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: "Vouloir être: transsexuelle, femme et mère" (Wanting to be: transsexual, woman and mother) by Marie-Josée Enard, afterword by Catherine Rihoit.
This incredible story raises many questions. The truth is that the child is hermaphrodite: the sex of angels. But angels, we love them in heaven, that is to say dead, they have absolutely no place here below. Marie-Josée dreams with such force that it becomes real. And yet she has to wake up. And when she wakes up, she's in the middle of a nightmare.
As in the past, when the other children refused to play with her and called her a “chick”, they point the finger at her, they don't give her a job. They reproach her for having prostituted herself, and they push her to return to prostitution. Because if there is one thing that disturbs more than monsters, it is a monster who says he is like you and me.
1982,
French,
Marie-Josée Enard,
Full title: "Les Amies de Place Blanche" by Christer Strömholm.
The book was published in 1983 and republished in 2012. Les Amies focuses on the transsexual community around the Place Blanche district of Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book established Christer Strömholm's reputation as one of the leading photographers of the twentieth century.
The 2012 edition of the book includes the original essays by Strömholm and publisher Johan Ehrenberg as well as newly commissioned texts by Jackie and Nana, two of the women who feature in many photographs in the book. The book concludes with a thirty-two-page notebook of unpublished letters, papers, and contact sheets."
1983,
Christer Strömholm,
English,
French,
"Avant que j'oublie; suivi de Regarde maman, je danse!" (Before I forget; followed by Look at mom, I dance!) is the French language edition of "Kijk mama, ik dans: 's lands bekendste transseksueel vertelt" (Look mom, I dance: The country's best-known transsexual tells).
"Vanessa van Durme has made choices in her life. Hard choices, painful choices. Choices that caused her parents a lot of grief.
Now she is a celebrated actress who feels her sixtieth birthday approaching. She has fond memories of her work for public and commercial broadcasting, of the comedy see the wrote, and of the wonderful role she played in All India by Alain Platel and Arne Sierens.
Her autobiography regularly brings tears to the eyes of the reader. Sometimes out of sympathy, more often out of laughter."
According to Wikipedia, Vanessa Van Durme (born in 1948) is a Belgian actress and screenwriter. She studied at the Conservatory of Ghent in the drama section and made her stage debut – as a young actor – at Nederlands Toneel Gent (NTG).
2014,
Belgium,
French,
Georges Burou,
Vanessa Van Durme,
Original title: "Mon Dalí" (My Dalí) is another edition of "Le Dalí d'Amanda" (Amanda's Dalí) published in 1984.
Amanda Lear (born 1939) is a French singer, television celebrity, actress, and model, known for her professional career as a fashion model in the mid-1960s and being a muse of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. The book tells about her relationship with Salvador Dalí and presents detailed insights into the 15 years of their relationship.
According to Wikipedia, Amanda's transgender background was confirmed by Salvador Dalí himself, and other well-known artists that used to know Lear earlier in her life. For example, April Ashley, a transgender icon and model, claimed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, Lear, whose birth name she stated was "Alain Tap", had worked with her in the Parisian transgender revues Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel. In her book April Ashley's Odyssey, Ashley recalls Lear performing drag acts under the stage name "Peki d'Oslo".
2004,
Amanda Lear,
April Ashley,
French,
Georges Burou,
Romy Haag,
Original title: "France avec un s: notre histoire!" by Frances Olympe Cormier. The book was also published in English - "Frances with an "E": Our Story!"
I came across this book and author in the list of biographies of Canadian transgender women, presented by Zagria on her fantastic blog. I searched the Internet thoroughly but unfortunately, I was not able to find any info about this publication. If you have ever read the book or have any information about it, please let me know.
1995,
Canada,
Frances Olympe Cormier,
French,
Full title: "Le Carrousel" by Marie-Pierre Pruvot. This is the third part of the 5-book series about Marie-Pierre Pruvot's life.
The Carrousel is the immediate follow-up to the novel Madame Arthur. Bambi makes his debut in the prestigious cabaret. Crowned with success, she remains insensitive to this shadow of prestige. Her interest, she brings it to the obsessive Coccinelle who becomes her friend, but especially her model. Always in search of her "self", will Bambi finally have the strength and courage to find and cultivate her personality?
Her love for Serge is put to the test: the Algerian war makes their relationship clandestine. Very quickly, Bambi is torn by a sentimental duality that will end with a crucial choice...
Through this novel, Marie-Pierre Pruvot pursues her quest for identity. Her loves, her friendships, but also her disillusionments continue to shape her life. The path to an extraordinary destiny then emerges. Through this novel, she continues to take the reader to this distant Paris, colorful and full of frivolities. The cabaret Le Carrousel and its artists come back to life in this story...
2013,
Bambi,
French,
Georges Burou,
Marie-Pier Ysser,
Marie-Pierre Pruvot,
Original title: "C'était du spectacle: L'histoire des artistes transsexuelles à Montréal, 1955-1985" (It was a show: The history of transsexual artists in Montreal, 1955-1985). The book was published both in English and French.
