When language broke open: an anthology of queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent

When Language Broke Open is a collection of writing by Black queer and trans writers of Latin American descent who help us see Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. In centering the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community, the anthology's trans contributors challenge everything we think we know about gender, sexuality, and what it means to live a livable life.

Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries

In the library profession, and in the world as a whole, the experiences of trans and gender diverse people often go unnoticed, hidden, and ignored. But we are here. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries is entirely written and edited by trans and gender diverse people involved in the field: its fifty-seven authors include workers from academic and public libraries, special collections and archives, and more; LIS students; and a few people who have left the library profession completely.

This book is not intended to be the definitive guide to trans and gender diverse experiences in libraries, but instead to start the conversation. It is our hope that this book will help trans and gender diverse people in libraries realize that they are not alone, and that their experiences are worth sharing.

This book also demonstrates some of the reality in a field that loves to think of itself as inclusive. From physical spaces to policies to interpersonal ignorance and bigotry, the experiences recounted in this book demonstrate that the library profession continues to fail its trans and gender diverse members over and over again. You cannot read these chapters and claim that Safe Zone stickers and "libraries are for everyone" signs have done the job. You cannot assume that everything is fine in your workplace because nobody has spoken out. You can no longer pretend that we don't exist.

You Only Live Twice: Sex, Death, and Transition

What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending work of true fiction, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom come together over the films of Chris Marker to exchange transition tales: confessional missives that map out the particularities of what they call "second lives": Chase's transition from female to male and Mike's near-death from AIDS in the 1990s. Chronicling reactions from friends and families, medical mechanics, and different versions of "coming out,' YOLT explores art, love, sex, death, and life in changed bodies.

Making Love with the Land

In the last few years, following the publication of his debut novel Jonny Appleseed, Joshua Whitehead has emerged as one of the most exciting and important new voices on Turtle Island. Now, in this first non-fiction work, Whitehead brilliantly explores Indigeneity, queerness, and the relationships between body, language and land through a variety of genres (essay, memoir, notes, confession). Making Love with the Land is a startling, heartwrenching look at what it means to live as a queer Indigenous person "in the rupture" between identities. In sharp, surprising, unique pieces—a number of which have already won awards—Whitehead illuminates this particular moment, in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples are navigating new (and old) ideas about "the land." He asks: What is our relationship and responsibility towards it? And how has the land shaped our ideas, our histories, our very bodies?

Here is an intellectually thrilling, emotionally captivating love song—a powerful revelation about the library of stories land and body hold together, waiting to be unearthed and summoned into word.

Jonny Appleseed

"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling novel. Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez," and his former life, to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The next seven days are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's life is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkagesand as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life. Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of First Nations life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams

Missed Her

Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller; her beautiful, funny stories about growing up a lesbian butch in the Canadian north attract audiences both gay and straight. In her fifth collection, Ivan addresses issues of family, queer youth, and homophobia with a trenchant and wistful eye.

The trans generation: how trans kids (and their parents) are creating a gender revolution

Some "boys" will only wear dresses; some "girls" refuse to wear dresses at all. In both cases, as Travers shows in this fascinating account of transgender kids, these are often more than just wardrobe choices. From very early ages these children find themselves to be different from the sex category that was assigned to them at birth. How they make their voices heard-to their parents and friends, in schools, in public spaces, and through the courts-is the focus of this remarkable and groundbreaking book.

Based on over five years of research in Canada and the U.S., and interviews with trans kids and their parents, The Trans Generation offers a rare look into what it is like to grow up as a transgender child. Illuminating the day-to-day realities of trans kids who regularly experience crisis as a result of the many ways traditional sex categories regulate their lives, Travers offers an essential and important new understanding of childhood.

Others of my kind: transatlantic transgender histories

From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, a group of transgender people on both sides of the Atlantic created communities that profoundly shaped the history and study of gender identity. By exchanging letters and pictures among themselves they established private networks of affirmation and trust, and by submitting their stories and photographs to medical journals and popular magazines they sought to educate both doctors and the public. Others of My Kind draws on archives in Europe and North America to tell the story of this remarkable transatlantic transgender community. This book uncovers threads of connection between Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands to discover the people who influenced the work of authorities like Magnus Hirschfeld, Harry Benjamin, and Alfred Kinsey not only with their clinical presentations, but also with their personal relationships. It explores the ethical and analytical challenges that come with the study of what was once private, secret, or unacceptable to say. With more than 180 colour and black and white illustrations, including many stunning, previously unpublished photographs, Others of My Kind celebrates the faces, lives, and personal networks of those who drove twentieth-century transgender history.

Black trans feminism

Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power.

