A random collection of over 2078 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: "Let the Dandelions Grow: A Poetic Portrait of a Transsexual Journey and the Human Condition" by Lee Ann P. Etscovitz.
“Let the Dandelions Grow: A Poetic Portrait of a Transsexual Journey and the Human Condition” by Lee Ann P. Etscovitz is exactly what its title promises and then some. It is a substantial collection of poetry that feels both intimate and expansive, rooted in one woman’s life yet constantly reaching outward toward the shared terrain of human experience. Written by a woman who lived the first sixty-five years of her life as a man, the book carries the weight of long concealment, hard-earned self-knowledge, and the quiet courage it takes to finally live in truth. Etscovitz was a professor and a therapist as well as a poet, and that combination shows itself not through academic heaviness but through emotional clarity and deep empathy. Her poems are accessible without ever being simplistic, thoughtful without being obscure, and consistently engaging.
2012,
English,
Lee Ann P. Etscovitz,
Full title: "Je Me Souviens: One Person's Experience with Male-to-Female Sex Reassignment Surgery" by Jean Vermette.
Jean Vermette’s book Je Me Souviens: One Person's Experience with Male-to-Female Sex Reassignment Surgery is an unflinchingly honest account of a life lived largely in silence, and of the long, careful journey toward embodiment, integrity, and wholeness. Drawn from lived experience rather than theory, the book offers readers not an abstract argument about transgender lives, but a deeply human narrative shaped by memory, patience, spirituality, loss, and quiet courage. It stands as both personal testimony and historical document, rooted in a time when language, resources, and social understanding around transgender identity were scarce or nonexistent.
Vermette traces her awareness of herself as female not as a sudden realization, but as something that simply always was. One of the earliest memories she recounts is from the age of three, when she put on a piece of her mother’s clothing and looked at herself in the mirror. There was no sense of experimentation or rebellion in the moment, only a feeling of rightness, coupled immediately with an unspoken understanding that this truth was not something the world would welcome. That combination, of inner certainty and outer danger, becomes a defining pattern throughout her life. From that moment forward, her femininity is something lived quietly and privately, carefully hidden even from those closest to her.
1999,
English,
Jean Vermette,
Full title: "Growing Up Transgender in the Roman Catholic Church: A Memoir" by Patricia Hailes.
Growing Up Transgender in the Roman Catholic Church: A Memoir by Patricia Hailes is not a story of sudden revelation or youthful rebellion, but of a life lived largely in silence, shaped by devotion, fear, resilience, and ultimately, courage found late in life. Patricia’s memoir unfolds as both a personal reckoning and a broader reflection on what it means to exist as a transgender person within a religious framework that has historically offered little space for such identities.
For much of her life, Patricia lived hidden, not only from the world, but from herself. Raised in a Roman Catholic environment that offered rigid ideas about gender, morality, and the body, she learned early that survival depended on suppression. Faith and family were central to her upbringing, yet they were also sources of profound internal conflict. From childhood, Patricia felt a deep and persistent awareness of herself as female, an awareness that clashed sharply with the expectations placed upon her. Rather than being affirmed, these feelings became something to bury, to pray away, to endure.
2025,
English,
New Zealand,
Patricia Hailes,
Full title: "Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman" by Laurie Lee Hall.
Laurie Lee Hall’s memoir Dictates of Conscience: From Mormon High Priest to My New Life as a Woman is a profound, often heartbreaking, and ultimately affirming account of what it means to live at the intersection of deep faith, rigid doctrine, and an inescapable inner truth. It is not merely a transition narrative, nor solely a critique of institutional religion, but a carefully constructed testament to conscience, integrity, and the cost of authenticity when one’s identity collides with an uncompromising belief system.
From her earliest years, Laurie Lee Hall experienced a persistent and unnameable dissonance between her body and her sense of self. Growing up in New England, she understood herself internally as a girl while being perceived and treated as a boy, a contradiction she lacked both the language and the social permission to articulate. Like many transgender people of her generation, she internalized the belief that this dissonance was something to be overcome through discipline, faith, and conformity. Rather than exploring her gender identity, she committed herself to suppressing it, believing that adulthood, structure, and religious devotion would provide resolution. This decision to bury her truth is not portrayed as weakness, but as a rational survival strategy shaped by the cultural and religious realities of her time.
