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.
Original title: "El Nunca Más de las locas: Resistencia y deseo en la última dictadura" (The Nunca Más de las locas: Resistance and desire in the last dictatorship) by Matthias Maximus.
The persecution, kidnapping, torture, and murder of gays, lesbians, transvestites, and trans people was systematic in both military and civilian governments. Forty years after the return of democracy, the time has come to think about whether the emblematic figure of 30,000 is complete without the disappeared individuals of the LGBT+ community. Why don't words like "transvestite," "homosexual," "puto," "gay," "lesbian," "tortillera," "inverted" appear in the CONADEP report? How could a transvestite approach the disappearance of her partner, if because of her identity she could also be detained? How could a Marica militant complain about a kidnapping if the revolutionary organizations themselves discriminated against her?
2023,
Argentina,
Matthias Maximus,
Spanish,
"Bad Girls" is the US 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,
Original title: "Si te viera tu madre: Activismos y andanzas de Claudia Pía Baudracco" (If Your Mother Saw You: Activism and Adventures of Claudia Pía Baudracco) by María Marta Aversa and Matías Máximo.
The story they never told you about one of the most important people in Argentina of LGBTIQ+ activism. The life of Claudia Pía Baudracco, La Gorda, was a whirlwind of impulses that spilled seeds in dozens of activisms: repeal of police edicts, gender identity, access to comprehensive health, cannabis culture, and human rights were some of the issues that obsessed her.
After finding out about the activist movement in Europe, in 1993 she founded, together with María Belén Correa, the Association of Transvestites, Transsexuals, and Transgenders of Argentina, the first T space that achieved representation throughout the country. Claudia Pia also lived the vicissitudes of a community that for many years was left out of "official history", having the Police section as the only possible destination.
2023,
Argentina,
Claudia Pía Baudracco,
Spanish,
"Les Vilaines" (The Bad Ones) is the French 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,
French,
Original title: "La novia de Sandro" (Sandro's girlfriend) by Camila Sosa Villada.
Sandro's bride, the hopeless lover, the bottomless hole where hope disappears, the passage to the edge of the precipice, the one entrusted to the Virgin of the Transvestites, the one who knows men because she was one of them, comes to rescue the essence of poetry: to put her finger on the wound, to sing the wound of love or of the times, make us feel beautiful or pathetic (that is what we are), remove the patina that makes us respectable so that we shine at last in the face of some true fire, of those who burn and shine, of those who reduce us to ashes and entrust us to the last truth of the wind.
The one who wants to ask for forgiveness, the one who wants to cure his evil of loneliness or company, conjure his particular evil or his evil of all, the one who wants like Vallejo to show the bad his little bit of good and vice versa, the one who does not want to die of thirst or blindness without finding the puddle in which to drink or in which to look. Celebrate this book: because poetry dries up if every now and then a Camila Sosa Villada does not appear to put words back into circulation. Yes. Poetry dries up. As Córdoba was impoverished until Camila Sosa Villada arrived from Mina Clavero with her Carnes tolendas, to revitalize us, deepen us, show us the light and the shadow, and be pointed out as beautiful and miserable. - Jorge Marzetti
2015,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Spanish,
"Slemme piker" (Bad Girls) is the Norwegian 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,
Norwegian,
"Le cattive" (The Bad Ones) is the Italian 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,
Italian,
"O parque das irmãs magníficas" (The Park of the Magnificent Sisters) is the Portuguese 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.
2019,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Portuguese,
"Io principessa. Storia di Luana, una bambina transgender" (I princess. Story of Luana, a transgender child) is the Italian language edition of "Yo nena, yo princesa: Luana, la niña que eligió su propio nombre" (Me baby, me princess: Luana, the girl who chose her own name) by Gabriela Mansilla.
