Transgender Biographies

Showing posts with label 2025. Show all posts

Eva Carieri - Travaglio

Original title: "Travaglio. Genesi di una donna transgender" (Travaglio: The Genesis of a Transgender Woman) by Eva Carieri.

Eva Carieri’s new book Travaglio. Genesi di una donna transgender (Travaglio: The Genesis of a Transgender Woman) is a raw and unfiltered account of intolerance, drugs, sex, and violence in an Italy that has rarely been spoken about with such honesty. It is a narrative that does not shy away from the darker corners of life but instead confronts them, showing how the search for love can persist even when everything seems hostile and unforgiving. Beyond fear and beyond prejudice, Carieri writes about survival, self-discovery, and the fragile yet resilient pursuit of dignity.

This book comes after her 2022 autobiography Eva. Il prezzo dell’ambizione. La ricerca dell’amore nonostante tutto, oltre il pregiudizio (Eva. The Price of Ambition. The search for love despite everything, beyond prejudice). In that first work, she chronicled her personal journey, balancing ambition with the costs of being true to herself. The new book can be read as a continuation and deepening of that story, taking readers further into the formative experiences and struggles that shaped her into the woman she is today.

Lakshmi Ajoy - From 'Ka' To 'Ki'

Full title: "From 'Ka' To 'Ki' - Biography Of A Transgender Woman: A 'Transformation Through Strength And Resilience" by Lakshmi Ajoy.

Dr. Lakshmi Ajoy’s book From “Ka” To “Ki” – Biography of a Transgender Woman: A “Transformation Through Strength and Resilience is not merely a biography; it is a mirror reflecting both the cruelty and the hope of our world. At the heart of this work lies the extraordinary life of Deepika Naiduu, a woman who endured unimaginable pain yet rose to claim her identity with courage and grace. Her life is one of survival against betrayal, abuse, and relentless social rejection, but it is also one of rebirth, love, and resilience.

Deepika was born into a world that could not accept her truth. She grew up carrying the weight of rejection, enduring physical and emotional abuse that would have broken many spirits. The shadows of cruelty followed her, yet amidst the bleakness she found small islands of compassion. A handful of people, who saw her not as an outcast but as a human being worthy of love and respect, gave her the strength to keep moving forward. Their belief in her became the scaffolding on which she built her new life. Through them, she learned to embrace her true identity, ultimately transitioning and stepping into the fullness of who she had always been.

Ellen Krug - Being Ellen: A Second Chance at Life

Full title: "Being Ellen: A Second Chance at Life" by Ellen Krug.

How often does anyone get a second chance at life? For most people, life is a continuous journey with only one opportunity to become the person they are meant to be. Ellen Krug, known to friends and readers as Ellie, experienced that rare and extraordinary gift. After living fifty-two years presenting as a man who often prioritized career and societal expectations over personal authenticity, she embraced her true self and transitioned into the woman she had always known herself to be. Being Ellen: A Second Chance at Life is a deeply intimate and inspiring account of that transformation, detailing the challenges, triumphs, and profound lessons Ellie encountered along the way.

In Being Ellen, Ellie reflects on her journey with honesty, humor, and courage. She chronicles the moments of uncertainty and fear, as well as the joy of finally inhabiting her authentic self. Transitioning later in life brought unique challenges, from learning the subtleties of womanhood to navigating relationships that had been formed under her former identity. Ellie emphasizes the importance of chosen family, particularly her enduring friendship with Thap, a bond formed in eighth grade that remained a source of unwavering support throughout her life. Through these relationships, she discovered that love and allyship often appear in unexpected forms and that the people who truly matter will walk with you even when everything else changes.

Charlotte Jasmin Sky Tiberian - Ich bin Charlotte

Original title: "Ich bin Charlotte: Mein Weg in ein echtes Leben" (I am Charlotte: My path to a real life) by Charlotte Jasmin Sky Tiberian.

