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But the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Olathe school district in 1994 would go on to federal court, where the judge ruled that its removal was unconstitutional and violated students’ First Amendment Rights. In this book, Stryker covers trans history from the 1850s to today, unpacking excerpts from trans memoirs, how trans-ness was seen and depicted over the decades, how trans social change has changed, and the historical trans people who lived through these times.
This book has so much to teach us about gender f*ckery, drag, the history of queer culture, and most important, the future of queer culture.
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton (2017)
How did slavery, and the production of a racialized gender dynamic, provide foundations for a fluid understanding of gender?
Many stories to encounter. Many contemporary readers are torn on their feelings about the novel due to the age gap between Elio and Oliver, but the book’s cultural impact is undeniable after the film featuring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer released in 2017, and was nominated for several Academy Awards.
Content warnings for adult/minor relationship, sexual assault.
Ash by Malinda Lo (2009)
Aisling, or Ash, is a teenage girl working as a servant in her own home to help pay off her father’s debt.
In this essay collection, the first full-length work to focus specifically on a tribally specific Indigenous queer or two-spirit identity, Driskill looks at how Cherokee culture and history have looked at and shaped gender identity, drawing from oral history and archives. Bonus points for the fact that Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick are hilariously cute on TikTok.
Snorton pulls on medical trauma and experimentation on Black women, midcentury Black trans narratives, Hollywood films, sensationalist journalism, slave narratives, and more to connect trans-ness and Blackness in ways that are inextricable. He moves into the home of the Fedden family while they’re away in France, and after helping their daughter Cat through an episode of self-harm, he quickly becomes a permanent part of their family.
While it’s a richly academic book, sometimes a bit dense, Snorton’s book is lauded for being a crucial contribution to the work of queer and trans narratives.
Content warnings for racism, transphobia, medical trauma, suicide.
We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib (2019)
According to the world, Samra Habib doesn’t exist.
Borrowed Time is all about Roger’s illness, Monette’s fears, and Roger’s eventual death, a love story, and a profound work about loss. The joy of queerness is that it is impossible to contain, that it contains multitudes. But after she increasingly starts to enjoy kissing good friend Coley, their romantic relationship is discovered, and her family sends her to a conversion camp.
It was most notable for showing young Molly Bolt, an adopted daughter in a poor family, understanding from an early age that she has a crush on a girl and that is completely normal. I liked this book more than Delilah Green, mostly because Iris’ love interest was fun to learn about. It has a score of 94/100 on Metacritic and a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes.
It includes his work as co-founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
She writes about white feminism, lesbian parenthood, toxic masculinity, colorism, imperialism, and how Black women can best support one another in the struggle. It’s a book of sexuality, trauma, otherness, and most of all, painful, messy family, that deals frankly and unapologetically with issues of child abuse, poverty, toxic masculinity, and the American South.
Content warnings for graphic child abuse (sexual, physical), sexual assault, alcoholism, racial slurs, animal death.
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)
Jess Goldberg is a butch working-class lesbian in 1970s America, struggling to survive in a painful and unaccepting world.
This eerie, seductive story follows Laura, a young woman who falls under the spell of the mysterious and mesmerizing Carmilla. This first novella features Nancy, an asexual girl with a white streak in her hair. The book was adapted into a BBC television drama serial in 2002 which heightened the novel’s success and reach. This ultimately sweet, heart-warming story is full of realistic, genuine teenage struggle, awkwardness, drama, and humor.
It’s messy as hell, but so are real people! Anzaldúa herself was queer and her works are absolutely vital for an understanding of living on the edges of the world, living in on the borders of “in-between.” Her work is considered one of the primary early works or precursors to Latinx philosophy.
Content warnings for racism, racial slurs, rape and sexual violence, violence, genocide.
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette (1988)
“It will be recorded that the dead in the first decade of the calamity died of our indifference,” writes Monette.
Between the 79 pages of notes and the 16 pages of photographs and art, you know that France isn’t kidding around with this one.