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: "Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist" by Cecilia Gentili.
"In these hilarious and heartbreaking letters, Cecilia Gentili reinvents the trans memoir, putting the confession squarely between the writer and her enemies, paramours and friends. Writing to childhood figures such as her rapist's daughter, her father's mistress, her best friend, and her mother, Gentili probes deeply into the bitter cruelty, buried secrets, and delicious gossip of a small town. Is she here for revenge, or forgiveness? Both! And more! A story of sex, theft, murder, motherhood, and outrageous fashion choices, Faltas is a beautiful, messy meditation on what it takes to heal, and even grow."
2023,
Argentina,
Cecilia Gentili,
English,
Original title: "Furia travesti: Diccionario Travesti de la T a la T" (Travesti Fury: Travesti Dictionary from la T to la T) by Marlene Wayar.
"This book is a rallying cry against all those discourses that seek to deny transvestite identity, subsuming it in one of the two poles of the hetero binarism. Being transgender, says the author, has nothing to do with being born in a wrong body that needs to be intervened to normalize, make it thinkable, digestible for the binary stomach of a society that is as two-minded as it is hypocritical.
This book is also about the life that is presented for the first time; An experience that is related to the support of militancy in favor of the rights of transgenders as a group. It is, therefore, a cry that is both individual and collective. With a sharp tongue, clarity, and fierceness, Marlene Wayar weaves in these pages a reasoned and lucid exposition of what it means to be a Latin American transgender today: expelled even as children by the institution of the family, they will be migrants all their lives, marginalized, prostitutes. But also beings of enormous charm and beauty, intelligence, attractiveness, and seduction. Like all of them, all of them: they are what they are. And this book, for the first time, gives them the place they deserve."
2019,
Argentina,
Marlene Wayar,
Spanish,
Original title: "Poesía Recuperada" (Recovered Poetry) by Naty Menstrual.
This is Naty Menstrual's third book, entitled "Poesía recuperada", a material that compiles her initial texts created before her official birth as Naty. "These are things I wrote before I cross-dressed, before I was Naty," she said. It is the compendium of "secret" poems, which she herself never believed could be published, but which today she decided to present to society.
"If I were a woman, I would have a thousand children, I would have a thousand children
with a thousand different men.
If I were a woman, I'd have a thousand men, With a thousand red velvet kisses, Tangled on my lips, No rush and no time, Walking through me.
If I were a woman, I'd sleep among a thousand bodies, Entangled in a thousand tentacles of love, With passion, with pain, and with sweat, Sweats of a thousand men
skin, smells, licks, kisses."
2017,
Argentina,
Crossdressing,
Naty Menstrual,
Spanish,
Full title: "A Body of One's Own: A Trans History of Argentina" by Patricio Simonetto.
"A history of Argentina that examines how trans bodies were understood, policed, and shaped in a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives.
As a trans history of Argentina, a country that banned medically assisted gender affirmation practices and punished trans lives, A Body of One’s Own places the histories of trans bodies at the core of modern Argentinian history. Patricio Simonetto documents the lives of people who crossed the boundaries of gender from the early twentieth century to the present.
Based on extensive archival research in public and community-based archives, this book explores the mainstream medical and media portrayals of trans or travesti people, the state policing of gender embodiment, the experiences of those transgressing the boundaries of gender, and the development of homemade technologies from prosthetics to the self-injection of silicone. A Body of One's Own explores how trans activists' challenges to the exclusionary effects of Argentina’s legal, cultural, social, and political cisgender order led to the passage of the Gender Identity Law in 2012. Analyzing the decisive yet overlooked impact of gender transformation in the formation of the nation-state, gender-belonging, and citizenship, this book ultimately shows that supposedly abstract struggles to define the shifting notions of "sex," citizenship, and nationhood are embodied material experiences."
2024,
Argentina,
English,
Patricio Simonetto,
Original title: "Vamos por más: mocha celis na experiência educacional das travestis e transexuais" (Let's go for more: mocha celis in the educational experience of transvestites and transsexuals) by Luana Pagano Peres Molina.
"In Brazil, we see alarming data that show an escalation in violence and murder of trans populations (transvestites, transgenders, and transsexuals). The public policies of the different governments that have passed through the country, moved by so-called right-wing and left-wing ideologies, have done little or nothing to change this scenario.
