#trans literature

[puppybot]

butch is a noun, s. bear bergman 2006

[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!

[genderqueerdykes]

"I Am A Transwoman. I am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out." by Jennifer Coates

here is an extremely important article written by a trans woman that touches on why man hating, and assuming certain people to be men affects more than just men. this behavior affects trans women and transfemmes and we need to care about not profiling people who are in our spaces and lives

[alwxischarles]

Being trans taught me: true love treats fragility with tenderness. If you'll share your softness too, let's begin.

[floral-ashes]

Remember when I published this in a serious journal and everyone thought it was very funny?

Well, Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body is basically where I stake my claim at being a depraved freak. 😉

Don’t wait! Get your copy now! Available on Bookshop and plenty more.

[gatheringbones]

[“When I asked focus group participants again about body hair and their desires for women, Adam responded:

That’s what makes the woman different, her body, I don’t mind uh having hair in certain specific parts on her body um . . . in general I . . . like woman to be clean. Just in certain areas. But like I said, down in the genital, like it’s okay for me.

Hair, for Adam, Musiteli, and other participants, served as the visual representation of the differentiation between “men” and “women.” Further, Adam referred to a woman being hairless not only as “proper” but “cleanly,” as well.

Often, when I asked participants specifically about genital hair, the response was that they did not prefer hair due to cleanliness, hygiene, and other such myths surrounding body hair. The idea that hairlessness is cleanly is reflected in colloquial discourse (e.g., “clean shaven”). Ryan, an Indian American, cis-het man, explained to me his distaste for a “bush” or a large amount of hair genitally:

I just think like it's better to sometimes, maybe, fully shave it, like coordinate with your partner if you're going to do that, because then it could help but like, yeah, if like two people both have bushes then like you don't know what's going on. And, also, it's just like, cleaner. Like in terms of like keeping it clean. It's easier when you have less hair in those areas.

When I asked Liz, a cis-lesbian, Latina woman, whether she cares if a woman shaves her armpits and genitals or not, she similarly responded, “Yes (laughs). Yes definitely. It’s just . . . um . . . how should I call it? Hygiene. Hygiene.”

In Ryan, Liz, and Adam’s discourse, pubic hair is conceptualized as unclean, non-hygienic, and obtrusive. Such ideas, again, are not mere individual preference but are instead shaped by cultural and generational understandings of hair. Herzig highlights that “the normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old,” with such ideas arising during the same years as the Cold War with individuals in the United States describing “visible body hair on women as evidence of a filth, ‘foreign’ lack of hygiene.” Porn and the framing of sexually explicit material have also shaped cultural understandings of pubic hair. While pubic hair removal for women went out of vogue after the nineteenth century, it became popular once again in the 1980s, in part, due to pornographic depictions largely including hairless vulvas, and more recently, hairless bodies for men, as well. Cultural discourse surrounding pubic and body hair is, thus, shaped by racialized, gendered, and xenophobic understandings of the body and hair. The fact that these ideas are shared by immigrant participants/participants of color does not deny the racialized and xenophobic roots of such discourse, so much as it highlights the internalization of racism and xenophobia by immigrants and/or people of color, as an adaptive response to the racism of society.

As participants conceptualized hair as animal-like, masculine, and/or filthy, they also conceptualized of it as excess or surplus to the human (woman’s) body. Pubic hair shaped their idea of what it means to do womanhood and to be a woman. As such, participant discourse not only was shaped by racist, sexist, and xenophobic conceptualizations of hair that have proliferated in the United States but also cissexist concepts of manhood and womanhood as opposite, different, and biologically based. That which is “improper to manhood/womanhood within White schemas of a gender binary are unnatural, unclean, and undesirable.”]

alithia zamantakis, from thinking cis: cisgender heterosexual men, and queer women’s roles in anti-trans violence, 2023

[selenedistress]

[sydsixxftm]

There comes a point in every tboy's life when it's time to choose

[asofspades]

I'm foaming at the mouth with my self-gifted bday gift

These limited editions are so freaking cool!!

