Transgender Biographies

Jodi Gray - The Evolution of Jodi

Full title: "The Evolution of Jodi: The Truth I Carried" by Jodi Gray.

The Evolution of Jodi: The Truth I Carried is not a book that asks for admiration. It asks for attention, patience, and honesty. Jodi Gray does not write to impress the reader with triumph after triumph, but to sit beside them and speak plainly about what it costs to survive, to heal, and to finally belong to yourself. The result is a deeply human story, one that unfolds quietly yet powerfully, rooted in lived experience rather than slogans or easy resolutions.

Jodi Gray’s life has been shaped by contradiction from the very beginning. She grew up in a deeply religious, conservative Christian household in North Carolina, a place where rules were rigid, difference was dangerous, and silence was often the safest response. From an early age, she knew she was different, though she did not yet have the language to explain why. What she did know was that being different felt wrong in the world she was raised in, and that knowledge settled into her body as fear, shame, and isolation. Severe abuse and poverty marked her childhood, laying the groundwork for anxiety and depression that would follow her well into adulthood.

Theresa Miles - Full Disclosure: A Memoir

Full title: "Full Disclosure: A Memoir" by Theresa Miles. The book is a sequel to "Hiding in Plain Sight: Memoirs for Living," published in 2021.

Full Disclosure: A Memoir by Theresa Miles is a stirring and heartfelt continuation of a life story that began with her first book, Hiding in Plain Sight: Memoirs for Living, published in 2021. While her debut memoir explored years of struggle, concealment, and personal transformation, this sequel is a radiant celebration of renewal, authenticity, and triumph. It marks a complete 180-degree turn from the pain and challenges that once defined her existence. Written with the same honesty and grace that made her first book so powerful, Full Disclosure reveals what it truly means to embrace freedom after a lifetime of restraint and self-discovery.

The memoir opens during a significant turning point in Theresa’s life: her forced retirement amid the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Faced with the difficult decision to accept a retirement package in 2020, she found herself at a crossroads between fear and liberation. Rather than allowing the situation to defeat her, Theresa used this moment to rediscover purpose and joy. She offers readers an unfiltered account of that transition, describing the anxiety, relief, and eventual empowerment that came with letting go of her professional identity. Her candor about vulnerability makes the narrative deeply relatable, while her resilience shines as a guiding light for others navigating major life changes.

Mandy Goodhandy - Waiting For a Bus

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Meredith Lee and Derek Moo - Double Exposure

Full title: "Double Exposure: A Life Visible in Two Genders" by Meredith Lee and Derek Moo.

Double Exposure: A Life Visible in Two Genders by Meredith Lee and Derek Moo is not simply a memoir about gender, it is an invitation to sit with uncertainty, to question inherited rules, and to imagine a self that refuses to be flattened into a single definition. The book unfolds as a deeply personal, sometimes painful, often joyful exploration of what it means to live authentically when authenticity itself does not fit into familiar categories. From the first pages, the reader understands that this is not a story about choosing between male and female, but about living truthfully in both, at the same time, without apology.

At the heart of the memoir is a deceptively simple challenge. Society insists on binaries. Male and female. Before and after. One or the other. Meredith and Derek respond to that demand with a quiet but radical refusal. Maybe it is not a choice. Maybe it is something that simply is. Maybe it is both. This question echoes throughout the book, shaping not only the narrative but also the tone, which is reflective rather than declarative, curious rather than prescriptive. The authors do not offer rules or manifestos. Instead, they offer lived experience, with all its contradictions and unfinished edges. Derek’s childhood is described with tenderness and restraint. As a shy and sensitive child, he sensed early on that the rules governing boys and girls were unfair, rigid, and oddly disconnected from how people actually felt inside. These realizations did not arrive with dramatic clarity, but as a low hum of discomfort that followed him through adolescence and into adulthood.

Naina Menon - Birthing Me

Full title: "Birthing Me: Memoirs of a Transwoman" by Naina Menon.

