#BOOKS FOR TRANS

[transread]

A Mirror Made of Words 🪞💜

“Queer in the Mirror: Trans Poems” isn’t just poetry. It’s a heartbeat—wild, unapologetic, and real.

Every line feels like a truth you’ve kept buried, finally set free. A language of longing, joy, rage, and healing that refuses to be silenced. These poems don’t ask for permission to exist; they demand it.

It’s the kind of book you stumble upon and realize you’ve been searching for all along. The kind that feels like a conversation you’ve craved but never quite found.

Read it if you’re ready to see yourself in ways you never have before. Or if you’ve ever felt invisible and needed something to cling to. Or simply if you want to feel seen.

Because these words aren’t just words—they’re a mirror. And what you find there might just change everything.

#TransPoetry #QueerInTheMirror #WordsThatHeal

Amazon.com: Queer in the Mirror: Trans Poems eBook

[mysharona1987]

So, Ben is going through some things these days.

[rincewind87]

[aubryjoi]

Whatcha reading? 👁️👁️📖

Little doodle inspired by a picture of my reading buddy Soba! 🖤

[cliveguy]

i feel like i'm speaking a different language whenever i try to talk about jkr to anyone who isn't a trans person in the uk. americans imagine if every time someone tried to talk about donald trump a million home alone fans started talking about how they felt bad for macauley culkin but they were doing activism by drawing fanart of the burglars having gay sex. also they understand some of the problematic aspects of home alone and try to divorce their enjoyment of the films from trump's presence but they would appreciate permission from you to continue watching them. then every time you try to steer the conversation away from home alone to what he's currently doing in the present day they get confused and keep bringing it up.

[lizardho]

I came out to my dad as bisexual at 14 and I was PANICKED because I had a crush on a guy in my Boy Scout troop and thought I was Going To Hell Forever and he was so kind and understanding of my distress, but he had NO idea what bisexuality was. He just said “yeah but you like girls too? This is normal. Everyone is like this.” And I love my dad and trust him with my life to this day and the idea that the concept of bisexuality had not occurred to him had not occurred to me so I put it off.

By 16 though I had a crush on like THREE boys. Three entire boys in my Boy Scout troop. I felt like my sin was slowly advancing, until like an untreated cancer it had become metastatic. I remember bawling my L’il limp-wristed sissy eyes out in his big rumbly truck on the way home from a scout meeting and him telling me that it was OK, that he still loved me if I was gay, but that he knew I wasn’t gay because I still had crushes on women and that meant I was straight. I didn’t quite know how to explain that those felt *~*different*~* and that I felt like I was losing a fight to evil inside me but I again felt comforted by his reassurances and his genuine fatherly love.

At 18 I was like “hey I’m realizing all my friends are going on missions. I don’t wanna do that. Idk how to say that and I don’t have a ‘good enough’ reason to not wanna go.” So I just put it off. Again, my parents were extremely supportive of the information I gave them (I blamed it on perpetually forgetting to start the paperwork.) and one day my mom texted me that she had done the paperwork for me! And that all I needed was to get a physical! So I did that (it was awkward af tbh, my hernia check was done by a trainee doctor and she spent like 3 minutes fishing around my inguinal canals before her attending rescued me) and was sent to Mexico City where I learned that in addition to dipshit himbos with strong hands and scruffy guys with artistic hearts I was REALLY into chubby Latin men with strong personalities who bullied me a little when I lived in Mexico.

I remember my first companion got annoyed with me during an argument and said we were just gonna wrestle and whoever won the wrestling match won the argument (I stg I am dead serious this happened.) I was like…SWEATING when he tore off his tie and threw his white button-down shirt onto the ground (I won btw, don’t ask me how).

I remember one of my companions with this really intense, almost manic energy telling me that he was gonna make sure I was safe in a new area I didn’t know very well. He cooked breakfast for me and we’d go shopping together on P-Days and in the mornings before breakfast he’d jog around and do pull-ups with his shirt off and I’d do anything but look at him because my face would break out in a sweat so intense he’d think I was crying and come over to see if I was OK and somehow make it worse. He let me play D&D with myself in the evenings even though it was against mission rules because he knew how lonely and stressed I was.

I remember one of my companions was a big chubby man with a loud voice and a great sense of humor. He was kind and direct when addressing conflicts with me, and always bragged about how he knew the secrets of women’s minds and it felt like he really did since it almost always boiled down to “Treat Them Like People and Love Them a Lot. Don’t Stop Being A Person For Them. Also Eat Them Out Sloppy Style.” Our P-Day activities sometimes felt like dates, and it seemed like he was more attentive to my emotional state than I was since he was always the first to suggest we slow down our Divinely Mandated, God-Ordained, Super Sacred Work and Wonder to get a snack or check out a Pawn Shop (I love Pawn Shops).

