March 31st is Trans Day of Visibility, so we're taking this as an opportunity to spotlight some of our favourite recent books from transgender and gender diverse authors. With conservative fearmongering on the rise, now more than ever it's important to support the LGBTQIA+ community by engaging with their stories and uplifting trans voices.
We have a whole collection of great books from gender diverse authors, so once you've read your way through this blog, check out that list and support trans writers all year round.
Fiction & poetry
Geraldine
Andrea Thompson
Geraldine is born with an adventurer's heart. Whether it's escaping from boarding school in Rhodesia, or buying hormones from the local speed dealer in Weston-super-Mare, Geraldine is open to all the world has to offer – even if the world doesn't quite know what to make of her.
Arriving in Australia as an adolescent, Geraldine finds solace and self-discovery through music. As she grows into a woman, she not only inspires others but also learns to be accepted for who she truly is.
Stag Dance
Torrey Peters
From the adventures of a lonely logger who, deep in the forest, joins his workmates to dance dressed as a woman, to the story of an obsessive boarding-school romance, to the dizzying spectacle of a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend, Peters' keen eye for the rough edges of trans community and desire reveals fresh possibilities.
Acidly funny and breath-taking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of Lauren Groff or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles and delights.
A Language of Limbs
Dylin Hardcastle
The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.
Throat
Ellen van Neerven
Throat is the explosive second poetry collection from award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. Exploring love, language and land, van Neerven flexes their distinctive muscles and shines alight on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart. Van Neerven is unsparing in the interrogation of colonial impulse, and fiercely loyal to telling the stories that make us who we are.
rock flight
Hasib Hourani
rock flight is a book-length poem that, over five chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative, to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine's occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine.
It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
She Who Became the Sun
Shelley Parker-Chan
In a famine-stricken village on a dusty plain, a seer shows two children their fates. For a family’s eighth-born son, there’s greatness. For the second daughter, nothing.
In 1345, China lies restless under harsh Mongol rule. And when a bandit raid wipes out their home, the two children must somehow survive. Zhu Chongba despairs and gives in. But the girl resolves to overcome her destiny. So she takes her dead brother’s identity and begins her journey. Can Zhu escape what’s written in the stars, as rebellion sweeps the land? Or can she claim her brother’s greatness – and rise as high as she can dream?
Some Strange Music Draws Me In
Griffin Hansbury
It's summer, 1984, in blue-collar Swaffham, Massachusetts. Mel is thirteen, drinking a Slush Puppie at the drugstore, when she hears a voice, 'deep and movie-star dramatic, like Lauren Bacall': Sylvia.
Sylvia's shameless swagger and tough-girl trans femininity sparks fury among her new neighbours and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and her best friend. But it is also a catalyst for Mel. She comes to realise that not only is there a world beyond Swaffham, there are other ways of being.
Narrating this blistering coming-of-age tale from 2019 is Max – formerly Mel – who is on leave from his job for defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
Disappoint Me
by Nicola Dinan
Max is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. She's living her best life! Or is she?
The debris of years of dysphoria and failed relationships rattle around in her head. When she tumbles down the stairs at a New Year's Eve party and wakes up in hospital alone, she decides to make some changes.
First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.
Enter Vincent, corporate lawyer and hobby baker. His trad friendship group may as well speak a different language to Max, and his Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. It's uncertain terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way she'd long given up on as a foolish fantasy.
Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage. Is Vincent really the new face of the Enlightened Man, or will the ghosts of his past sabotage his and Max's happiness?
Nonfiction
Detachable Penis
Sam Elkin
As the inaugural lawyer of Victoria's queer law service, Elkin is quickly immersed in thorny debates around trans inclusion in sport, children's access to puberty blockers, birth certificate law reform and the Christian right's demand for enhanced religious freedoms. Set against the backdrop of a growing moral panic about the 'trans agenda', Elkin reflects on the double-edged sword of visibility post the 'transgender tipping point'.
Elkin offers an honest, unflinching account of chest surgery, phalloplasty, the emotional impact of cross-sex hormones and the perils of airport body scanners. Undogmatic and refreshingly open-minded, Elkin explores his ambivalence about aspects of his own transition, masculinity and fears of lesbian erasure as he encounters a new world of gender-affirming psychologists, surgeons and speech pathologists.
Travelling to Tomorrow
Yves Rees
Yves Rees rewrites the story of Australian-US relations by spotlighting ten trailblazing women whose extraordinary lives have largely been forgotten.
A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.
A century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across the Pacific to make their fortune. In doing so, they reoriented Australia towards the United States years before politicians began to lumber down the same path.
Love in Exile
Shon Faye
Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love – the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. Faye's experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.
Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out.
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times – for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.
Dear Cis(gender) People: A Guide to Allyship and Empathy
Kenny Ethan Jones
Behind the shock headlines and the distressing statistics, what does it really mean to be trans?