The life of a girl born in a body that does not reflect her true self is an experience many people may find difficult to imagine, let alone fully understand. In societies where rigid ideas of gender still dominate everyday thinking, the journey toward self acceptance for a transwoman can be far more challenging than the moment of realization itself. Acceptance by family, institutions, and the wider world often comes slowly, if at all. It is within this complex emotional and social landscape that Naina Menon’s book, Birthing Me: Memoirs of a Transwoman, finds its voice, offering readers a deeply personal, honest, and ultimately hopeful account of one woman’s journey toward living her truth.

The book is a compilation of memoirs that brings together the events, encounters, and relationships that shaped Naina into the person she is today. Rather than presenting her life as a single dramatic arc, the narrative unfolds as a series of moments that collectively reveal the emotional weight of growing up with a gender identity that the world refused to see. From her early childhood, the reader is invited into the quiet confusion, unspoken fear, and longing that accompanied her earliest memories. These formative years are not portrayed merely as a time of pain, but also as a period of learning and observation, where Naina slowly began to understand herself even when she lacked the language or freedom to express it.

Cath Nichols - This is Not a Stunt

Full title: "This is Not a Stunt" by Cath Nichols.

Cath Nichols’s poetry collection This is Not a Stunt is built on a quietly radical premise: that living with disability or being trans is not a tragedy to be overcome, nor a narrative arc that demands redemption, heroism, or exceptional suffering. Instead, these poems insist on something far more subversive, the idea that such lives are simply ways of being, full of humour, romance, irritation, longing, boredom, love, and the slow accumulation of ordinary days. Nichols embraces both the mundane and the remarkable, reminding us that “We’re middle-aged, of course. Life rolls on,” and it is precisely this rolling on that gives the collection its emotional weight.

The book moves fluidly across time and place, revisiting Nichols’s childhood in New Zealand, her teenage years in Kent, and later decades spent on the gay scene in Manchester, complete with changing fashions, haircuts, and social codes. These shifts are not treated nostalgically or sentimentally, but as lived textures, moments that shape a self without needing to explain or justify it. The poems feel grounded in experience rather than theory, even when they are engaging with ideas that are politically and philosophically charged. Bodies, identities, and relationships are presented as processes rather than destinations, as acts of becoming rather than problems to be solved.

Rute Bianca - Quem?

Original title: "Quem?" (Who?) by Rute Bianca.

Rute Bianca’s autobiography Quem? arrives in the reader’s hands like a confession whispered after a lifetime of storms. It is not a book that hides behind stylistic flourishes or careful literary embroidery. Instead, Bianca writes with the urgency of someone who has lived intensely and who now feels compelled to lay her story bare. She writes as a woman shaped by resistance, using that word with the weight of personal history. Resistance marks every chapter of her life, because for her growing up was never simply growing up. It was surviving a cultural, religious, and social dictatorship that tolerated no deviation from a rigid gender model. She calls herself a child of April, a reference to the Portuguese revolution that promised freedom, although many of those promises never reached the lives of people like her.

In Quem? Bianca recounts the adventures and misadventures that made her who she is, never pretending that the path was tidy or dignified. She admits that her life may appeal to some and repel others, but she insists that it is hers. She writes from the perspective of someone who tried to be happy and, in many moments, succeeded with a joyful intensity that still echoes through her memories. Yet she also writes as a woman aging in a world that once felt endlessly vibrant. The contrast between her youth, full of motion and appetite, and her present life, shaped by routine and quiet, fills her with a bittersweet understanding. She goes to the sea, walks, shops for groceries, takes care of her mother, reads, and savors the awareness that life is precious precisely because it ends. She knows she cannot be young in this era, nor would she want to be. Her youth belonged to a different world, one she remembers as warmer and richer in human feeling.

Tamara Rivera - Becoming Tamara

Full title: "Becoming Tamara: My Story of Transition From Male to Female" by Tamara Rivera.