Charlotte Jasmin Sky Tiberian’s autobiography Ich bin Charlotte: Mein Weg in ein echtes Leben is a powerful and unflinching story of a woman who dared to step out of the shadows of a life that never felt like her own. The book opens with the haunting question of what it means to live trapped in a role that does not reflect one’s true self, a question Charlotte wrestled with from childhood into adulthood. From the first pages, she invites readers into her inner world, exposing the struggles of a life filled with uncertainty, silence, and the constant sense of wearing a mask. What follows is not only a deeply personal journey but also a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit when confronted with the need to live authentically.

Charlotte’s story is marked by many turning points, some painful and others liberating. She writes candidly about her childhood, a time shaped by confusion and the heavy weight of expectations that forced her into a role she never chose. The themes of love, loss, depression, and addiction run through her early years, but so does an unshakable longing for truth. With honesty and vulnerability, she traces how these experiences ultimately led her to confront the life-altering realization that she could no longer deny her true identity. Choosing to live openly as the woman she had always been was not a sudden decision but the result of a long and often grueling process of self-discovery.

tyrnyr x - 16,000km or so

Full title: "16,000km or so" by tyrnyr x.

In 16,000km or so, tyrnyr x takes the reader on a journey that is at once deeply personal, culturally specific, and universally resonant. This second collection, following Ulysses: an odyssey in poetry, situates itself within the tradition of road narratives, yet it refuses to conform neatly to expectation. Echoes of Kerouac’s freewheeling spirit, Krakauer’s obsession with escape, and Sanchez’s lyrical urgency are evident, but tyrnyr folds them into a distinctly queer landscape of desire, grief, resilience, and laughter. Even Britney Spears’ cinematic detour in Crossroads becomes part of the book’s constellation of influences, reminding us that pop culture has long been a secret map for those looking to find themselves on unfamiliar terrain.

The premise is deceptively simple. Three queer people, bound together in romantic entanglement, take to the highways of the United States in the summer of 2022. What they seek is not just scenery but healing, and what they pursue is not simply freedom but the elusive presence of Tori Amos, that spectral figure of artistry and queer devotion. Yet the road is more than a backdrop; it becomes a living witness to the turbulence of its time. The trip unfolds amid Pride celebrations that feel both defiant and fragile, as monkeypox spreads and the legal aftershocks of Roe v. Wade’s overturning reshape bodies and futures. The specter of Trump’s first presidency lingers even as the country insists it has moved beyond it. The pandemic, still raw, haunts every public space with a reminder of isolation and loss. And, though unspoken in its immediacy, the book exists on the edge of subsequent global crises, capturing a fleeting interval when America felt both exhausted and restless, weary yet still mythologized.

Tara Hudson - Ten Years: A Transexual Memoir

Full title: "Ten Years: A Transexual Memoir" by Tara Hudson.

Tara Hudson’s book Ten Years: A Transexual Memoir is both a profoundly intimate personal narrative and a sharp indictment of the systems that failed her. Written with honesty and urgency, it recounts a decade of her life in which she endured not only the ordinary struggles of living openly as a transgender woman but also the extraordinary injustices of being placed in a male prison despite her identity. What emerges is a powerful chronicle of resilience and survival, but also a plea for compassion, justice, and lasting change.

Hudson begins by reflecting on her childhood and the early awareness that she was different from those around her. She describes the years of self-discovery that followed, including her work as a make-up artist, where she built a career while continuing her transition. Yet the memoir’s most searing sections revolve around her incarceration in 2015, when she was sentenced to prison and initially placed in HMP Bristol, an all-male facility. What should have been a short custodial sentence turned into a national controversy after more than 150,000 people signed a petition demanding that she be transferred to a women’s prison.

Bobbi Waterman - The Woman Inside

Full title: "The Woman Inside: From Outer Space to Inner Peace" by Bobbi Waterman.

There is a rare kind of courage that does not announce itself with fanfare, it moves quietly and persistently through a life lived in service of others, it surfaces in small acts and big decisions alike, and it is the quiet engine behind Bobbi Waterman’s memoir, The Woman Inside: From Outer Space to Inner Peace. This book reads like a voyage, not only across geography and career milestones, but deeper, into the territories of identity, belonging, and what it means to become oneself after a lifetime of roles that were assigned long before the author could consent. If you come for rockets and the steady, exacting world of NASA, you will find them, vivid and technically grounded. If you come for the inner life of transition, you will be met with honesty, nuance, and the kind of reflective clarity that only decades of lived experience can produce.