Plus Hell Followed With Us is hand signed by the author

And these are only the front illustrations, the spine and back illustrations as well as the ones inside the books are absolutely gorgeous . I've been wanting to read The Spirit Bares its Teeth and Compound Fracture since I finished Hell Followed With Us. I'm so excited!!

[bookswithpurride]

Some of my favorite trans and nonbinary books that, as a bonus, have really awesome audiobook editions. I’ll listen to anything Vico Ortiz narrates tbh; they’ve got a great voice and apparently top notch taste in books. Lakelore spoke to me on a deep and personal level. The Monk and Robot books are maybe the two most calming and restorative books I’ve read in my entire life. Self Made Boys is a more compelling version of The Great Gatsby (I said what I said).

((Cross posting some older posts from my insta (same username) because I’m not sure about the future of meta platforms/my use of meta platforms & I don’t want my content to be lost.))

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

The Javelin Program by Derin Edala

goodreads

When Dr Aspen Greaves signed up for the Javelin Program, humanity's first foray into colonising deep space, they expected to wake up to life in a thriving colony on a distant planet. Instead, they find themself five years away from their destination on a broken spaceship full of complex mysteries, dead astronauts, and a very unhelpful AI. Aspen wasn't trained for any of this. But if they can't keep themselves alive, get the ship in working order, and find out what went wrong by unravelling a chain of mysteries leading all the way back to distant Earth, then neither Aspen nor the five thousand sleeping passengers in their care will ever see a planet again.

Mod opinion: I haven't heard of this book before, but I love trans sci fi mysteries, so I'm hoping to check it out some day!

[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.

[tserica-cherry]

Your lovely tranny 😘😍

The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it❤️💕

[alwxischarles]

No guys wants to date me because I'm trans......are there people who don't mind? 😔

[screaming-across-the-sky]

I finished Welcome to Dorley Hall and it was so good. Favorite part was when Christine was like "Welcome to Dorley Hall" and Dorleyed all over the hall

[gatheringbones]

[“Misogyny’s hatred of femininity means that trans feminism is an urgent project, as trans-feminized people know the promise and fallout of femininity as well as anyone. To that end, this book concludes by uplifting the excess attributed to trans women and trans femininity. What if feminists didn’t reply to the charge that trans women are too sexual, or too feminine, by shrinking trans femininity to prove the accuser’s bad faith wrong? What if trans feminism meant saying yes to being too much, not because everyone should become more feminine, or more sexual, but because a safer world is one in which there is nothing wrong with being extra?

Abundance might be a powerful concept in a world organized by a false sense of scarcity. What if trans feminism dedramatized and celebrated trans femininity as the most feminine, or trans women as the most women? How might trans women lead a coalition in the name of femininity, not to replace or even define other kinds of women, but to show what the world might look like for everyone if it were hospitable to being extra and having more than enough?

Many of the key achievements of liberal feminism, particularly in the West, have relied on minimizing, if not rejecting or trying to transcend, femininity. To achieve equality with men, liberal feminism has often claimed that women are the same as men, downplaying their femininity to adapt to the default masculine model of authority and respect. (This is also why feminists are often charged by misogynists with being too masculine or becoming manly.) Having been typecast as irrational, ornamental, and unserious, femininity is treated as an obstacle to women’s equality. Think of how often women politicians are encouraged to project cold, stern public personae, acting like the men in their midst, which in turn becomes proof that they are untrustworthy or inauthentic. And think of how often people associated with the stigma of femininity, like gay men, are encouraged to minimize their femininity to assume public roles or be taken seriously—or even to be granted human rights. The respectability strategy sacrifices femininity to curry favor with dominant, misogynist ideas of power. Whether or not it succeeds in any of its goals, it always extends the devaluation and hatred of femininity. In that way, it always loses.”]

jules gill-peterson, from a short history of trans misogyny, 2024