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: "La fille d’elle-même" (The Daughter of Herself) by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay. The book was published in 2021 and republished in 2023.
"Winner 2022, Prix des Libraires Rights for TV adaptation purchased by Zone 3 A runaway bestseller in Québec, where it has captured the hearts of readers and pushed trans-identity into the mainstream conversation, Dandelion Daughter is an intimate, courageous portrait of what it’s like to grow up having been assigned the wrong sex at birth.
Set against the windswept countryside of the remote Charlevoix region some five hours north of Montreal, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s autobiographical novel immortalizes her early years as an alienated boy trapped in a world of small-town values and her parents’ dissolving marriage, through complex adolescent years of self-discovery and first loves, to the harrowing episodes that fuel the growing realization that she must transition and give birth to her new self if she is to continue living at all. One of the first novels of its kind to appear in Québec, this inspiring story has already connected with a wide readership, and has been adopted by many schools to help expand worldviews and curriculums."
2021,
2023,
Canada,
French,
Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay,
Gabrielle Tremblay,
Original title: "Mauvais genre" (Wrong Gender) by Chloé Cruchaudet.
"Paul and Louise love each other, Paul and Louise get married, but World War I escalates and separates them. Paul, who wants at all costs to escape the hell of the trenches, becomes a deserter and finds Louise in Paris. He is safe but condemned to remain hidden in a hotel room. To put an end to his clandestine existence, Paul imagines a solution: to change his identity. Now he'll be known as... ...Suzanne. Between gender confusion and the trauma of war, the couple will arrive at a very unusual destiny."
To escape the horrors of the trenches, Paul becomes a deserter. He manages to make his way to Paris, where he hides with the help of his wife Louise. As a deserter threatened with death, he is doomed to stay forever in the same four walls — or to be transformed. Disguised as "Suzanne", Louise's best friend, she dares to flourish as a woman. The masquerade in women's clothes becomes a new identity that lasts for decades. As Suzanne, Paul becomes part of the Parisian travesty scene. Based on a true story, French illustrator Chloé Cruchaudet tells a nuanced and subtle story of an unusual transgender relationship in the Paris of the Golden Age Twenties. The Wrong Gender was one of the great successes of the 2013/14 comic book year in France. The graphic novel is based on the highly acclaimed biography of Fabrice Virgili & Daniele Voldman La Garconne et L'Assasin.
2013,
Chloé Cruchaudet,
French,
Original title: "Coccinelle: Chercher la femme" (Coccinelle: Look of A Woman) by Luca Conca and Gloria Ciapponi.
"In 1953, at the now legendary Madame Arthur cabaret, a young woman appeared on stage dressed in a modest sarong but already possessing captivating charm. The audience applauds and does not yet know that they have just attended the first performance of Coccinelle, an artist who will soon have a string of triumphs on stages around the world.
However, nothing predestined Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy, born Jacques Charles in a modest family and raised by a violent and authoritarian father, to shine in the spotlight.
At a time when cross-dressing is punishable by law and military service is still in place, Coccinelle invents a new way to live her life freely, and traces her own path as a liberated woman.
Defended by lawyer Robert Badinter, Coccinelle became the first French public figure to officially change her marital status and performed on stages around the world, from Syndey to Rio de Janeiro via Dakar. In 1989, after nine months of triumph at the Casino de Paris, she was caught up in debt and was forced to distance herself from her French public for a while. A place that upon her return, she will never really be able to find again..."
2024,
Coccinelle,
French,
Gloria Ciapponi,
Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy,
Luca Conca,
"Mama Black Widow" is the French language edition of "Mama Black Widow" by Iceberg Slim, published in 2013. The book was translated into French by Gérard Henri.
"Mama Black Widow tells the tragic story of Otis Tilson, a stunning black drag queen trapped in a cruel queer ghetto underworld. In hopes of escaping the racial bigotry and economic injustice of the South, Otis’ family journeys north from their plantation to an urban promised land. Once in Chicago Otis and his brother and sisters become prisoners to a wasteland of violence, crime, prostitution and rape. This is the gut-wrenching tale of the destruction of a family and the truest portrayal of homosexuality in the ghetto ever told."
2020,
Drag queen,
French,
Iceberg Slim,
Otis Tilson,
Original title: "Valide" (Valid) by Chris Bergeron.