Waterman organizes her story around a life spent at the edge of human possibility, she spent thirty four years at NASA, a detail that could intimidate a reader who thinks of astronauts and mission control as being far removed from the intimate struggles of gender and self. Yet this is precisely what makes the narrative powerful, the contrast between the institutional, objective world of rocket launches and the deeply personal, subjective world of gender transition creates a tension that the book handles with compassion and intellectual rigor. The tasks of launching payloads, leading teams, and traveling to remote sites around the world become, in Waterman’s hands, metaphors for the stages of self discovery, each mission echoing a small rehearsal for the larger, riskier mission of becoming who she truly is.

Sheryl Weikal - I Was an Abomination

Full title: "I Was an Abomination: A Story of Trans Survival in Conservative America" by Sheryl Weikal.

Sheryl Weikal’s memoir I Was an Abomination: A Story of Trans Survival in Conservative America arrives at a moment when public debate about the very existence of transgender children is louder than ever. For years, figures like J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk have insisted that trans identities in children are the result of external influence, that young people are not capable of knowing who they truly are, and that transition is always prompted by adults.

Sheryl Weikal’s life story dismantles that narrative with unflinching honesty. Raised in a deeply conservative homeschooling family, she knew from her earliest memories that she was a girl. At eight years old, she even crafted a doll that represented herself in her true gender, a gesture both innocent and profound, one that expressed what words could not yet carry. Her memoir reveals how even the strictest isolation from progressive ideas could not erase her own sense of self.

Nia Chiaramonte - I Hardly Knew Me

Full title: "I Hardly Knew Me: Following Love, Faith, and Skittles to a Transgender Awakening" by Nia Chiaramonte.

In her memoir I Hardly Knew Me: Following Love, Faith, and Skittles to a Transgender Awakening, Nia Chiaramonte offers an intimate portrait of transition that is striking for its immediacy. Rather than narrating her journey from the safe distance of hindsight, she writes from within the unfolding moments themselves, therapy sessions, late-night reflections, family conversations, and the uncertain but luminous steps toward authenticity. The result is a profoundly human book that refuses simplification, capturing the painful, messy, and beautiful process of becoming oneself.

The title itself, I Hardly Knew Me, conveys the heart of Chiaramonte’s story: years of hiding, even from herself. “I used to be so hidden that even I couldn’t see who I was,” she writes, a confession that resonates deeply with anyone who has lived in silence or fear. That silence eventually breaks, sometimes quietly, sometimes with shattering force, in moments like posting her truth online, enduring the echo of responses and silences, and sharing vulnerable conversations with her wife Katie and their children. Through it all, Nia’s voice is both tender and unflinching, guiding readers through her discovery that authenticity is not only possible but necessary for survival.

EJ Jade Manalo - Becoming Jade

Full title: "Becoming Jade: A Memoir of Transition, Music, and Self-Discovery: A Memoir of Transition, Music, and Self-Discovery" by EJ Jade Manalo.

In her heartfelt memoir Becoming Jade: A Memoir of Transition, Music, and Self-Discovery, EJ Jade Manalo opens the door to her world with honesty, courage, and a spirit of resilience that is as inspiring as it is humbling. More than a personal narrative, Jade’s book is a beacon for anyone searching for authenticity and strength in the face of adversity.

At its core, Becoming Jade is the story of a young trans woman navigating a world that often seemed unwilling to embrace her for who she was. Growing up with autism added another layer of complexity to her journey, shaping both the challenges she faced and the unique ways she approached them. Jade doesn’t shy away from discussing the realities of transferring between schools with rigid rules and minimal accommodations. These institutions, meant to nurture growth, often became spaces of tension where she had to fight for her right to be herself. But Jade’s narrative is never one of defeat. Instead, it is about resilience, about finding ways to thrive despite barriers, about discovering moments of joy and independence even when surrounded by misunderstanding. She invites readers to see the world through her eyes, where something as simple as riding an elevator becomes a source of solace and empowerment.