Tamara Rivera’s memoir “Becoming Tamara: My Story of Transition From Male to Female” is more than a personal narrative. It is a testament to the power of truth, courage, and the unyielding human spirit that fights its way toward the light even when surrounded by years of shadow. Her book invites readers into a life shaped by hardship and reborn through authenticity, a story that unfolds with honesty and deep emotional resonance. Reading it feels like sitting across from Tamara herself as she recounts the moments that tested her, the memories that shaped her, and the transformation that ultimately liberated her.

From the first pages, Tamara’s voice emerges with striking clarity. She writes not as someone seeking sympathy but as a woman determined to share the truth of her lived experience. Her childhood was not painted with ease. It was threaded with confusion, fear, and the ache of hiding a self she could not yet name. The world placed expectations on her that never fit, yet she carried them because she had no other choice. The decades that followed were marked by the difficult balancing act so many transgender people know too well, the one where survival becomes a habit rather than a life. Tamara takes the reader through these years without bitterness. Instead, she reflects on them with the perspective of a woman who has finally stepped into her rightful place and looks back only to illuminate the path for others.

Lara Crespo - Despida: Reflexões de uma Mulher Transexual

Original title: "Despida: Reflexões de uma Mulher Transexual" (Stripped Bare: Reflections of a Transgender Woman) by Lara Crespo.

Lara Crespo wrote her book Despida: Reflexões de uma Mulher Transexual as an act of honesty and self-exposure that few people are brave enough to attempt. She gathered her thoughts, memories, emotions, and the quiet and turbulent moments that shaped her transition, and she placed them in front of the reader without filters. This book does not attempt to construct a traditional autobiography. Instead, it invites readers into a space of contemplation where both transgender and cisgender individuals can reflect on the inner reality of a woman discovering and asserting her identity in a world that often refuses to understand her.

The reflections in this book cover several years of Lara's life and capture the evolution of her self-awareness during her clinical transition. Her intention was not simply to tell her story but to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that surround transgender identities. She believed deeply in confrontation through truth. For this reason she wrote words that were as direct as they were painful. She often repeated a phrase that is common in Portuguese and Brazilian LGBTQ activism, transfobia mata. This means transphobia kills. It is not a metaphor. It is a reminder of the harsh reality faced by transgender people who endure violence, discrimination, exclusion, and hostility simply for existing. When Lara used that phrase, she did so to warn society of the stakes. She wanted to show that prejudice is not an abstract idea but a force that destroys lives.

Katie Wilson - I need to be myself

Full title: "I need to be myself: 100 transgender poems" by Katie Wilson.

Katie Wilson’s book I Need to Be Myself: 100 Transgender Poems is not simply a poetry collection. It is a diary of awakening, a record of years when a life quietly rearranged itself, and a soul finally found vocabulary for feelings that had slept for decades. The poems were written between September 2015 and July 2017, a period when Katie first allowed herself to explore crossdressing and when she finally understood that this exploration was not a curiosity but a recognition of something essential inside her. Poetry had always been her natural language. She had written verses for years, long before she ever took a dress from a hanger or shaped her name into Katie. When her identity began to rise to the surface, poetry rose with it and gave form to what was happening. The result is this collection. One hundred pieces that show the stumbling, reaching, glowing, frightening, liberating messiness of realizing you are a transgender woman.

Julia Bueno - Nas esquinas do cuidado

Original title: "Nas esquinas do cuidado: Brenda Lee e a redução de danos" (At the crossroads of care: Brenda Lee and harm reduction) by Julia Bueno.