"Geni e o Zepelim" is a Brazilian song composed in 1978 by Brazilian composer Chico Buarque to be part of the musical Ópera do Malandro. The character Geni is described as being a transvestite who is constantly harassed by her community, "who can give it to anyone", who is "made to be beaten" and "good for spitting". The song's catchphrase: "Throw a stone at Geni" has become well known in the popular songbook and is repeated jokingly whenever someone is spoken of who is the target of public execration."
2020,
Argentina,
Brazil,
Luana Pagano Peres Molina,
Portuguese,
Original title: "Memorias, identidades y experiencias trans: (In)visibilidades entre Argentina y España" (Memories, identities and trans experiences: (In)visibilities between Argentina and Spain) by Jorge Luis Peralta and Rafael M. Mérida Jiménez.
"Visible but, at the same time, invisible: this paradoxical condition has marked and continues to mark the existence of trans people. Consequently, the reconstruction of possible genealogies comes up against a certain void in terms of representations, especially if they are first-person accounts, not mediated by an "other" alien to the social and sexual reality of transvestites, transsexuals and transgenders.
This book aims to offer an interdisciplinary look at the trans universe in Argentina and Spain from the 1960s to the beginning of this millennium. The aim is to contribute to the rescue and recovery of voices and experiences, both through textual and sociological analysis or historiographical reconstruction, as well as testimonies that illuminate, in the first person, the various itineraries of transvestism, transsexuality, and transgenderism.
2015,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Kim Pérez,
Lohana Berkins,
Naty Menstrual,
Spain,
Spanish,
Original title: "Continuadísimo" (Continuity) by Naty Menstrual.
"Naty Menstrual writes tales of grotesque lust but tinged with the tender piety with which the best popular chroniclers usually wrap their creatures. Her scatological eroticism has antecedents as remarkable as Quevedo, who wrote Gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo and Aristophanes, who put a black pudding seller as the protagonist of his comedy Los caballeros.
With narrative dexterity, Naty Menstrual passes through the noses of readers new flowers of evil who, with their crooked heels and tired wigs, know how to wrest a touch of comedy from the melodrama of life: their names are Sabrina Duncan, Mr Ed, Sissy Lobato, Marlene Brigitte... If Clara Better, the prostitute-poet invented by César Tiempo, had met them at a crossroads of fictions, she would have stopped yirring to work indoors. I could never have competed with so much ingenuity of living, so much extracted from bad luck, so much golden shower of black kisses in a perpetual frenzy.
Maria Moreno"
2008,
Argentina,
Naty Menstrual,
Spanish,
Original title: "La Revolución de las Mariposas" (The Butterfly Revolution) by Alicia Ruiz, Las Mochas, Lucía Fuster Pravato, Marlene Wayar, Gabriela Mansilla, Karina Nazábal, Alan Otto Prieto, Sebastian Amaro, Alba Rueda, Say Sacayán, Dario Arias, Emiliano Litardo, and Paula Viturro.
"The Butterfly Revolution. Ten years after The Deed of the Proper Name. An investigation into the situation of the trans population in the City of Buenos Aires. It was developed jointly by the Gender and Sexual Diversity Program, the Divino Tesoro Foundation and the Mocha Celis Trans Popular High School. It seeks to warn about the need to continue with the design and implementation of policies that effectively contribute to the recognition of the trans community as subjects of rights."
2013,
Alan Otto Prieto,
Alicia Ruiz,
Argentina,
Gabriela Mansilla,
Karina Nazábal,
Las Mochas,
Lucía Fuster Pravato,
Marlene Wayar,
Sebastian Amaro,
Spanish,
Original title: "La felicidad es terrible" (Happiness is Terrible) by Lizy Tagliani.
"At some point in 2021, Hernán Casciari realized that Lizy Tagliani was (in addition to a lot of things) a writer. She was on the radio program Perros de la calle. The two shared that space and Casciari was fascinated by the way Lizy recounted the anecdotes that made up her life. In an intuitive and masterful way, each story had an introduction, conflict and outcome, with the detail that all these stories exhibited the surreal and terrible way in which Lizy had carried out her existence.