The Regulation of Desire: Queer Histories, Queer Struggles

Originally published in 1987 during the panic around HIV/AIDS, The Regulation of Desire was the first book-length study of sexual regulation in Canada. Drawing on his long experience in anti-capitalist groups, the gay liberation movement, anti-racist and anti-police organizing, and AIDS activism, Gary Kinsman's investigation of the social forces that produce both sexual regulations and resistance and enforce queer, trans, and Two-Spirit oppression laid the groundwork for subsequent studies of queer sexuality in Canada and beyond. It quickly became an essential work of scholarship and an expanded second edition appeared in 1996. Ranging from the beginning of colonization to the twenty-first century, Kinsman's historical-materialist approach attends to the specificities of race, class, and gender to show how desires, pleasures, and sexualities have been organized and regulated by state relations--in the service of patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist relations. At the same time, Kinsman documents the emergence of Indigenous, gay, lesbian, and trans resistance, and the formation of queer and trans movements and communities. This new edition of The Regulation of Desire includes new chapters on the rise of the neoliberal queer and the mainstreaming of white-defined homosexuality since the late 1990s, along with a new introduction by the author examining how the COVID-19 pandemic, the housing and poverty crisis, and the necessity of Indigenous liberation and police/prison abolition intersect with and transform the politics of queer liberation. This new edition also features a foreword by OmiSoore Dryden and an afterword by Tom Hooper, plus updates to the text addressing topics such as the limitations of legal reform and same-sex marriage, and the emergence of transgender activism and abolitionist perspectives, moving far beyond limited rights approaches.

Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-Spirit

This book offers insights from young trans, queer, and two-spirit Indigenous people in Toronto who examine the breadth and depth of meanings that two-spirit holds. Tracing the refusals and desires of these youth and their communities, Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-Spirit expands critical conversations on queerness, Indigeneity, and community and simultaneously troubles the idea that articulating a definition of two-spirit is a worthwhile undertaking. Beyond the expansion of these conversations, this book also seeks to empower community members, educators, and young people - both Indigenous and non-Indigenous - to better support the self-determination of trans, queer, and two-spirit Indigenous youth. By including a research zine and community discussion guidelines, Laing demonstrates the possibility of powerful change that comes from Indigenous people creating spaces to share knowledge with one another.

Side affects: on being trans and feeling bad

Some days-or weeks, or months, or even years-being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening. 

In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the "wrong body." Posttransition, trans individuals-especially trans people of color-are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair. 

By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing-and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.

Transgender History

Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today,Transgender Historytakes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon,and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender Historyincludes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

How to understand your gender: a practical guide for exploring who you are

Have you ever questioned your own gender identity? Do you know somebody who is transgender or who identifies as non-binary? Do you ever feel confused when people talk about gender diversity? This down-to-earth guide is for anybody who wants to know more about gender, from its biology, history and sociology, to how it plays a role in our relationships and interactions with family, friends, partners and strangers.

Brown trans figurations: rethinking race, gender, and sexuality in Chicanx/Latinx studies

Honorable Mention for the National Women's Studies Association's 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize2021 Finalist Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards2022 John Leo & Dana Heller Award for Best Single Work, Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in LGBTQ Studies, Popular Culture AssociationWithin queer, transgender, and Latinx and Chicanx cultural politics, brown transgender narratives are frequently silenced and erased. Brown trans subjects are treated as deceptive, unnatural, nonexistent, or impossible, their bodies, lives, and material circumstances represented through tropes and used as metaphors. Restoring personhood and agency to these subjects, Francisco J. Galarte advances "brown trans figuration" as a theoretical framework to describe how transness and brownness coexist within the larger queer, trans, and Latinx historical experiences.Brown Trans Figurations presents a collection of representations that reveal the repression of brown trans narratives and make that repression visible and palpable. Galarte examines the violent deaths of two transgender Latinas and the corresponding narratives that emerged about their lives, analyzes the invisibility of brown transmasculinity in Chicana feminist works, and explores how issues such as transgender politics can be imagined as part of Chicanx and Latinx political movements. This book considers the contexts in which brown trans narratives appear, how they circulate, and how they are reproduced in politics, sexual cultures, and racialized economies.

Terrorizing gender: transgender visibility and the surveillance practices of the U.S. security state

Using an interdisciplinary framework, Fischer connects media coverage with the state regulation of trans people to show how, despite some increase in positive depictions, negative representations of trans people as deceptive, deviant, and threatening still permeate mass-mediated discourses used to justify, even normalize, state-sanctioned violence against gender non-conforming populations.

Introduction to transgender studies

This is the first introductory text/reader for trans, transgender, or trans* studies at all levels, from first year to graduate coursework. It can be used in programs and courses ranging from major courses to electives in LGBT/queer studies, feminist/gender studies, and other allied disciplines. It encompasses and connects global contexts, intersecting identities, historic and contemporary issues, literature, history, politics, art, and culture.