Julia Bueno’s “Nas esquinas do cuidado: Brenda Lee e a redução de danos” is a book that refuses to remain neatly within the boundaries of academic analysis, biography or political manifesto. It is all of these at once and something more. It is a work that listens deeply to the voices of trans women and travestis who have lived and shaped the practices of harm reduction in Brazil long before the term became a formal public policy. It is an exploration of how care emerges not as an abstract ideal but as a daily struggle, an inventive survival strategy and a place where memory, rage, tenderness and political consciousness collide. The book widens the contemporary debate on health and human rights by focusing on the lives of those who are most often neglected in both fields and by insisting that any meaningful discussion about care must take into account the structural conditions that make certain bodies more vulnerable, more visible and more exposed to violence.

Michelle Duff - Make Haste Slowly

Full title: "Make Haste Slowly: The Mike Duff Story" by Michelle Duff.

Michelle Duff’s Make Haste Slowly: The Mike Duff Story stands as one of the most vivid and intimate chronicles of grand prix motorcycle racing ever written. It is important to state from the outset that the book is not about her transition or her later life as Michelle. Instead, it is a deep dive into the racing world of Mike Duff, the Canadian athlete who carved his name into the history of the Continental Circus during the golden age of the sport. The book is a celebration of speed, technical mastery, courage, and the relentless pursuit of excellence at a time when the world of motorcycle racing was changing at an unprecedented pace.

At the heart of the story is Mike Duff, the first North American and the only Canadian to claim a victory in a world championship grand prix motorcycle race. Across the pages, Duff’s accomplishments unfold with the clarity of lived memory rather than mere historical retelling. The book captures the thrill of the 1964 250 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa Francorchamps, where Duff claimed his first world championship win on one of the most challenging circuits ever built. It then moves into the exhilarating 1965 season when he stood again atop the winner’s rostrum at the 125 Dutch Grand Prix at Assen in the Netherlands and yet again at the 250 Finnish Grand Prix at Imatra. These victories form the backbone of a career that combined raw determination with technical brilliance and a deep connection to the machines he rode.

Venus Rountree - Sethie to Venus

Full title: "Sethie to Venus: My Story of Becoming a Trans Mystic on my Spiritual Journey to Happiness" by Venus Rountree.

Sethie to Venus: My Story of Becoming a Trans Mystic on my Spiritual Journey to Happiness by Venus Rountree is a sweeping, intimate memoir that carries the reader through decades of pain, healing, and spiritual discovery. Venus opens her story in the 1960s, a period often romanticized as a time of liberation and cultural transformation, yet for her it unfolded as a childhood marked by trauma, neglect, and the perpetual ache of feeling unseen. As a child of divorce at a time when such fractures were still spoken of in hushed tones, she grew up wrestling with the consequences of abandonment while surviving an environment steeped in instability. In this vulnerable space, she began to develop the questions and longings that would later guide her toward mysticism and self-understanding.

Her early life was shaped by the upheaval of the era: the soundtrack of rock and roll playing against the backdrop of broken homes, shifting social norms, and a world that refused to recognize the identity she carried quietly within her. Venus describes how the California Department of Corrections system became an unexpected chapter of her life, one where past trauma collided with an institution ill-equipped to understand the complexity of her needs. Within those walls she struggled not only with the weight of her history but also with the mental health challenges that had followed her since childhood, including post-traumatic stress disorder and the constant feeling of having to fight simply to exist.

Marie-Pierre Vancallement - Fétiche par Fétiche

Original title: "Fétiche par Fétiche" (Fétiche by Fétiche) by Marie- Pierre Vancallement.

Fétiche par Fétiche is not simply a memoir, nor is it a nostalgic tour of Parisian nightlife. It is the intimate reconstruction of a life that began in pain and uncertainty and grew into a luminous legend of cabaret, femininity, artistry, and resistance. Marie-Pierre Vancallement, known to the public as Fétiche, invites readers into a world where glamour was stitched together with courage, where the stage lights burned away fear, and where a child who once cried in the shadows of Northern France learned to dazzle the world with a serene, unforgettable presence.