Dominique Gallaway - Free To Be Me

Full title: "Free To Be Me: Transitioning at 40" by Dominique Gallaway.

When Dominique Gallaway made the decision at age forty to embrace her authentic self, she wasn’t just making a personal choice, she was writing a radical act of survival and joy into existence. Her memoir, Free To Be Me: Transitioning at 40, is not only a story of transformation but also a testimony of courage, grief, resilience, and the deep beauty of becoming who you always were.

Dominique, a proud Black transgender woman, opens her life to readers with unflinching honesty. For decades, she had lived behind a carefully constructed façade, fulfilling roles others expected of her while secretly carrying the weight of a truth she feared the world wasn’t ready to accept. Like so many transgender women who transition later in life, her silence was not born of weakness, but of survival. Yet, as Free To Be Me reveals, silence can only hold back authenticity for so long.

Jessie Parker - Still Here, Still Becoming

Full title: "Still Here, Still Becoming" by Jessie Parker.

In a world that often demands certainty and clarity, Jessie Parker offers something far more honest and healing in her book Still Here, Still Becoming: vulnerability, evolution, and truth told in motion. This stirring collection of essays is not a triumphalist memoir nor a neat blueprint of trans identity. Instead, it is something rarer and more necessary, an invitation into the beautiful, messy, and resilient becoming of one transgender woman who refuses to be anything other than fully, unapologetically herself.

At the heart of Still Here, Still Becoming is Parker’s unwavering commitment to truth-telling, even when it hurts. Each essay opens a window into her inner world and lived experiences as a trans woman navigating a society that is too often hostile, indifferent, or simply unprepared to understand. But this is not a book solely about suffering. Yes, Parker addresses the heartbreak, confusion, and pain of living in a body, and a world, that sometimes feels at odds with one's identity. But she also writes about joy. Real joy. Loud, earned, glittering joy that bursts forth in moments of connection, affirmation, love, and self-recognition. From the earliest pages, Parker’s prose is intimate, generous, and deeply reflective. “I didn’t write this book because I have all the answers,” she tells us. “I wrote it because I’ve lived the questions.” That statement captures not only the tone of the book, but its very ethos.

Camila Sosa Villada - La traición de mi lengua

Original title: "La traición de mi lengua" (The betrayal of my tongue) by Camila Sosa Villada.

Memory is the most treacherous affection there is, says Camila Sosa Villada in one of the texts that compose The Betrayal of My Tongue. Memories always flow in disorder and leave us fragile and vulnerable to feelings we rarely can control. Is it possible to resist our memory? she wonders, and then, as a condition of survival, she clings to betrayal to reflect on language and its relationship with eroticism and the past.

This series of writings respects chaos, plays with the sharpness of imagining oneself in another place and inhabiting another language. Fiction and non-fiction are assaulted by a language that is inherited and betrayed. With prose as sharp as it is poetic, Sosa Villada once again cultivates the art of writing what is left unsaid. Sometimes the hardest coexistence of all is with oneself. In her novel Thesis of a Domestication, recently adapted to film with her starring role, the protagonist, a celebrated trans actress, struggles with the ambivalence that her family and her comfortable life provoke in her.

Rae Elle Riley - Just Nod If You Can Hear Me

Full title: "Just Nod If You Can Hear Me: A Memoir" by Rae Elle Riley.

There are memoirs that explain. There are memoirs that reflect. And then, once in a very long while, there’s a memoir that doesn’t ask for permission, doesn’t wait for understanding, and certainly doesn’t smooth over the jagged parts. Instead, it grabs you by the collar, shoves you into its world, and demands that you feel every splinter of bone-deep truth embedded in its prose.