Convinced that these narratives could not literally remain in the air, Casciari decided to transfer Lizy's world to paper. For that, together with Josefina Licitra—editor of Orsai and this book—they met with Lizy several times, recorder in hand, and asked her to tell the story of her life from the beginning. The result is this book: an editorial record of the wonderful novel (crazy and coherent, hilarious and dark) that Lizy kept in her head. And today, like an exquisite banquet, it reaches the hands of readers. Let them enjoy it."
2022,
Argentina,
Lizy Tagliani,
Spanish,
Original title: "Batido de Trolo" (Trolo Milkshake) by Naty Menstrual.
"Naty is not dizzy in the lukewarm lights of the biggest publishing houses, or the book fairs where it is measured who has the longest time, or the meetings in which four or five poets or writers look at each other's faces in a bookstore in Palermo Soho to read their "unpublished" books and applaud each other while they call each other beings of light (even if they want to devour each other) and believe that if one improves the typography and reads while Nina Simone plays, the texts seem better written. Naty is not one of those.
Her writing is compared to that of Quevedo, Lemebel, Aristophanes, Puig, Copi. And that's encouraging. But Naty has her own style, it's not comparable. It is unique and unrepeatable. And if sons or daughters come to him, we can talk about a way of making literature that is as vital as life and could be called natymenstrual literature. Or Natilesco. Or menstrual or something that serves to stop comparing her with others. Naty is her own comparison (creation)."
2005,
Argentina,
Naty Menstrual,
Spanish,
Original title: "Lola Cruda: Atípica, atópica, utópica" (Lola Cruda: Atypical, atopic, utopian) by Lola Bhajan.
"When I was a child, I prayed to God to wake up like a baby," says Lola Bhajan, an Argentinian trans musician and writer, in one of the chapters of Lola Cruda. She is a versatile artist and trans activist involved in musical projects such as “Hermanas Travestis.” She impresses with her powerful voice and her passion for traditional music such as baguala and vidala, whose roots lie in northern Argentina.
Her first novel, marked by a literary discourse that portrays the passage of a trans girl, who goes from puberty to youth; that measure of time where the world inexorably begins to take other forms.
2019,
Argentina,
Lola Bhajan,
Spanish,
Original title: "Soy una tonta por quererte" (I'm a fool for loving you) by Camila Sosa Villada.
"In the middle of the 90s, a woman earns her living as a surrogate bride for gay men. In a Harlem smoking room, a Latina transvestite becomes intimately acquainted with none other than Billie Holiday. A group of rugby players haggle over the price of a night of sex and in return get their comeuppance. Nuns, grandmothers, children and dogs are never what they seem... The nine stories that make up this book are inhabited by quirky and deeply human characters who confront an ominous reality in ways as strange as themselves.
Soy una tonta por quererte confirms that Camila Sosa Villada is one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. Owner of a dazzling and daring imagination, she is capable of both speaking the language of a victim of the Mexican Inquisition and of building a dystopian universe where transvestite existence takes its revenge. Owner of a unique style, Sosa crosses the boundaries between reality and magic in these tales, honoring the oral tradition with unparalleled ease and solidity."
2022,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Spanish,
Original title: "Nuestro Códigos: Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina" (Our Codes: Trans Argentina Memory Archive) by Trans Memory Archive.
Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT), in the words of its members, is a space for the protection, construction, and vindication of trans memory. Since the late 1990s, activists Claudia Pía Baudracco and María Belén Correa had dreamed of gathering their friends and fellow survivors—of violence and murder by police, imprisonment, and the AIDS pandemic—to share memories and images of one another.
In 2012, months after the death of Claudia Pía and the approval of Argentina's Gender Identity Law (which removed barriers to legal gender recognition and provided healthcare to trans youth and adults), Belén founded AMT on social media while living in exile in Germany. Together with photographer Cecilia Estalles, Belén developed the project, collecting and scanning the personal archives of Argentine trans women and sharing their lives and histories online and through print publications.
2023,
Argentina,
Spanish,
Trans Memory Archive,
Original title: "El futuro es sin género: Historias trans de Colombia, Chile y Argentina" (The Future is Genderless: Trans Stories from Colombia, Chile, and Argentina) by Sandra Sanchez Lopez.
The book tells the stories of trans people from three places in Latin America: Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. In addition to reports, interviews, and chronicles, this book presents reflections on an inclusive journalistic profession, in which we make the political commitment of communication more transparent and leave behind fears and prejudices in the face of the encounters between journalism and activism.