"Although it is described as an autobiographical science fiction novel, the context it offers is not that far removed from our current world. We project ourselves 30 years into the future, in a world governed by the artificial intelligence Total David. Human beings are then confined and are only allowed a few hours of going out a day. "This feeling of living in a bubble that is in the novel, and that came before the pandemic, is for many trans women what they experience on a daily basis. Valide is a sci-fi and sci-fi novel, but it's also an allegory of today. What I tried to describe was this isolation, this feeling that maybe society isn't built for me.""
"This novel is also an opportunity to show a very dark future for the LGBT community and especially trans people. Indeed, in the story, in order to adapt to this new regime dominated by artificial intelligence, the heroine Christelle is forced to become Christian again. And to erase all traces of his past. This echoes a reality experienced on a daily basis by transgender people, which is the fear of not being accepted by our society. That of losing their job if they decide to transition. That of no longer existing within society."
2021,
Canada,
Chris Bergeron,
French,
Original title: "Les secrets de l'origami" (The Secrets of Origami) by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay.
"Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay's second book hardly addresses trans identity, but unabashedly explores the dysfunctional relationships and disillusionment of a woman who claims to be in love with everyone. "I'm a passionate person who doesn't do things by halves, like the movie I starred in. I often get ideas about a relationship that's just been born, like a pre-origami blank page, before realizing it's not working.""
"Heartbroken by disappointment, she uses words to examine her scars, forced to admit that many of her injuries were caused by people's inability to endure intimacy for more than one night. "I often wonder if it's my fault, if it's because I'm trans or too intense, not enough this or that. I quickly become intimate with people. I allow myself to be vulnerable with someone I barely know. This is how I can live my truth. But sometimes, it scares some people...""
2018,
Canada,
French,
Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay,
Gabrielle Tremblay,
Original title: "Les hijras: Portrait socioreligieux d'une communauté transgenre sud-asiatique" (Hijras: Socio-religious portrait of a South Asian transgender community) by Mathieu Boisvert.
Hijras, often referred to as "transgender" by Westerners, are a distinct community whose identity underpinnings transcend sexual orientation alone. This "third gender" is presented with great finesse in this book, which examines, among other things, family structures, perceptions of aging, human rights issues, and rituals of all kinds – from birth to death to community integration, marriage, or castration.
Based on field studies and interviews, the book describes a complex and astonishing world of people who live on the margins of society while struggling for the legitimacy of a status that would allow them to be fully part of it. Three stories in particular bear witness to the daily practices of the hijras and their philosophy and thus provide this study with valuable insight of direct experience.
2018,
French,
India,
Mathieu Boisvert,
Original title: "Trans*" by ÉPICÈNE.
The book deconstructs stereotypes related to transgender people by presenting 46 portraits of trans* people from all over Switzerland.
The portraits consist of a photograph taken by Noura Gauper and an interview conducted in one of the three main national languages by a professional journalist. They concern 23 women and 23 men, 20 in French-speaking Switzerland, 20 in German-speaking Switzerland and 6 in Ticino.
In concrete terms, our goal is to fight against discrimination and exclusion of transgender people at the social level. Currently, the suicide rate among trans* people is 10 times higher than that of the cisgender population and unemployment is 6 times higher. This work, which lasted more than two years, shows that trans* people, if they can be themselves, are perfectly integrated people, no different from the rest of the population.
2020,
ÉPICÈNE,
French,
Switzerland,
Original title: "Je suis transexuelle: j'en fais pas une maladie!" (I'm transsexual: I don't make it a disease!) by Philippine Dhanis.
I have to get used to the light gradually so as not to be blinded by my new condition. I will have to gradually learn to master each of the feminine codes, so as not to be a caricature. This gentle yet powerful transformation takes the time necessary for me to totally and definitively incarnate as a woman, smoothly and delicately.
I will certainly need strength when tackling the surgical steps that I am considering, but here too, time and hormones will have done their work. I will be ready, well prepared, but I can't help but think that here too, I will be impatient and that I will need a lot of courage to reason with myself!
2018,
French,
Philippine Dhanis,
Original title: "Ladyboys de Thaïlande: Une approche anthropologique" (Ladyboys of Thailand: An anthropological approach) by Jean-Pascal Huvé and Franck Poupart.