2024,
English,
Laurie Lee Hall,
USA,
Full title: "The Quiet Defiance" by Rosie Stokes.
The Quiet Defiance by Rosie Stokes is the kind of memoir that speaks softly while leaving a lasting echo. It does not shout for attention, it does not posture or perform, it simply tells the truth, and that truth is powerful enough on its own. Rosie’s story unfolds with an honesty that feels almost radical, especially because so much of her life was spent learning how not to be honest, at least not with the world, and often not even with herself.
Rosie Stokes was born into the constant motion of a public house in Poole, Dorset, a place full of voices, expectations, and unspoken rules about what strength should look like. From an early age, she was sensitive in an environment that rewarded toughness and emotional restraint. This tension between who she was and who she was expected to be would become the defining undercurrent of her life. The book captures this beautifully, showing how early lessons about endurance and silence can shape a person long before they have the words to explain their discomfort.
2025,
English,
Rosie Stokes,
UK,
Full title: "Becoming Helga: The story of a transwoman in the 1950's" by Helga Mann.
Becoming Helga: The Story of a Transwoman in the 1950s by Helga Mann is not a gentle memoir that eases the reader into history. It is a raw document of survival, a fiercely personal account that insists on being read on its own uncompromising terms. Drawn from a two-year journal, supported by X-rays, medical records, eyewitness testimony, and the author’s own memory, the book stands as both autobiography and indictment. It tells the story of a transgender woman growing up in an era that had no language for her existence except insults, threats, and silence, and it does so with a voice that refuses to apologize for its anger, its grief, or its bluntness.
Helga Mann situates her life firmly in the America of the early 1950s, a time shaped by postwar trauma, rigid gender roles, and political hysteria. This was the age of McCarthyism, of whispered accusations and public punishments, where any deviation from the norm could destroy a family or a career. In this environment, a child who walked, spoke, or moved differently was not merely teased, but actively endangered. Mann’s account of her earliest school experiences is harrowing not because it seeks shock, but because it records brutality as a matter of routine. Violence appears not as an exception, but as a daily reality, sanctioned by peers and ignored by institutions that were supposed to protect children.
2025,
English,
Helga Mann,
Full title: "Sorry I Was Such a D!ck, When I Had One!: A Story of Gender Joy, and the Messy Road to Authenticity" by Dee McWatters.
How does a forty-three-year-old straight white man suddenly realize she has always been a gay woman? That question sits at the heart of Sorry I Was Such a D!ck, When I Had One!, a memoir whose outrageous title barely hints at the tenderness, vulnerability, and emotional intelligence inside. Dee McWatters tells a story that feels at once deeply personal and strangely universal, a story about what happens when a life that looks complete on the outside can no longer contain the truth growing inside it.
For decades, Dee lived as Darren McWatters, a husband, a father, a respected professional in the British Columbia wine industry, a volunteer firefighter, a hockey referee, and a deeply embedded member of her small town community in Summerland, BC. From the outside, it was the kind of life that signals stability and success, the kind of life that rarely raises questions. Inside, however, was a constant, unnamed ache, a quiet sense of wrongness that followed her from childhood into adulthood, through relationships, work, and service to others. The memoir does not romanticize this dissonance. Instead, it lets readers sit with the confusion, the denial, and the exhausting effort of trying to be someone you are not, even when you do not yet have the language to explain why.
2025,
Canada,
Dee McWatters,
English,
Full title: "Finding Jensen: A Path to Empathy Through Understanding" by Jensen Dee Parker Chappell.
Finding Jensen: A Path to Empathy Through Understanding is a book that quietly insists on being felt as much as it is read. At first glance it presents itself as a memoir, yet as the pages unfold it becomes clear that this story reaches beyond one life and speaks to a much wider human experience. Jensen Dee Parker Chappell invites readers into her world with an openness that feels both brave and disarming, sharing the deeply personal journey of becoming herself while never losing sight of the people walking beside her. As a transgender woman, a mother, and a software engineer, she writes from the intersection of identities that are too often flattened or misunderstood, and she does so with warmth, humor, and remarkable clarity.