I remember another companion who asked me to bully him every time he did something against his goal of losing weight. It was like he gave me Carte Blanche to take out my crush on him by being a nuisance and I LOVED that. I remember having a breakdown one day after we’d spent the afternoon frantically cleaning our disgusting-barely-habitable mission house to make it look less vile that it was (not our fault imo?) and I started bawling and he pulled me into a hug and he smelled good and he told me he knew it wasn’t just the house and that I was mad at him for being a Huge Dickhead for about a week (true) and that he would work on it. (He’s also a huge chaser but that’s a separate thing.)

I remember one of my companions waking up early (and our schedule is already built for sleep deprivation) to make me a “birthday cake” from knock-off Nutella and bread. He used matches for candles and woke me up, lit the ‘candles,’ pulled them out, then smashed it in my face and took a bunch of pictures while I was still madrugada and disoriented as fuck. He had the same sense of humor as one of my HS crushes and I could push his buttons pretty easily which was so fun.

I came home from my mission and started back at BYU where I became actively and aggressively suicidal. I had a stalker the year I moved up there and my dad’s solution to that was to get me a gun. I know he wouldn’t have bought me a gun if he could have read my mind, but I had a loaded pistol under my bed during a trifecta faith/sexuality/gender crisis and that was not helpful. I remember that the day I decided to kill myself I figured I’d call the BYU CAPS and see if I could get into therapy because it felt like what I was “supposed to do” so I could check my suicide boxes. My therapist was the guy who’d helped me pick a major the year before and was this drop-dead gorgeous Hawaiian man who cried when I told him how I’d been feeling.

A few weeks into therapy I met another stunning man with soft eyes and a scruffy illegal-at-BYU beard he kept pushing his luck with. He was funny, kind, patient, married, and wouldn’t give me the time of day if he knew I was crushing on him. We were in my history of psych class, which was inarguably the worst psych class I have ever had, and we studied together for every assignment and test and I realized that my feelings for him and for all the men I’d already mentioned were in direct conflict with my faith and relationship with God. My already agonizing spiritual conflict became even more wretched and as a result of this plus some other tightly-packed experiences with Mormonisms bullshit, I left the church.

After leaving the church I decided to move back to AZ and transfer to ASU. My mom helped me get a dog since I think it had started to dawn on my family that my mental health was barely getting me through the day, and she knew that we both loved dogs. Madi made my last year at BYU livable while I got my shit together and transferred. In that last year, I went on a date with quite possibly the only semi-openly-out trans person on BYU campus. It was not a great date imo, I was not doing well, but the person I spoke with was fun and fascinating and talked to me about Gender Dysphoria and it really cemented my need to go. To leave and never come back to that fucking school.

I started at ASU a month after my last semester at BYU and within a very short time frame it felt like I was coming back together, like a puzzle magically putting itself together in an environment that wasn’t slowly draining that puzzle’s will to live.

On the 4th of July, the year I started at ASU, I saw a transition timeline photo of a gorgeous happy beautiful happy radiant happy woman and her former Mormon missionary self and I realized the light that was on in her eyes was the light that was off in mine. I looked into transitioning for 3 days, sleeping about 10 hours total during that time. I started talking to other trans people on Reddit (one of whom is now my beautiful fiancée @cintailed) and after about a month of making preparations to be disowned and kicked out, something I was not sure would happen but was ready to go through to Turn On The Lights, I came out to my family and it was amazing. I started HRT a month after that. I secretly dated some dorky guys for about a year while I applied to grad schools. I got into a great grad school for me and my needs. I got FFS. I did my trainings and classes. Me and my fiancée moved in together after some LDR shenanigans. We’ve lived together now for 4 years of basically marital bliss. We have a cat named Grandmother Esmeralda Weatherwax who bites the hell out of my feet about three times a day. My bi-cycle continues to be part of my life but now it’s not as scary. Baby gays in my life have started to look to me for advice. Idk how this all happened so fast. When the years, months, weeks, days, and hours seems to crawl by so slowly now they are rushing past me so fast it’s almost bewildering. Whereas before I felt like I was living on borrowed time, past my ‘expiration date,’ now it feels like I can Fucking Breathe. I’m training myself to slow down now and it feels worth it to Live In The Moment.