It is estimated that between half a million and one million "kathoeys" live in Thailand. All of them, from a very young age, have had the feeling of being little girls trapped in boys' bodies and have never stopped assuming or claiming their femininity.
Why in Thailand, why so many, why so pretty?
The authors met and interviewed many ladyboys, whether they were veterinarians, escorts, cabaret dancers or political science graduates, but also with academics, an anthropologist specializing in Kathoeys in Chiang Mai or a researcher from the University of Liège whose laboratory studies the neuro-hormonal mechanisms underlying sexual behavior.
2022,
Franck Poupart,
French,
Jean-Pascal Huvé,
Thailand,
Original title: "La loi du genre: une histoire culturelle du troisième sexe" (The Law of Gender: A Cultural History of the Third Sex) by Laure Murat.
"Man or woman. Is there a viable space between or outside these two categories?" asks Laure Murat at the beginning of The Law of Gender. The answer is yes: there is another category, at once literary, medical and police, that of the "third sex". Starting from the famous definition of the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (the "third sex" is "a woman's soul in a man's body" and vice versa), the historian considers that the "third sex" is in fact a third gender, i.e. a political, social and cultural construction as opposed to anatomical sex. She therefore apprehends this "third sex" as "a fact of language, ordering a series of theories and discourses around figures supposed to embody them between 1835 and 1939, mainly in France, but also in Germany and England".
2006,
French,
Laure Murat,
Original title: "Quand Un Suisse Change De Sexe" (When a Swiss man changes sex) by Laure Viel.
""So you think you're a woman?" Dr. Beaugrand's question had destabilized Laurent V. A lump in his throat prevented him from uttering the slightest hint of an answer. Dressed in velvet trousers and a navy sweater, Laurent was acutely aware that he did not look like the one he had always been convinced he was.
Yet he would never forget that day, the first in a journey that would make him, he hoped, a singular being, the only Parisian journalist who had been a soldier in the Swiss army. A journey that would also take him to faraway lands. Laure Viel's story is about transsexuality without taboos or pathos. There is no glitter in this journey either, but a quest for oneself, where introspection does not forbid self-mockery.
2020,
French,
Laure Viel,
Switzerland,
Original title: "Casa Susanna: L’histoire du premier réseau transgenre américain 1959-1968" (Casa Susanna: The Story of America's First Transgender Network 1959-1968) by Isabelle Bonnet, Sophie Hackett, and Susan Stryker.
"In 2004, 340 photographs, dating from the early 1960s, were found at the New York flea market. These amateur snapshots reveal a vast clandestine network of transvestites between the United States and Canada. They belonged to the famous Susanna, who regularly hosted transvestite friends at her property in Catskill (NY). Essential to their practice of transvestism, photography is preciously preserved by its followers as proof of their "inner daughter". These photographs testify today to the existence and aesthetics of a pioneering network in American transgender history."
2023,
Casa Susanna,
French,
Isabelle Bonnet,
Sophie Hackett,
Susan Stryker,
Original title: "Un jour peut-être: Journal d´un champion olympique devenu femme" (One day maybe: Diary of an Olympic champion turned woman) by Sandra Forgues.
In 1996, Wilfrid Forgues was crowned Olympic Canoe Champion in Atlanta, together with his teammate Franck Adisson. 22 years later, Wilfrid has become Sandra, and it is under this new identity that she appears to the general public, especially in the media that are interested in the first French athlete Olympic champion to reveal her desire to change gender.
It took her a long time to admit that she wanted to become a woman, to accept it... and do it. A lot of time, a lot of questions, which remained unanswered for a long time. It is the story of this questioning, the diary over several months, this awareness and decision that led her to implement this change of identity, that constitutes this book, from the "favorable" opinion of a psychiatrist, to the communication with the media that announces the final decision.
2018,
French,
Sandra Forgues,
Original title: "Mémoires Régicides I" (Regicide Memoirs I) by Laureen Lemarre Herman.
""If I ever had to die here, I would be happy. I asserted myself, against all odds. I have nothing left to prove to the world: Finally, I am Me." The story of these "Memories" began in 2017 when I discovered my trans identity. Since then, my situation has evolved towards a different affirmation of this gender identity.