The sixties and seventies were decades of social change in Quebec. It was a show! tells the story of the first generation of transsexuals who underwent sex reversal surgery. Namaste examines working conditions in cabarets, prostitution, police abuses of power towards transsexuals, the role of organized crime in the city's nightlife, and access to health care. It was a show! offers a rare overview of Montreal's urban culture, presented in its own words by one of its most important artistic communities.
2005,
Canada,
French,
Viviane Namaste,
Original title: "Les transexuel(le)s" (Transsexuals) by Jane Hervé and Jeanne Lagier.
Who are transsexuals? What differentiates them from transvestites? Where does their unshakeable conviction of belonging to the opposite sex come from? Tragic heroes in spite of themselves, they lead a Titan fight in terrible solitude that does not break their loved ones or society. Yet they want only one thing: to acquire the body of their mind.
Men became women, women became men, and they confided in Jane Hervé and Jeanne Lagier. Doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers also provide their answers. This book transports us to a world where the myth, thanks to the advances in surgery in the second half of the twentieth century, has become reality. Beyond our doubts and appearances, what is the daily existence of these 1000 to 2000 people in France, who want to live according to their desire?
1993,
French,
Jane Hervé,
Jeanne Lagier,
Original title: "Un papillon dans la tête" (A butterfly in the head) by Armonia Zyra (Armonia Lemaître).
"Armonia Zyra with this collection of poetry, makes us discover "from the inside" the long journey that led her to fulfillment: to become the woman that her body and her deep personality have always been convinced to be. She gives us with strength and sincerity her moods, her difficulties, her renunciations, her disappointments, but also her revolts, her victories. What shines through in these inspired and profound texts is her mistreated, but still intact will, her capacity for analysis, her love, and her generosity.
"Femininity cannot be defined, it is lived," says the author in maxim 17. Isn't it simply a reflection of the struggle that women have had to fight over the centuries to exist as such? To want to become this woman that a genetic error made born as a boy, the author gives us a beautiful lesson in courage."
2017,
Armonia Lemaître,
Armonia Zyra,
French,
Original title: "Délires" (Delusions) by Amanda Lear.
'An eclectic artist, Amanda Lear readily accepts the term jack-of-all-trades, but when asked to define herself in one word, she answers "star". A virtuoso of repartee and self-mockery, she was in turn the muse of Salvador Dalí, David Bowie's lover, disco diva, and queen of boulevard theatre.
Despite a shy and self-conscious childhood, her enthusiasm and curiosity allowed her to shape the funny, elegant and mysterious character that everyone knows. This is a sparkling anthology that brings together reflections and memories, under the sharp pen of a fine observer.'
Amanda Lear (born 1939) is a French singer, television celebrity, actress, and model, known for her professional career as a fashion model in the mid-1960s and being a muse of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.
2018,
Amanda Lear,
April Ashley,
French,
Georges Burou,
Romy Haag,
Original title: "Les chevaux de frise couraient sur l'hippodrome" (The Frisian horses ran on the hippodrome). The book was the first autobiography written by Ovida Delect.
A transsexual teenager, under the Nazi occupation, brought up in a religious college for boys, in Caen, questions the conditions she has to undergo... Autobiography of a former deportee-resistant, tortured at the age of 17 years old, founder of a youth resistance group. She contrasts the concrete or conceptual hells with a living infinity of flowers, dresses, and stars.
According to Wikipedia, Ovida Delect (1926-1996) was a French poet, politician, and member of the French resistance during the Second World War. In February 1944 she was arrested by the Gestapo for being a member of the National Front, a movement created by the French Communist Party (PCF). She was tortured and deported to a German concentration camp.
1994,
French,
Ovida Delect,
Original title: "Appelez-Moi Gina" (Call me Gina) by Georgine Noël.
He or she? He then She? Changing sex, being born a man and becoming a woman? Or finally be what we have always been? Here is the story of the most amazing adventures experienced. On April 25, 1975, Doctor Georges Noël woke up in his hospital bed knowing that this was the end of a long and painful journey. From now on there is only Georgine Noël, Gina for close friends. But what terrible ordeals she had to pass!
When nature, family, and society have decreed otherwise, what to do with the fundamental mismatch between one's deepest drives and the gender of one's birth which one knows is not one's? And especially when you come from a local family, steeped in local tradition deep in the Belgian countryside. What to do if not return to solitude, and marginalization but also the struggle, desperate and courageous, to restore the truth of one's being, to restore harmony between one's body and one's mind.
1994,
Belgium,
French,
Georgine Noël,
"One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family's door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family's journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core.
Self-aware and intimate, A Girlhood asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Girlhood is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future.
A Girlhood is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is—and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up."
2022,
Carolyn Hays,
French,
Original title: "Femme" (Woman)by Inès Rau.
"I fly away, I'm free, I'm beside myself. I feel like my soul is finally liberated as if the padlock that has kept me locked up for so long has been opened. This time, yes, I am a woman. Totally."
According to Wikipedia, Inès Rau, (sometimes written Ines Rau or Ines-Loan Rau), is a French model and actress born in 1990 in Nancy.