The trans experience is all-too-often the subject of fierce debate in the media and online. Whilst we’re having more and more conversations about the trans experience, the stark reality is that hate crimes against the trans community have quadrupled over the past five years.
In this powerful, extensively researched and deeply personal book, Kenny Ethan Jones, trans activist and writer, offers an authentic and in-depth insight into the trans experience. From gender dysphoria to surgery, from being outed to finding love and considering parenthood, Kenny Ethan Jones draws on his own life and the stories of others from the trans and non-binary communities to create discussion around the complexities and reality of the trans experiences in today’s society.
Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia
Edited by Sam Elkin, Alex Gallagher, Yves Rees and Bobuq Sayed
Nothing to Hide is Australia’s first mainstream anthology of trans and gender diverse writing.
While there has been unprecedented trans visibility in Australia in the last decade, this visibility has not always been positive, shadowed at every step by transphobic misinformation and extremist rhetoric. As a counter to the harmful chorus of anti-trans voices, this collection features the work of thirty trans and gender diverse people who sit across the spectrum of age, race, geography and circumstance. The writers give voice to their communities and tell their own stories, on their own terms.
Showcasing the wealth of creativity within the trans and gender diverse community and providing illuminating insights into the challenges and joys of trans experience, Nothing to Hide is a powerful contribution to Australian letters.
Young adult fiction
Everything Under the Moon
Edited by Michael Earp, illustrated by Kit Fox
Some damsels don't want to be rescued. Some curses don't need to be broken. And some of the best happy ever afters won't be found in storybooks.
Think you know fairy tales? Think again. These twelve fairy tales have been spun through a queered lens to reflect our world in stories as old as time. From the furthest reaches of space and the darkest depths of the forest to the street just around the corner, this anthology will excite, challenge and move you. Featuring stories from some of the biggest names in young adult fiction, Everything Under the Moon is an illuminating celebration of queer love and identity.
Lushly illustrated by up-and-coming talent Kit Fox, this collection includes stories by Michael Earp, Alison Evans, Helena Fox, Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner, Will Kostakis, Jes Layton, Gary Lonesborough, Amber McBride, Abdi Nazemian, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Alexandra Villasante and Lili Wilkinson.
The Spider and Her Demons
sydney khoo
Moving and funny by turns, this is a story about what it takes to make peace with your demons – literal or otherwise. An urban fantasy spin on growing up as a second-generation immigrant, struggling under the overwhelming pressure to make others proud, while feeling trapped inside your own body.
Between surviving high school and working at her aunt's dumpling shop, all Zhi wants is to find time for her friends … and make sure no one finds out she's half spider-demon.
But when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl in school, she discovers she might not be the scariest thing in the shadows …
Not for the Faint of Heart
Lex Croucher
Mariel is desperate to live up to the legacy of her grandfather, the legendary Robin Hood. Clem, a backwoods assistant healer known for her new-fangled cures, just wants to help people.
When Mariel's ramshackle band of Merry Men kidnap Clem as retribution for her guardian helping the Sheriff of Nottingham, all seems to be going (sort of) to plan – until Mariel's father is captured in a deadly ambush. Determined to prove herself, Mariel sets out to get him back with her annoyingly cheerful kidnappee in tow.
But the wood is at war. Many believe the Merry Men are no longer on the right side of history. Watching Clem tend the party's wounds, Mariel begins to doubt the cause to which she has devoted her life. As the two of them grow closer, one thing is clear: they must prepare to fight for their lives and for the lives of everybody in the greenwood.
Compound Fracture
Andrew Joseph White
On the night Miles Abernathy, sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian, comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: photos that prove the county's Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called 'accident' that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.
The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles's great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners' rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud's latest victim as the sheriff's son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.
In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles's bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidently kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff's heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they're willing to put everything on the line – is Miles?
Celestial Monsters
Aiden Thomas
New York Times-bestselling author Aiden Thomas returns to the beloved world of The Sunbearer Trials in Celestial Monsters, a heart-stopping duology finale, in which three young semidioses travel through a dark monster-infested world, facing down chaotic Obsidian gods, in a quest to save their friends and return the sun to the sky.
Teo never thought he could be a Hero. Now, he doesn't have a choice.
The sun is gone, the Obsidian gods have been released from their prison, and chaos and destruction are wreaking havoc on Reino del Sol.
With the world plunged into perpetual night, Teo, his crush Aurelio, and his best friend Niya must journey to the dark wilderness of Los Restos, battling vicious monsters while dealing with guilt, trauma, and a (very distracting) burgeoning romance between Teo and Aurelio. Determined to rescue the captured semidioses and retrieve the Sol Stone, the trio races against the clock to return Sol and their protective light so order can be restored.
Now the future of the whole world is in their hands.