This poetic collection brings together a number of texts and formats (short stories, poems in verse and prose, speeches) which, in addition to showing the diversity of forms, explore the depths of a spirit sometimes wounded, sometimes amazed. The journey of both sorrows and blessings is transcended by the power of words. It is the brilliance of a Woman in the making, the isotopy of Being."
2017,
French,
Laureen Lemarre Herman,
Original title: "Ma fille est un homme" (My daughter is a man) by Ludiane de Brocéliande.
There are girls. There are the boys. There are others. This book will help you understand what the daily life of transsexual or intersex people can represent. Most of the texts were inspired by testimonies, meetings, and friends who confided and shared their moods but also the trials, discriminations, and physical mutilations they face.
Far from fantasmatic and infamous clichés, and for the first time, an author-poet makes us dive into the universe of their everyday life, with a lot of emotions, sensitivity, and without detours.
2015,
French,
Ludiane de Brocéliande,
Original title: "Mon neveu Jeanne" (My Nephew Jeanne) by Patrick Bard.
Since 1983, photographer and writer Patrick Bard has been photographing his nephew. He started without really knowing why, when he was 16 years old. His name was Jean-Pierre. He married early, had two children who grew up and became a road haulier in Sarcelles. When his relationship to gender began to change in the mid-1990s, Patrick Bard continued to take pictures of him, of her, rather.
Jean-Pierre officially became Jeanne in 2001. Jeanne knew men, then she ended up falling in love with a woman in 2008. Initially, the relationship started as clearly lesbian. Two years later, Jeanne decided to become a man again, while retaining her identity as a woman. More than anything, his nephew Jeanne decided that the question of gender was not fixed and that it was not a problem for him.
2015,
French,
Patrick Bard,
Original title: "La fille de Casablanca" (The Girl from Casablanca) by Juliette Jourdan.
"In 1956, in Casablanca, while Morocco struggles for its independence, Jenny, a young trans woman, solicits Dr. Georges Burou, a renowned, if somewhat enigmatic gynecologist, for a 'sex change'...
The Girl from Casablanca tells the true story of the first entirely successful sex reassignment surgery, at a time when the word 'trans' didn't even exist. It also tells a tale of daring and courage against all odds. True to himself, Dr. Burou went ahead with the first gender surgery to help a desperate and endearing young trans woman while risking ruining his career. Without knowing it, he would set the standard, to this day, for MtF surgery."
2017,
French,
Georges Burou,
Juliette Jourdan,
Original title: "Trans en France: Histoire des personnes trans en France et ailleurs d'autrefois à nos jours" (Trans in France: History of trans people in France and elsewhere from the past to the present day) by Jenny Latreille.
This book is intended for anyone who is interested in the history of trans people, particularly in France but not only, and in the issues (medical, legal, psychological, philosophical, sociological, artistic and others) that have always accompanied and surround people who choose, claim, undergo or refuse a sex and/or gender reassignment.
Trans people themselves will, of course, be able to find information there, in particular of a historical or epistemological nature, which they would not necessarily find elsewhere. It's always good to know where you're from. The work includes a copious bibliography and a filmography, and an index.
2018,
Bambi,
Coccinelle,
French,
Jenny Latreille,
Marie-Pier Ysser,
"Eau douce" is the French language edition of "Freshwater" by Akwaeke Emezi.
I liked Gina Maya's review a lot, so let me quote her: "Transgender narrative this may be, but it's far removed from Western, U.S.-based definitions in spite of its primary location in the U.S. The story follows the young life of Ada, a Nigerian child who travels to America to study, but her whole life involves psychical interaction with the indigenous spirits who vie for control of her. Is Ada Ogbanje too?
By the end, she appears to embrace this self-conception as an offspring of the Universal Creator Ala, visualized as cosmic python – the source of the spring from which all freshwater comes from its mouth. Yet Ada for almost the novel's entirety is also the human, engaged in an uneasy relationship with otherworldly spirits who inhabit her mind, visualized in turn as a room of marble, perhaps not unlike the Kaaba of Mecca. The most powerful, possessive, and controlling of the spirits is Asughara, occasionally presented as Ada's pernicious alpha. At times, Asughara blocks out Ada from consciousness, either to protect or punish Ada."
2020,
Akwaeke Emezi,
French,
Nigeria,