She is known for being Playboy magazine's "Playmate of the Month" in November 2017, to have become the first openly trans Playmate.
Her mother is French-Moroccan and her father is Algerian. She grew up in Paris.
Assigned male at birth, she made a transition from the age of 16, first in secret by obtaining hormones on the black market. She reveals her gender dysphoria to her parents a year later and receives support from them. On her 18th birthday, she undergoes gender reassignment surgery, stating that it is not a "transition" but "a true living reincarnation of herself".
Original title: "Princesa" (Princess) by Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque and Maurizio Jannelli. The book is the French language edition of "Princesa" published in Italian in 1994.
According to Wikipedia, Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque (1963–2000), known as Princesa, was a Brazilian transgender woman. Born in the Brazilian countryside, she grew up without her father in a family with economic difficulties. At the age of seven, she is the victim of sexual abuse and later she leaves home. After a brief period as a kitchen assistant, she begins to prostitute herself in the big Brazilian cities, adopting the name of Guerra Princesa.
2021,
Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque,
French,
Original title: "Enfin, la lumière!" (Finally, the light!) by Madeleine Charest.
I came across this book and author in the list of biographies of Canadian transgender women, presented by Zagria on her fantastic blog. I searched the Internet thoroughly but unfortunately, I was not able to find any info about this publication. If you have ever read the book or have any information about it, please let me know.
2009,
French,
Madeleine Charest,
Original title: "Jean, Jocelyne" by Jocelyne and Florence Haguenauer.
She is a woman in her fifties. A little piece of woman who looks like so many others... Twenty years of marriage, an employee in a large company in the region where she is known as the white wolf for being a union delegate for many, many years, she could be your next-door neighbor, your work colleague or a friend with whom you like to share an evening of cinema, perhaps even go jogging on days of great courage. Jocelyne is certainly everybody.
Except that three years ago, Jocelyne was a man. Anyway, that's what everyone believed. She had always known she was a woman, felt herself a woman, but her body indicated that she was Jean. Jean as a child ended up at the boys' school. Jean did his military service and was almost sent against striking workers in 1968. Jean became a technical agent at Thomson, was elected union representative by his work comrades, got married, and had an ordinary life. Except that he was in the depths of despair because he hated this man's body in which he was locked up.
2001,
Florence Haguenauer,
French,
Jocelyne,
Original title: "Carnet de bord d'un steward devenu hôtesse de l'air" (Logbook of a steward turned into stewardess) by Andréa Colliaux.
"Changing sex, for Bruno Colliaux, was not a whim of "great madness" but a cruel ambiguity of nature. Treated as a beautiful little girl in childhood, stuffed with male hormones at puberty to develop her male organs, this androgynous character never supported manly attributes that did not correspond to her deep reality. Not to mention the look of others, the loneliness, the impossibility of confiding. Neither "gay", nor "straight", neither man nor woman, she had to choose.
Duly followed by psychiatrists and understood by her management at Air France, a few black sheep aside, Bruno began his feminization. And Andréa tells us the tragicomic stages of this mutation, the painful hair removal, a new hormonal treatment, the preparations for the operation, but also the social difficulties (in her passport, "she" is always "Bruno", then at the borders...), and the clothing details: girl, so be it, but when you measure 1.85 ni and you wear 41, it is better to avoid miniskirts and stilettos! The book is a testimony that is both moving and humorous, which challenges certain prejudices and unfortunate preconceived ideas."
2001,
Andréa Colliaux,
French,
Original title: "Les prémices du papillon" (The beginnings of the Butterfly) by Armonia Zyra (Armonia Lemaître).
The butterfly has this ability to be born of itself. In her previous collection, Armonia Zyra offered poems written during her transition to the woman she had always felt inhibited. With this collection, she reveals behind the scenes when she was still living in a body that was not hers.
We find with pleasure her sharp pen, her militant spirit, her perception of the world with its injustices, her sufferings, the way she looks at the forgotten, the bruised by life, the excluded. In a constantly renewed melody, her poetic language envelops us and we can only be touched by the reading of these texts. These beginnings of the butterfly open wide the doors of Armonia Zyra's original universe.
2019,
Armonia Lemaître,
Armonia Zyra,
French,
Original title: "Né homme, comment je suis devenu femme" (Born man, how I became woman).
"In "Born a man, how I became a woman", you will discover one of the most surprising stories of Quebec show business, Sans fausse honte, with a frankness that many will find shocking, the young prodigy of the song, Jacques Bélanger, who created the phenomenal success of "Maman, la plus belle du monde", tells how, he became a real woman.
Through a moving story, he recounts his difficult youth, the beginnings of his career, his homosexual adventures, his experiences with drugs, and, finally, the great drama of his life: that of feeling like a woman, fully a woman, but being born in a man's body. This "accident of nature", he will eventually correct, by dint of courage and perseverance, against all odds, by a series of surgical operations of which he spares us no detail. Once the metamorphosis was accomplished, Jacques Bélanger, now Brigitte Martel, realized his greatest dream by marrying the man of her life."
1981,
Brigitte Martel,
French,
