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: "Eschimesi in Amazzonia: Dialoghi intorno alla depatologizzazione della transessualità" (Eskimos in the Amazon. Dialogues around the depathologization of transsexuality) by C. Pallarin and R. Padovano.
Like Eskimos in the Amazon, transgender and transsexual people live in a context that did not provide for them, in constant contrast with the social rules and cultural conventions of the habitat. At every latitude and at all times there have been people with a non-conforming gender, defined by various names, the "Hijras" in India, the "Sworn Virgins" in the Balkans, the "Two Spirits" of the Native Americans, the Neapolitan "Femminielli"... The realities of trans existences, freed from the stigma of pathology, can bring into play an overall redefinition of who we are, as women, men, trans, lesbians, gays, and intersexes.
2013,
C. Pallarin,
Italian,
R. Padovano,
Original title: "LadyMen. Una donna racconta le trans (Saggi)" (LadyMen. A woman tells the trans (Essays)) by Isabella Marchiolo.
"Ladymen" is a survey of human reality, that of trans people, linked to the social changes of our country, but still reductively combined only with the scenario of degradation and crime news, especially after the recent sexual-political scandals.
This investigative book with an unusual tone, tells not only news stories but, above all, stories of humanity, as the author wants to dispel prejudices and overcome the aseptic nature of statistics. Thus we discover a change in the "secret" attraction relationship between males and transsexuals, contrasting relationships within the transsexual community, but also solidarity between those who are born female and those who, going through the transition, will be put back into the world by correcting an error of nature.
2010,
Isabella Marchiolo,
Italian,
Original title: "Il mio nome è Lucy. L'Italia del XX secolo nei ricordi di una transessuale" (My name is Lucy. Italy in the twentieth century in the memories of a transsexual)
"The short century with different eyes: those of Luciano, born in 1924, first a restless child from the Piedmontese province, then a "different" teenager in fascist Bologna, and immediately after being a deserter on September 8, deported to Dachau and freed by the allies, and after the war migrated to Turin on the wings of the economic boom, where she changed sex in the eighties and then returned, as a mature woman, in the house and in the neighborhood that knew him as a boy.
An eighty-year-long history that is intertwined with that of our country and its social, cultural, and political turns, and sheds light on its most shadowy sides, on the expedients, places, languages, transformations of sexual diversity, always poised between secrecy and exhibition, between insecurity and the full claim of a conscious otherness."
2009,
Gabriella Romano,
Italian,
Lucy Salani,
Original title: "Trans: Storie di ragazze XY" (Trans: Stories of XY girls) by Monica Romano.
"Are you male or female?" It was 1986 when Ilenia heard this question asked for the first time. At the moment she doesn't know what to answer, she doesn't want to be different, she just is. The search for a true answer will accompany her all the way through adolescence and towards adulthood. Hers is the troubled journey of a girl who seems to have only one destination for society and for the right-thinking people, prostitution.
But Ilenia is a person who does not give up and immediately upsets the cards of destiny: despite bullying, discrimination, physical and verbal violence, she graduates, finds a job and an unexpected love, that for a woman. We can witness the fears, battles, wounds, and goals of a young trans woman, who like many other XY girls, fights for a peaceful and authentic life, towards gender freedom and the full right of citizenship for transgender people in civil society.
2015,
Italian,
Monica Romano,
Original title: "Luna l'altro dieci anni dopo. Itinerario sulla rotta di un cambiamento di sesso" (The Other Moon ten years later. Route of a Gender Change).
'A short itinerary on the route of a sex change, which ended ten years ago on the verge of a definitive change, resumes today to explain that there are new, or perhaps old reasons why that journey has not come to an end. Perhaps because the goal was already reached without having yet understood it.
Today talking about trans has become a recurring phenomenon, we do not know if for real sensitivity to the problems of these people or for creeping morbidity. The fact is that when Sonia and the author found themselves behind a table to build that monologue, in the now distant 1999, the topic was not so obvious and not even easy to deal with and to accept. Listening and updating the story of this journey, after so much water has passed under the bridge, can perhaps help someone, in a very difficult choice that leads to breaking with the previous life, and perhaps someone else, to a greater understanding.'
2009,
Italian,
Simona Segalini,
Original title: "Il volo. La mia vita: ieri uomo, oggi donna. Storia di metamorfosi e di lotta" (The flight. My life: yesterday man, today woman. History of metamorphosis and struggle) by Sandra 'Jovanka' Alvino.
Sandra is the story of a flight, of a female soul imprisoned in the wrong body, a screamed, shouted, demanding presence that takes your breath away, that does not allow for discounts, compromises, half measures… A story that overflows everywhere for too much abundance of life, for too many open wounds, for abuses and abuses suffered too many times.
We hope that by reading these pages so true and poignant, the liberating force that this flight of Sandra has is recovered, and that everyone learns to turn their eyes towards the many Sandras who inhabit and walk our streets and our neighborhoods and that they can re-emerge the need to restore dignity and name to these lives torn apart by the violence of our silences, our indifference, our presumptuous truths.
