A random collection of over 1910 books and audiobooks authored by or about my transgender, intersex sisters, and gender-nonconforming persons all over the world. I read some of them, and I was inspired by some of them. I met some of the authors and heroines, some of them are my best friends, and I had the pleasure and honor of interviewing some of them. If you know of any transgender biography that I have not covered yet, please let me know.
Full title: "Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators - Celestial and Human" by Clarence Joseph Bulliet.
The author presents the phenomenon of female impersonation providing the historical and sociological context.
"THE tantalizing mystery of "Mona Lisa's" smile may be that it is no woman's smile at all, but a boy's. This is a better guess than Freud's, that it is the smile, not of La Gioconda, but of Leonardo da Vinci's pathetically wanton mother, forever illuminating the subconscious of her talented bastard son. For, if the Gioconda smile has had its innumerable successors, so had it also its antecedents, and the first on record is not on a woman's lips but plays mysteriously around the mouth of a bronze half-naked boy hero of Israel-the David of Leonardo's master, Ver rocchio. The same enigma is there, the same subtle, amused perversity. The smile is to be found also on the faces of two other young men, John the Baptist and Bacchus, both in the Louvre. "From the locust eater of the Bible," writes Muther. "Leonardo made a Bacchus, an Apollo, who with a mysterious smile on his lips, and with his soft thighs crossed, looks on us with infatuated eyes.""
1956,
Clarence Joseph Bulliet,
English,
Full title: "I Changed My Sex" by Charlotte McLeod.
The story of Charlotte McLeod was first covered in the 1955 Danish book "Da Karl blev Karla: En dansk læges bedrift" (When Karl Became Karla: A Danish Doctor's Achievement) by Bent Rosenwein.
I found a fantastic article about her on Transas City: "Charlotte McLeod was the second transsexual American woman of the modern era, having had her sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) in Denmark in 1953, the year after Christine Jorgensen did. When Charlotte arrived in Denmark she discovered that the furor over Christine’s surgery had led to a moratorium on new SRS procedures, unless the process of conversion had already started.
Charlotte, near-suicidal with gender dysphoria and not to be deterred, found a discredited doctor who performed a botched SRS on his kitchen table. After nearly bleeding to death over the next two weeks, Charlotte was finally admitted into the Danish program and was given her surgeries."
1956,
Charlotte McLeod,
English,