On May 9, 2012, the Argentine National Congress passed a law on gender identity recognizing the right to identity of transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenders, indicating their female sex. A political-social revolution that has been intertwined with that of Manuel, the Argentine child, who became by law, at the age of six, the youngest transgender in the world with the name of Luana.
This is her story, told in an intimate personal diary, by her mother Gabriela Mansila.
2018,
Argentina,
Gabriela Mansilla,
Italian,
Original title: "Las malas" (The Bad Girls) by Camila Sosa Villada.
"When she arrived in Córdoba to study at the university, Camila Sosa Villada went one night, scared to death, to spy on the transvestites in Parque Sarmiento and found her first place of belonging in the world.
The Bad Ones is a rite of passage, a fairy tale and a horror story, a group portrait, an explosive manifesto, a guided tour of the author's imagination and a chronicle different from all of the rest. The two trans facets that most repel and terrify the well-thought-out society converge in the DNA of this book: transvestite fury and the celebration of being a transvestite. Marguerite Duras, Wislawa Szymborska, and Carson McCullers coexist in her literary voice."
2019,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Spanish,
Original title: "El viaje inútil: Trans/escritura" (The futile journey: Trans/write) by Camila Sosa Villada.
A very old memory. The first thing I write in my life is my male name. I learn a small part of myself. The useless journey starts announcing anxieties and wonders.
With unusual intensity and rage, Camila Sosa Villada, author of The bad, rehearses in an autobiographical key the story of a drift that goes from childhood to the subsequent exercise of prostitution, the transition from transvestism to the theater, and the clash with writing as a place of possibility and danger, of expression of vitality and erasure. The futile journey is a one-way trip.
"I write, in the way, as alcoholic are my words as my dad was and as helpless and unstable as my mother was." Camila Sosa Villada.
2021,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Spanish,
Original title: "Mora. Confesión travestí: Esta es la historia de Mora, travesti, pantera negra, trabajadora del sexo en Buenos Aires" (Blackberry. Transvestite confession: This is the story of Mora, transvestite, black panther, sex worker in Buenos Aires)
The man is named Mora and does not particularly attract attention. The woman is called Mora, and she does not attract any attention either. But the man named Mora to become a woman? Yes, this attracts attention.
This is her story, from the day she was found in a hotel closet, newborn, and arrived at the orphanage from which she would leave years later adopted by a couple from Barrio Norte.
This is the story of an obese teenager subjected to cruel hospitalizations and psychiatric treatments, who searches against all odds for her identity, and begins to find it in a pair of stiletto shoes, fishnet stockings, a tight miniskirt, and injections of industrial silicone applied to her flat chest.
This is the story of Mora, a transvestite, black panther, and sex worker in Buenos Aires.
2021,
Argentina,
María Maratea,
Spanish,
Original title: "Mariposas Libres" (Free Butterflies) by Gabriela Mansilla.
Luana was the first Argentine trans girl to obtain her ID card after the enactment of the Gender Identity Law, on May 9, 2012. It is a pioneering legislation and almost unique in the world because it contemplates the right to change registration for minors.
But it wasn't easy: it took her mother, Gabriela Mansilla, almost a year to get it. Since then, learning as she goes, Gabriela became a reference in the struggle for the rights of trans children in Argentina. She founded the organization Childhoods Free of Violence and Discrimination to help other families and wrote "Yo nena, yo princesa", where she told the story from the moment when Luana said her first words, at 18 months, until she got her ID. Now she publishes "Mariposas Libres" – also published by the National University of General Sarmiento – in which she tells how she follows the life of her daughter and, through her, of all trans children in Argentina.
2018,
Argentina,
Gabriela Mansilla,
Spanish,
Original title: "Pendeja: Diario de una adolescente trans" (Pendeja: Diary of a Trans Teenager) by Carolina Unrein.
"I don't blame anyone for not knowing what it meant to be trans from 2004 to 2012, which was when I went to primary school. In fact, the Gender Identity Law was sanctioned precisely in 2012.