Rae Elle Riley’s Just Nod If You Can Hear Me is that memoir. From the very first page, we meet Chuck Keiran, a steamfitter, a brawler, a man etched from grit and gasoline, your classic blue-collar antihero clinging to life in a rust-soaked world of factories, unions, and dive bars. But Chuck is not who he seems. Beneath the hard exterior and years of camouflage lives Rae, a trans woman buried under the wreckage of a life built to survive everyone else’s expectations. Rae doesn’t step out of the shadows gently. She explodes into them, armed with nothing but her truth, her pain, and her art. Just Nod If You Can Hear Me doesn’t offer a redemptive arc in the traditional sense. There are no clean breaks, no sudden epiphanies, no “and then everything was fine” ribbon to tie it all up. Instead, Riley offers readers a series of emotional detonations, each chapter a blowtorch to shame, silence, and societal erasure.

Tess Juliana - Just Tess

Full title: "Just Tess: A Trans Female's Journey to Womanhood" by Tess Juliana.

In Just Tess: A Trans Female's Journey to Womanhood, author Tess Juliana opens a window into the tender, complex, and deeply human evolution of identity, soul, and purpose. This memoir is not just a record of transition from male to female, but a spiritual and emotional chronicle of duality, of two spirits, Jules and Tess, walking side by side until they could become one. Tess Juliana’s life is anything but ordinary.

Born with what many Indigenous cultures would call the gift of "Two Spirits," she navigated much of her early life as Jules, a man who served honorably in the United States Air Force as an air traffic controller. Jules' military career included a transformative year in remote Greenland, an experience that sparked a lifelong passion for geology and the Arctic's harsh and magnificent landscapes. That same passion carried him into a decades-long career in science education, during which he earned degrees in geology, science education, and biology. But science and adventure were only half the story. In Just Tess, the reader travels not only through physical terrain, across glaciers, mountains, and oceans, but also through the interior landscapes of longing, silence, love, fear, and truth.

Ashley J. Webb - I Am Ashley

Full title: "I Am Ashley: A True Story of Growing Up Trans in a World That Said I Couldn’t Be Her" by Ashley J. Webb.

I Am Ashley: A True Story of Growing Up Trans in a World That Said I Couldn’t Be Her by Ashley J. Webb stands as a defiant beacon of courage and visibility in a world that too often demands conformity and silences those who dare to live authentically. This is not merely a story of gender transition or personal triumph, it is a raw, unapologetic journey of survival against the tides of erasure, misunderstanding, and systemic oppression.

Ashley was born intersex and assigned male at birth in New England, raised within a framework that could neither understand nor accommodate her true self. For decades, she navigated life burdened by medical mysteries, misdiagnoses, and the agonizing invisibility imposed by a society that refused to name or see her reality. Her memoir reads like a flame, burning through confusion, repression, and shame, illuminating the path toward self-realization and empowerment. “I didn’t transition for attention,” Ashley writes, “I transitioned to survive.” This powerful declaration sets the tone for a memoir that is as much about survival as it is about identity. The journey Ashley recounts is not one of a quiet, smooth self-discovery, but rather a fierce fight, against silence, against shame, and against systems built to keep people like her invisible.

Karla Sofía Gascón Ruiz - Lo que queda de mí

Original title: "Lo que queda de mí: Lo más difícil no es cambiar, es atreverse a ser" (What's left of me: The hardest thing is not to change, it's to dare to be) by Karla Sofía Gascón Ruiz.

In Lo que queda de mí: Lo más difícil no es cambiar, es atreverse a ser (What’s Left of Me: The Hardest Thing Is Not to Change, It's to Dare to Be), Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón doesn’t just continue her story, she tears the veil off it. This searing, unsparing memoir is both a follow-up and a counterpoint to her 2018 autobiographical novel Karsia. Una historia extraordinaria (Karsia. An Extraordinary Story), written under her former name, Carlos Gascón.