Focused on trans lives and voices, this set of contributions suggests that the public conversation is enriched when we stop dodging the dilemmas that we still have to solve as a society, while strong citizens, with determination, carry forward their struggles.
2021,
Argentina,
Chile,
Colombia,
Sandra Sanchez Lopez,
Spanish,
Full title: "Revealing Selves: Transgender Portraits from Argentina" by Kike Arnal.
"A beautifully photographed exploration of what it means to be transgender in Argentina—part of a series of photobooks on LGBTQ communities around the world Argentina was the first nation in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. It also passed legislation making it one of the most advanced countries worldwide in terms of transgender rights—the culmination of a long battle fought by LGBTQ support groups.
In the beautifully packaged and affordably priced Revealing Selves, award-winning photographer Kike Arnal collaborates with individuals in Argentinian transgender communities, living side by side with them and documenting their day-to-day lives in a series of strikingly intimate color and black-and-white images."
2018,
Argentina,
English,
Kike Arnal,
"The Queens of Sarmiento Park" is the UK edition of "Las malas" (The Bad Girls) published in Argentina in 2019 by Camila Sosa Villada.
From the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada, a book of love and affection: when we finish the last page, we want the whole world to read it too! When she arrived in the city of Córdoba to study at the university, Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada decided to go to Parque Sarmiento during the night. She was scared to death, thinking that the brutal verdict she had heard from her father could come to fruition at any moment: "One day they will knock on this door to warn me that they found you dead, thrown into a ditch." For him, this was the only possible destination for a boy who dressed as a woman.
2022,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
English,
"Im Park der prächtigen Schwestern" (In the Park of the Magnificent Sisters) is the German language edition of "Las malas" (The Bad Girls) published in Argentina in 2019 by Camila Sosa Villada.
From the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada, a book of love and affection: when we finish the last page, we want the whole world to read it too! When she arrived in the city of Córdoba to study at the university, Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada decided to go to Parque Sarmiento during the night. She was scared to death, thinking that the brutal verdict she had heard from her father could come to fruition at any moment: "One day they will knock on this door to warn me that they found you dead, thrown into a ditch." For him, this was the only possible destination for a boy who dressed as a woman.
2021,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
German,
"Nattdjur" (Nocturnal animal) is the Swedish language edition of "Las malas" (The Bad Girls) published in Argentina in 2019 by Camila Sosa Villada.
From the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada, a book of love and affection: when we finish the last page, we want the whole world to read it too! When she arrived in the city of Córdoba to study at the university, Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada decided to go to Parque Sarmiento during the night. She was scared to death, thinking that the brutal verdict she had heard from her father could come to fruition at any moment: "One day they will knock on this door to warn me that they found you dead, thrown into a ditch." For him, this was the only possible destination for a boy who dressed as a woman.
2021,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Swedish,
Original title: "Tesis sobre una domesticación" (Thesis on a domestication) by Camila Sosa Villada.
A trans actress – who could not be a mother – adopts a six-year-old boy with her husband, a homosexual lawyer. That HIV-positive boy – who did not know his biological father and whose mother committed suicide when she discovered that she infected him with AIDS – was raised by the maternal grandparents, until the grandfather killed his wife and then committed suicide.
The book lays bare the fragility of the bonds and the "invisible" agreements, not exempt from violence, that are woven around marriage and couples. The writer and actress from Cordoba raises questions about motherhood, fatherhood and orphanhood with an unlimited curiosity to try to account for the abyss between desires and experiences, between what is imagined or dreamed and what happens in the family back room. The apparent initial happiness of "life resolved" explodes. "Her legs, her heart, her transvestism, her family, everything weighs on her then as she had never weighed on. And being an orphan too," warns the narrator.
2019,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Spanish,
"Loše djevojke" (Bad Girls) is the Croatian language edition of "Las malas" (The Bad Girls) published in Argentina in 2019 by Camila Sosa Villada.
From the Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada, a book of love and affection: when we finish the last page, we want the whole world to read it too! When she arrived in the city of Córdoba to study at the university, Argentine author Camila Sosa Villada decided to go to Parque Sarmiento during the night. She was scared to death, thinking that the brutal verdict she had heard from her father could come to fruition at any moment: "One day they will knock on this door to warn me that they found you dead, thrown into a ditch." For him, this was the only possible destination for a boy who dressed as a woman.
2020,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Croatian,