The heart of the book lies in Jensen’s decision to tell the truth without theatrical exaggeration or defensiveness. She writes about growing up in a small West Texas town where the language to describe her identity simply did not exist, and how that absence shaped her early understanding of herself. Rather than framing this as a simple story of repression followed by revelation, Jensen explores the quieter complexities of adaptation, survival, and curiosity. She shows how a person can sense that something is misaligned long before they have the words to explain it, and how that gap between feeling and language can follow someone well into adulthood.
2025,
English,
Jensen Dee Parker Chappell,
Full title: "A Life of Extremes To Dreams: The Autobiography and Journals of a Post-Op Transgender Female" by Michelle Conybeer.
A Life of Extremes To Dreams: The Autobiography and Journals of a Post-Op Transgender Female by Michelle Conybeer is not a book that asks to be consumed lightly. It asks to be felt, endured, and lived alongside its author. Rooted in Northamptonshire yet reaching far beyond any single place, this work unfolds as an intimate record of a woman who has spent a year turning away from the noise of the world to confront the truth within herself.
What emerges from those pages is not simply a memoir, but a testament to survival, self-recognition, and the slow, painful, and ultimately luminous ascent into womanhood.
Michelle’s writing carries the weight of someone who has walked through darkness without romanticising it. The journals that form the heart of this book document a journey inward, one marked by isolation, reckoning, and a fearless examination of the past. She does not glance at her shadows and move on. She sits with them, names them, and allows them to speak. Every corner of her inner world is explored and exposed, not for shock or spectacle, but because honesty demands it. The reader is invited into a space where despair is not edited out and where vulnerability is not softened for comfort.
2024,
English,
Michelle Conybeer,
UK,
Full title: "California Girl: A Journey of Self-Discovery and Faith" by Chrissy Renaee.
California Girl: A Journey of Self-Discovery and Faith is a book that reads like an open wound and a victory song at the same time. Chrissy Renaee does not soften her story for comfort, nor does she dramatize it for spectacle. Instead, she invites the reader into a life lived on instinct, desperation, hope, and an unshakable desire to become herself, no matter the cost. From the very first pages, it is clear that this is not simply a memoir about moving across the country. It is a testimony about identity, survival, and the quiet courage it takes to keep going when everything familiar has already fallen away.
At just 23 years old, Chrissy leaves Georgia behind with four hundred dollars to her name and a red Honda Accord coupe that becomes both sanctuary and symbol. California represents freedom, reinvention, and possibility, but it also delivers indifference, exhaustion, and danger. The book captures this tension beautifully, showing how dreams can coexist with hunger, fear, and uncertainty. Chrissy’s early days in California are shaped by instability, sleeping on floors, chasing jobs, and learning quickly that hustle culture rarely rewards vulnerability. Her writing here is vivid and unflinching, placing the reader directly inside the anxiety of not knowing where you will sleep, how you will eat, or whether anyone truly sees you as human.
2025,
Chrissy Renaee,
English,
Full title: "A Year of E" by Jessica Faith.
“A Year of E” by Jessica Faith, published by Jessica Faith Kiszelewski, is an intimate and heartfelt account of one woman’s journey through gender transition. The book traces Jessica Faith’s experiences from her earliest memories as a child to her first year on hormones in her twenties, offering readers a deeply personal perspective on what it means to navigate life as a transgender individual. There is very little information available about this book on the internet, which makes discovering it feel like finding a hidden gem.
From the opening pages, the narrative draws the reader in as if they were sitting in the same room with the author, listening to her recount her struggles, triumphs, and moments of self-discovery with honesty and openness. The writing captures the complexity of emotions that accompany a gender transition, portraying both moments of joy and periods of uncertainty with equal sensitivity. Jessica Faith’s storytelling is clear and accessible, making it suitable for readers of all ages and backgrounds, and her reflections provide insight into the inner and outer challenges faced by transgender people.
2024,
English,
Jessica Faith,
Full title: "Get Off My Unicorn: Life Lessons from a Kinky, Polyamorous, Transsexual Lesbian Whose Kids Still Call Her “Dad”" by Katie Anne Holton.