Idk why I wrote this. Idk why these thoughts only seem to come up on Sundays when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation. Idk why I’m crying rn or why I feel so happy. I’m gonna post this shit then get on with my dissertation I guess. Read more Terry Pratchett and give yourselves the time you need. Get a pet. Talk to someone. Re-examine the events that brought you here. Be gayer. Love y’all 💕

[imawitchywitch]

Buying copies of banned books is awesome, but I also want to put this out there. If anyone is in college and/or has access to peer reviewed academic journals PLEASE do the following:

Buy USB drives

Download as many articles from academic journals in the coming months as you can about topics under attack, such as gender variance, DEI, critical race theory, racism, reproductive rights, climate change, and so on. Maybe pick one or two journals and topics to focus on per month! (There may be pay walls or limits on how many you can freely download)

Keep them organized on your USB’s by topic or journal

We don’t really know what will happen, what will get erased or censored from the web, but they’re already taking websites down related to DEI and reproductive rights. We need to work together to save the research and literature that we have!

[stealingpotatoes]

I like the story’s where mando doesn’t realize that boba is a clone

watch this [combines ur asks]

(commission info // tip jar!)

[alienbycomics]

In another timeline… this Gravity Falls-inspired comic featuring a popular headcanon about Dipper. I think Mabel would be supportive 🌲🌲

[itgetsbetter]

This group of Maryland high school students said f book bans, we'll write our own

Despite Maryland’s Freedom to Read act, schools still banned 64 books in the 2023-2024 school year—many by queer authors and centering LGBTQ+ identities. So this group of high school students said f that.

With one of our It Gets Better: Changemakers grants, they launched Navigating the Margins—a writing program that paired young authors with published mentors. What came out of the partnerships was a groundbreaking anthology filled with stories ranging from fantasy and dystopian fiction to school dramas and murder mysteries.

One of the students said, "I see the book at school and I’m filled with such immense pride for all of us who were brave enough and proud enough to show who we really are." <3

If you want to do this or something similar for LGBTQ+ youth in your own community, we can help! Apply for a $10,000 Changemakers grant by May 5th at itgetsbetter.org/changemakers.

[nekhcore]

HEY YOU!

Yeah, you! Are you trans? Do you like reading books? Or watching movies?

Do you like media about trans men/transmasculine characters but don't know where to find it?

That's sooo crazy because I have this little spreadsheet I'm working on where I'm trying to document all media with protagonists/major characters who are FTM or transmasculine.

The spreadsheet currently has 400+ entries spread across the following categories:

Books

Manga

Memoirs and non-fiction

Movies

TV Shows

Graphic novels / Comics

Webcomics

Audio dramas

Books and movies are also sorted by:

Which character is trans (MC, love interest, antagonist, etc)

If the trans character is POC

The trans character's sexuality (Because I saw lots of transhet guys sad about only being able to find gay romances)

If the author/actor is also trans (if we know for sure)

It's free to use, and free to add to as well! Editing permissions are on, and I check on the spreadsheet every now and then to make sure everything is in order and to clean up.

If you know something that isn't on the list, please add it! You don't have to fill in every single column, but fill it to the best of your abilities.

If you don't want to use the big ass long link below, you can also use: bit.ly/FTM-protags

I made this because I want it to be a community resource. So even if you're not a trans guy or transmasculine person, please reblog!

[iliothermia]

The Guard

[laurisverse]

My girls chillin' 💞🏳️‍🌈🍀

Read Lucky Lilly here.

[thetransfemininereview]

Overwhelmed by politics and life? Here’s a quick and easy guide to starting your personal trans microlibrary 🩷 written especially with the ADHD girlies in mind.

[emberwhite]

Do you think you have the correct opinion?

I'm currently looking for reviewers for my new transgender novella I just released called The Drunk, The Gambler, and The Lover. It's about how people see you for what you aren't and the life of isolation, loneliness, and addiction that comes with it, a faceless existence. It's about that one day you realize you have been lying to yourself for 20 years and the great unraveling that follows, a conversation about writing, art, and self-acceptance.

(It's in stores, but just DM me or ask me in the comments, and I will give you a free copy. Verified Amazon reviews are the best way to support indie authors.)

[enyasaints]

Santa can you hear me? I need a wheel chair.

Hey guys. I’m Enya and I am newly disabled. I have progressive Diabetic Neuropathy and as a result I have trouble walking, standing and general pain. I am crowdfunding for a motorized wheel chair to make day to day movement much more simplistic and less painful.

I’m pleased to say I have raised $125!! I only need to raise $2475 more and I can order my wheel chair. My goal is to have it in home before December 1st.

Direct Aid

V: Enyasaint

C: Enyasaint

I am pleading with everyone to please reblog and interact with my posts. I have no social capital on any platform. I cannot raise this alone. I cannot do this alone. I need the community help. Even on X there is a limit you can post and see per day. My reach is VERY limited so I need those who have or know of people with social capital to share my posts for me. Post on my behalf. This is the only way I can reach my goal. Also even if I get +2000 reblogs it does not mean I reached my goal. Please always check my posts or my direct GFM to see where I am at.