What I do blame my teachers for is for having taught me that I had to be ashamed of crying, of wanting to play with my female classmates. The teaching that this is wrong and that being this way is wrong and that there is something wrong with your being. I don't blame them for not having the best answer, but I do blame them for having the worst possible. It is not necessary to have specific training on trans childhood to avoid the most perverse and painful responses and teaching mechanisms that can be given to a child."
2019,
Argentina,
Carolina Unrein,
Spanish,
Original title: "La Berkins: Una combatiente de frontera" by Josefina Fernández.
The book is a unique biography of Lohana Berkins, a transgender activist and advocate of the rights of the LGBT community in Argentina and Latin America. She died on 5 February 2016, so she was not able to see her biography published.
Born in a small town in Salta, Lohana was expelled from the family home when she was very young and forced to practice prostitution to survive. She learned to walk on the border. At the end of the 80s, she settled in Buenos Aires and had to deal with ruffians, petty offenders, and the police. She fell in love and, fighting for the repeal of police edicts, became a unique leader whose main battle was the right to her own identity. She embraced feminism and was the first transgender woman in Argentina to get a job in accordance with the Labour code.
2020,
Argentina,
Josefina Fernández,
Lohana Berkins,
Spanish,
Original title: "Fatal: una crónica trans" (Fatal: A trans chronicle) by Carolina Unrein.
"I, Carolina Unrein, me, the kid with the cute ass, me, the survivor of sexual abuse, me, the one with the eating disorder, the anxious, the lonely, me, the fucking, the faggot, the tranny, I, Carolina Unrein, declare myself fed up with this world of terror and horror, of this world without opportunities, fed up with this world of shit that takes one of us every ninety-six hours."
Carolina Unrein is a writer and actress who has made significant waves in both the literary and artistic realms. Hailing from Diamante, Entre Ríos, she ventured to Buenos Aires in pursuit of opportunities. Carolina is the author of three novels in the young adult genre: “Pendeja,” “Fatal,” and “El viaje real.”
In “Fatal,” she candidly shares her personal experiences related to her transition with remarkable intimacy. Her writing resonates with young readers, providing them with a voice and companionship they may not have had before.
2020,
Argentina,
Carolina Unrein,
Spanish,
"Original title: "Yo nena, yo princesa: Luana, la niña que eligió su propio nombre" (Me baby, me princess: Luana, the girl who chose her own name) by Gabriela Mansilla.
The book is an extraordinary testimony of a struggle for the recognition of difference and the right to own identity to be a little girl. This struggle ran the limits of knowledge and professional practices, and also of the policies that are deployed on children. It is a story that shows the inseparably subjective and political effects of any identity struggle.
This diary of Gabriela is, without a doubt, a story of inexhaustible love and struggle. But it is also an essay and a profound and extraordinary reflection on the prejudices and knowledge instituted, so often close to the ignorance and ignominy with which we face every day. A story in which challenge, perseverance, and a charming form of intelligence face the problems of everyday life, social ties, and our relationship with institutions.
2014,
Argentina,
Gabriela Mansilla,
Spanish,
Original title: "Hembra. Cris Miró. Vivir y morir en un país de machos" (Female. Cris Miró. Living and dying in a country of machos) by Carlos Sanzol.
The book presents the story of Cris Miró, one of the most well-known transgender women in Argentina. Miró was a symbol of the Argentina of the nineties of the last millennium. Her irruption in the public space is understood only if one takes into account the political, economic, social, sexual, and moral changes of a country in the abysses of the end of the century.
Miró's body, paradoxically, Sanzol assures, became a kind of sign that made explicit the double standard that underlay and underlies Argentines: spectators paid a ticket to see her in the theater, while the State, with its laws, condemned to jail the other transvestites for the mere fact of wearing clothes that did not correspond to their gender.
2016,
Argentina,
Carlos Sanzol,
Cris Miró,
Spanish,