Get OFF My Unicorn: Life Lessons from a Kinky, Polyamorous, Transsexual Lesbian Whose Kids Still Call Her “Dad” by Katie Anne Holton is the kind of book that arrives laughing, sits down uninvited on your couch, eats your snacks, and somehow leaves you wiser than when it showed up. It is bold, funny, intimate, occasionally outrageous, and unexpectedly tender, a collection that feels less like a lecture and more like a long, honest conversation with the smartest friend you know, the one who refuses to pretend life is neat, quiet, or easily categorized.
Katie Anne Holton is best known to millions of readers as a singular voice on Quora, where she spent over a decade answering questions that ranged from hilariously naive to painfully sincere. With more than seventy-two million views, her writing resonated because it did something rare, it treated human curiosity with respect while never taking human nonsense too seriously. She answered questions people were afraid to ask out loud, questions about sex, love, identity, parenting, and shame, and she did it with wit sharp enough to cut through hypocrisy and warmth deep enough to make even uncomfortable truths feel survivable.
2025,
English,
Interview,
Katie Anne Holton,
Full title: "This Little Light of Mine" by Jené Sais Quoi.
This Little Light of Mine by Jené Sais Quoi is not simply a memoir, it is an intimate confession, a reckoning, and ultimately a love letter to the self that survives beneath layers of performance, fear, and expectation. From the very first pages, the reader is drawn into a deeply human story of longing, reinvention, collapse, and rebirth, told with a voice that is both lyrical and unflinchingly honest.
This is a book that does not ask for sympathy, it asks for presence, and in return it offers recognition to anyone who has ever felt miscast in their own life.
Jené Sais Quoi’s journey begins in a small town that felt too narrow for her dreams and too rigid for her identity. From a young age, she sensed that something about her existence did not align with the role she was expected to play. She felt trapped in the wrong body, but even more profoundly, trapped in a narrative that left no room for softness, truth, or vulnerability. To survive, she learned to create a mask. That mask was not merely a defense, it became a finely crafted persona, polished through ambition, talent, and relentless self-discipline. What makes this memoir so compelling is how clearly Jené articulates the cost of that mask, how every layer of success added weight rather than freedom.
2025,
English,
Jené Sais Quoi,
Full title: "The King is Dead... Long live the Queen" by Julia Phillips.
“The King is Dead... Long Live the Queen” by Julia Phillips is not simply a book you read. It is a book you witness. From its opening pages to its quiet, devastatingly honest conclusion, it feels less like a constructed narrative and more like an open door into a life that has been lived under pressure, secrecy, longing, and finally, truth. It is a personal journal in the purest sense, unpolished where it needs to be, tender where it must be, and unflinchingly brave in its refusal to look away from pain.
At its heart, this work is a chronicle of heartbreak and love lost. It tells the story of the end of a grand romance, not in melodramatic terms, but in the slow, aching way that real love often ends. Julia writes with the clarity of someone who has had no choice but to sit with her grief, examine it from every angle, and eventually accept it. The relationship that dissolves across these pages is not treated as a failure, but as something meaningful and transformative, something that shaped her and ultimately pushed her toward a deeper reckoning with herself.
What makes the book extraordinary is that this love story runs parallel to another, more difficult one. The love story between Julia and her true self. Written as a form of therapy, the book documents a journey that spans despair, self-reflection, and frank acceptance before arriving at redemption, joy, and hope. Spread across four volumes, the journals capture the emotional reality of a trans woman confronting her gender head-on for the first time after fifty years of hiding behind a carefully constructed façade. This is not a sudden awakening or a neat moment of realization. It is a slow dismantling. When you reach the very end, all the walls fall down, and you see yourself for who you truly are.
2025,
English,
Julia Phillips,
UK,
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.
2025,
Canada,
English,
Interview,
Jodi Gray,
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.
2024,
Dana Abbott,
English,
Theresa Miles,
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2025,
Canada,
English,
Interview,
Mandy Goodhandy,
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.
2025,
Australia,
Derek Moo,
English,
Meredith Lee,
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.
2024,
English,
India,
Naina Menon,
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.
2017,
Cath Nichols,
English,
UK,