The book begins with the story of a child who was not born Fétiche and not even born Marie-Pierre, but Serge. From the first pages, the reader is confronted with a portrait of a young boy subjected to physical abuse and emotional terror, who clung to a dream that seemed, at the time, impossible. That child longed to be a girl and longed to escape the narrow streets and suffocating rules of her hometown. Rather than dwell in tragedy, the book traces how this young person transformed hardship into a kind of burning determination. The early chapters follow Serge’s evolution into an enterprising young man who had little more than ambition and a stubborn refusal to remain trapped. He eventually gathered the courage to leave the North and join a touring group of singers, a bold act that opened the road to Paris and to her future self.

Helio R. S. Silva - Travesti a invencao do feminino etnografia

Original title: "Travesti a invencao do feminino etnografia" (Travesti: The Invention of the Feminine – Ethnography) by Helio R. S. Silva.

Helio R. S. Silva has captured the attention of readers eager for fluid and engaging anthropological narratives with his book Travesti a invencao do feminino etnografia. The author presents an ethnography rooted in the Lapa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, approached as a social space and bohemian territory, where the focus of the study is the travesti community. It is precisely in the perplexity this research provokes in readers that the importance of reflection emerges, compelling us to pause and consider the nuances of both the subject and the method.

The study is carefully delimited, encompassing reflections that extend beyond mere humanitarian concern into theoretical and methodological considerations that shape both fieldwork and ethnographic writing. Silva alerts readers to critical issues, including the ever-present relationship between travestis and the broader society, as well as the risks of exoticizing or folklorizing the people under study. These are not abstract concerns but concrete ethical and analytical reflections that guide the ethnographer in approaching a community whose visibility in society is often filtered through sensationalist or stereotypical lenses.

Yvie Oddly - All About Yvie: Into the Oddity

Full title: "All About Yvie: Into the Oddity" by Yvie Oddly and Michael Bach.

All About Yvie: Into the Oddity, co-written by Yvie Oddly and Michael Bach, is a deeply personal exploration of the life of one of the world’s most unconventional and celebrated drag artists. The memoir traces Yvie’s journey from childhood to international stardom, offering readers an unflinching look at the challenges and triumphs that shaped their identity, artistry, and relationships. Born Jovan Jordan Bridges on August 22, 1993, in Denver, Colorado, Yvie’s early years were marked by a fascination with makeup and dress-up, often in defiance of traditional gender expectations.

Even as a six-year-old, Bridges expressed joy and comfort in skirts and makeup, a preference that would later evolve into the signature drag persona the world now knows. Gymnastics and other physically demanding activities were a part of their youth until a diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome at fifteen prompted a shift toward musical theatre, providing an alternative avenue for physical expression and performance. Yvie’s first encounter with drag came in middle school through the theatrical creativity of a classmate, inspiring their own playful exploration of costuming, attention, and performance. Their formative years included attending East High School and later the Auraria Campus in Denver, both of which contributed to the foundation of their artistry and understanding of self.

Mallery GenX - Becoming Her: Transitioning After Forty

Full title: "Becoming Her: Transitioning After Forty" by Mallery GenX.

In a culture that glorifies wrinkle-free ambition and the illusion that personal reinvention expires sometime before your twenty-ninth birthday, Mallery GenX arrives with a story that gently but firmly sweeps that myth aside. Her memoir, Becoming Her: Transitioning After Forty, is an intimate testament to the truth that transformation does not diminish with age. If anything, it becomes richer, deeper, and undeniably more honest. Mallery steps into her womanhood not with the blinding glare of youthful urgency, but with the hard-earned clarity of lived experience. She is not trying to outrun time. She is trying to meet herself.

Before she ever questioned her own reflection, Mallery spent more than two decades helping other people assemble theirs. As a salon owner and stylist, she built confidence with scissors, color, and conversation. She knew how to craft beauty for others down to the smallest detail. What she did not know was how to navigate the quiet ache sitting beneath her own exterior, a longing planted in childhood when she wished she could “be a gul,” spoken in the language of innocence long before she understood what it meant. That longing follows her into adulthood, shadowing her successes and celebrations until the day she finally allows it to take shape in the open.

