms of their mother, who always offers them the same loving refrain: "whatever you dream of / i believe you can be / from the stars in the sky to the fish in the sea. "
In this captivating, beautifully imagined picture book about gender, identity, and the acceptance of the differences between us, Miu Lan faces many questions about who they are and who they may be. But one thing's for sure: no matter who this child becomes, their mother will love them just the same.
From Arsenal Pulp Press
Felix Ever After
By Kacen Callender
Image description: Picture of book cover for Kacen Callender’s ‘Felix Ever After’ which has illustration of brown youth with arm tattoos wearing tank top and flower crown
Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.
From Harper Collins
Image description: Cover of Sophia Labelle’s ‘Down with the cis-tem’ which has illustration of two people holding hands and wearing backpacks, one person has their hand to their open mouth
Down with the cis-tem
By Sophie Labelle
Sophie Labelle is the French-Canadian author of Serious Trans Vibes / Assigned Male comics, which she has been drawing since 2014. She is also the author of several children's books and novels, as well as a public speaker. She gives talks and lectures to a large array of audiences, from kindergarden groups to university students.
In the DWS Library!
Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression
by Iris Gottlieb
Image description: Cover of Iris Gottlieb’s ‘Seeing Gender’
Seeing Gender is an of-the-moment investigation into how we express and understand the complexities of gender today. Deeply researched and fully illustrated, this book demystifies an intensely personal--yet universal--facet of humanity. Illustrating a different concept on each spread, queer author and artist Iris Gottlieb touches on history, science, sociology, and her own experience. This book is an essential tool for understanding and contributing to a necessary cultural conversation, bringing clarity and reassurance to the sometimes confusing process of navigating ones' identity. Whether LGBTQ+, cisgender, or nonbinary, Seeing Gender is a must-read for intelligent, curious, want-to-be woke people who care about how we see and talk about gender and sexuality in the 21st century.
From Burning Books
Available in the DWS library!
I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World
by Kai Cheng Thom
Image description: Cover of Kai Cheng Thom’s ‘I Hope We Choose Love’
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 maree brown 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.
From Arsenal Pulp Press
Available in the DWS library!
A TWO-SPIRIT JOURNEY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LESBIAN OJIBWA-CREE ELDER
BY MA-NEE CHACABY AND MARY LOUISA PLUMMER
Image description: Cover of Ma-Nee Chacaby’s ‘A Two-Spirit Journey’
A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.
As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.
Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.
Available in the DWS Library!
A quick and easy guide to queer and trans identities
By Mady G. and J.R. Zuckerberg
Illustrated by Mady G. and J.R. Zuckerberg
Image description: Cover of the book ‘A Quick and Easy Guide to Queer and Trans Identities’
In this quick and easy guide to queer and trans identities, cartoonists Mady G and JR Zuckerberg guide you through the basics of the LGBT+ world! Covering essential topics like sexuality, gender identity, coming out, and navigating relationships, this guide explains the spectrum of human experience through informative comics, interviews, worksheets, and imaginative examples. A great starting point for anyone curious about queer and trans life, and helpful for those already on their own journeys!
From Simon & Schuster
Available in the DWS Library!
A Quick & Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns
By Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson
Illustrated by Archie Bongiovanni
Image description: Cover of Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson’s ‘A Quick an d Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns’
Archie, a snarky genderqueer artist, is tired of people not understanding gender neutral pronouns. Tristan, a cisgender dude, is looking for an easy way to introduce gender neutral pronouns to his increasingly diverse workplace. The longtime best friends team up in this short and fun comic guide that explains what pronouns are, why they matter, and how to use them. They also include what to do if you make a mistake, and some tips-and-tricks for those who identify outside of the binary to keep themselves safe in this binary-centric world. A quick and easy resource for people who use they/them pronouns, and people who want to learn more!
From Simon & Schuster
Available in the DWS Library!
Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws
By Kate Bornstein
Image description: Cover of Kate Bornstein’s ‘Hello Cruel World’
A one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive outside the box, Hello, Cruel World is a much-needed unconventional approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, but alive.
Hello, Cruel World features a catalog of 101 alternatives to suicide that range from the playful (moisturize!), to the irreverent (shatter some family values), to the highly controversial. Designed to encourage readers to give themselves permission to unleash their hearts’ harmless desires, the book has only one directive: “Don’t be mean.”
From katebornstein.com
Available in the DWS Library!
Tomboy Survival Guide
By Ivan E. Coyote
Image description: Cover of Ivan E Coyote’s ‘Tomboy Survival Guide’
Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, about how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don't fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.
Ivan writes about their years as a young butch, dealing with new infatuations and old baggage, and life as a gender-box-defying adult, in which they offer advice to young people while seeking guidance from others. (And for tomboys in training, there are even directions on building your very own unicorn trap. )
Tomboy Survival Guide warmly recounts Ivan's past as a diffident yet free-spirited tomboy, and maps their journey through treacherous gender landscapes and a maze of labels that don't quite stick, to a place of self-acceptance and an authentic and personal strength.
From Arsenal Pulp Press
Available in the DWS Library!