But where Karsia traced the outlines of her transition, Lo que queda de mí dives into the abyss, unflinching, raw, and deeply human. From the first lines, “A body suspended in the void. A final breath. A moment where time fragments and the mind retraces the paths that led it there”, Gascón’s prose sets the tone: visceral, immediate, and unapologetically personal. This is not a celebrity tell-all, nor a curated victory lap. This is a descent into the wounded core of being. It is, in her own words, “not just a story; it’s a strangled cry, a confession without filters.” Karla Sofía Gascón has lived many lives, actor, public figure, immigrant, trans woman, controversy magnet, Cannes winner. And yet, she begins Lo que queda de mí not with triumph, but with fragility. That suspended body isn’t just metaphor. It’s the image of a person fractured by years of self-denial, survival, and social performance. “How much of our existence is just an act?” she asks. “And what happens when the curtain finally falls?”

Julia Shelton - Becoming Me: A Trans Memoir

Full title: "Becoming Me: A Trans Memoir - A Trans Woman’s Guide to Radical Self-Love" by Julia Shelton.

What if becoming yourself wasn’t about changing who you are, but coming home to the truth you’ve always known? This is the question at the heart of Julia Shelton’s bold and unflinching debut, Becoming Me: A Trans Memoir – A Trans Woman’s Guide to Radical Self-Love. Part lyrical memoir, part defiant manifesto, Shelton’s book is a raw, radiant chronicle of survival, self-discovery, and sacred transformation.

With the grace of a poet and the grit of a woman who has walked through fire, Julia invites readers not only to witness her journey but to begin (or deepen) their own. Becoming Me opens with a tender, painful recollection of childhood, a time when gender was both a secret truth and a source of silent shame. Shelton paints early life with aching honesty: the confusion of being assigned male, the ache of invisibility, the early traumas that left her unmoored long before she had the language to name her reality. Her story is neither linear nor sanitized, and that’s what makes it so powerful. It is nonlinear healing. It is poetry breaking into prose. It is a woman wrestling with, and eventually embracing, the parts of herself the world told her to bury.

Shiro Deng - Julie Lemieux: Canada's First Transgender Mayor

Full title: "Julie Lemieux: Canada's First Transgender Mayor - Unauthorized" by Shiro Deng.

In Julie Lemieux: Canada’s First Transgender Mayor – Unauthorized, author Shiro Deng chronicles one of the most quietly groundbreaking political careers in Canadian history. With sensitivity, depth, and journalistic curiosity, Deng paints a vivid portrait of Julie Lemieux, a soft-spoken, community-oriented cabinetmaker turned trailblazing public servant, who reshaped a rural Quebec village and, along the way, Canadian politics. Julie Lemieux's story is not one of grand speeches or sweeping national headlines, but of grassroots transformation.

A former Drummondville cabinetmaker, she moved to the village of Très-Saint-Rédempteur in 2009 seeking a slower, more connected life. It wasn’t politics that brought her there, but wood, peace, and community. But the heart of this story, and the heart of Deng’s book, lies in the way Lemieux responded when her community needed her most. The turning point came in the form of a church. When the beloved, but disused, Roman Catholic church at the village center was slated for demolition, Lemieux led the fight to preserve and transform it into a community and cultural hub. That victory sparked her political awakening, and in 2013, she was elected to the municipal council. Four years later, she would make history by becoming Canada’s first openly transgender mayor, and the first woman elected mayor of Très-Saint-Rédempteur.

Valentina Ruiz - Mi Nombre Es Valentina

Original title: "Mi Nombre Es Valentina: Una guía íntima para transitar la identidad con valentía" (My Name Is Valentina: An Intimate Guide to Navigating Identity with Courage) by Valentina Ruiz.

In a world where trans voices are still too often silenced or misunderstood, Mi Nombre Es Valentina: Una guía íntima para transitar la identidad con valentía (My Name Is Valentina: An Intimate Guide to Navigating Identity with Courage) emerges as a powerful and necessary work. Written by Valentina Ruiz, this book isn’t just a memoir, it’s a lighthouse for trans people and their allies, illuminating the complexities, beauty, and bravery involved in living as one’s authentic self. Ruiz describes Ser Yo (“Being Myself”) as an intense, honest, and deeply human guide to what it means to be a trans woman today. With unflinching vulnerability, she traces her path from childhood silence to adult resilience, offering her readers a hand to hold along the way. Each chapter weaves together personal experience with practical wisdom, creating a space that feels both intimate and empowering.

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