Chen Wei-chen - The Prehistory of Transgender in Taiwan

Original title: "台灣跨性別前史：醫療、風俗誌與亞際遭逢" (The Prehistory of Transgender in Taiwan: Medical Treatment, Customs, and Inter-Asian Encounters) by Chen Wei-chen (跨性別倡議站).

Chen Wei-chen’s book The Prehistory of Transgender in Taiwan: Medical Treatment, Customs, and Inter Asian Encounters is a rare example of transgender studies written from within the community rather than about it. Published in 2016 by the Transgender Advocacy Station, it appeared during a decade when Taiwanese LGBTQ scholarship was expanding rapidly, yet still tended to focus on the post-martial law era and on narratives that aligned neatly with Western academic categories. Chen’s work deliberately moves in the opposite direction.

Instead of accepting the familiar timeline in which transgender politics enter Taiwan through American second-wave feminism and gay liberation, the book explores what existed before these imported frameworks arrived and before the vocabulary of gender identity and LGBT politics became standardized. It begins with a simple question that turns out to be surprisingly disruptive. What if Taiwan always had its own forms of gender variance, its own aesthetic and cultural expressions, and its own political struggles, long before English terms shaped how such lives could be narrated. By going back into the mid-twentieth century and even earlier, Chen reveals a layered history of people whose lives were often recorded only through the eyes of doctors, journalists, police, and entertainment managers. Their experiences become a window into how Taiwanese society negotiated gender, desire, and respectability under rapidly changing political and economic conditions.

Sophie Haugh - All I ever wanted was just to be me

Full title: "All I ever wanted was just to be me" by Sophie Haugh.

Sophie Haugh’s book All I Ever Wanted Was Just to Be Me is an emotional, raw, and deeply personal journey through the complex and often misunderstood experience of gender transition. It is more than a memoir; it is a chronicle of four decades of longing, perseverance, and courage. Over the span of thirty-nine years, Sophie recorded her thoughts, experiences, and emotions, creating a powerful diary of what it means to live a life feeling trapped in the wrong body, and the eventual liberation of becoming who she always knew she was meant to be.

From the very first pages, the reader is drawn into the world of a young boy who senses early on that something about him does not align with what the world expects. This realization, while profound, becomes a lifelong struggle as Sophie faces confusion, rejection, and the internal torment of not being seen for who she truly is. The story unfolds through real events and genuine feelings, revealing both the painful and joyful moments that shaped her life. It is a book that captures the full spectrum of human emotion, fear, despair, hope, and, ultimately, triumph.

Eleanor Hystoré - Venus Rising

Full title: "Venus Rising: The Unfinished Life of a Ballroom Icon Venus Xtravaganza" by Eleanor Hystoré.

Eleanor Hystoré’s Venus Rising: The Unfinished Life of a Ballroom Icon Venus Xtravaganza is a work of deep tenderness and fierce illumination. It reaches beyond the glitter of the ballroom floor to reveal the woman behind one of the most unforgettable faces of queer history. Through graceful prose and unflinching honesty, Hystoré brings Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza back to life, tracing her journey from a teenage dreamer in Jersey City to a radiant symbol of self-creation and resilience in 1980s New York.

The book opens in the small, crowded home where Venus was born on May 5, 1965, the youngest of several siblings in an Italian-Puerto Rican family. Hystoré paints these early years with sensitivity, showing a child already attuned to beauty, movement, and performance. Venus’s first steps toward becoming herself were met with the kind of confusion and rejection familiar to many transgender people of her era. She left home young, seeking a world where her reflection would match her spirit. That world, she soon discovered, existed in the shadowy brilliance of the Harlem ballrooms. It is here that Hystoré’s storytelling truly begins to shimmer.

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