2007,
Italian,
Sandra 'Jovanka' Alvino,
"La mia vita con Dalí" (My life with Dalí) is the Italian language 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".
1987,
Amanda Lear,
April Ashley,
Georges Burou,
Italian,
Romy Haag,
Original title: "Gender (R)Evolution" by Monica Romano.
From the Stonewall revolt to the killing of the trans activist Hande Kader, passing through the battles of the Italian LGBT movement, Monica Romano tells firsthand the story of that long journey of affirmation of individual freedoms that saw the movement and the transgender community as protagonists, both Italian and international.
Her experience as an activist and militant is intertwined with that of some of the best-known and leading exponents of the movement. A memoir that invites us to reflect and to face mistrust and clichés, but also an informative text in which the story of the author and her companions is contextualized and enriched by in-depth information sheets, useful for clarifying meanings and concepts, against any mystification and prejudice.
2017,
Italian,
Monica Romano,
"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,
Italian,
Original title: "I travestiti: fotografie a colori" (Transvestites: color photographs) by Lisetta Carmi.
'Elena', by day rude crane operator at Italsider, red stiletto heels at night in Piazzetta del Fregoso. 'La Morena', during the day Mario the greengrocer, at night undecided whether to lure customers or become a nun. 'Dalida' instead sold candy during the day, at night she dreamed of the scalpel to finally marry her man.
Then 'the Gitana', with a physique already a bit undone, was said to have been the lover of De Pisis, who wanted at all costs to end up on the cover, and succeeded, laughing and shirtless.
None of them is there anymore, flashes of their lives remain in the most beautiful and cursed photographic book of the seventies, The transvestites of Lisetta Carmi.
2022,
Italian,
Lisetta Carmi,
Original title: "Vita da trans. 15.000 transessuali in Italia; Storie e confessioni di un'esistenza difficile" (Trans life. 15,000 transsexuals in Italy: Stories and confessions of a difficult existence) by Gatto Trocchi Cecilia.
Surreal figures of metropolitan nights, which in the light of the headlights appear beautiful and disturbing, have gained their irrepressible and exciting femininity on the plastic surgeon's computer. Brains, perfect buttocks, full lips, and delicate noses are the result of an artificial construction halfway between perverse dreams and cyber-punk fashion.
There are 15,000 transsexuals who beat the sidewalks of our cities, offering themselves by the hour to satisfy insane curiosity and unconfessed desires. In the investigation that the author has conducted, entering the lives of trans people and interviewing their customers, the underlying ambiguity of our society emerges and the massive "escape from the feminine", motivated by fears and frustrations.
1995,
Gatto Trocchi Cecilia,
Italian,
Original title: "La mia vita scandalosa" (My Scandalous Life).
"You are usually born only once. At least in the course of the same existence... I, on the other hand, was born twice." Thus Giò Stajano begins the story of her first exceptional sixty years, during which she passed from a life certainly not common to another almost unbelievable.
Gioacchino Starace, who was given the name of his paternal grandfather, was born in Sannicola, Puglia, in December 1931. On his mother's side, he is the nephew of Achille Starace, who has just been appointed secretary of the Fascist Party. Childhood is happy and privileged, adolescence is marked by war and the first signs of its "diversity".
1992,
Georges Burou,
Giò Stajano,
Italian,
Original title: "Gli Uni & Gli Altri: Travestiti e Travestimenti nell’Arte, nel cinema, nel teatro, nella musica, nel cabaret e nella vita quotidiana" (One & The Other. Travesti in art, in cinema, in theater, in music, in cabaret, and in everyday life) by Gillo Dorfles, Giovanni Buttagava, Gianni Romoli, Peppo Delconte, Carlo Romano.
In society "they" do not recognize
"the Others". The mask has always attenuated the contrasts and exalted the
shadow ambiguity. This collection of essays aims
to seize a particular moment of the mask, stand it out in its actuality when one becomes the other, the man a woman, the
woman a man, the man/woman the androgyne, the flower, the "difference"
on the morphological dictatorship of habits of sense and form.
1976,
Carlo Romano,
Gianni Romoli,
Gillo Dorfles,
Giovanni Buttagava,
Italian,
Peppo Delconte,
Original title: "I travestiti" (The transvestites) by Lisetta Carmi, (Rome, Essedi, 1972).
This is a photographic book with about 150 black and white shots on a phenomenon that – at the beginning of the 70s – did not fail to cause a sensation, gender identity. The volume was originally equipped with a paper dust jacket (now very rare) to hide from view a cover that for the time was considered particularly scandalous.
The photos were shot in Genoa from 1965 to the early 1970s. It is an intimate and deeply sensitive meditation on sexual identity. Lisetta Carmi was the first professional artist to photograph the transgender community.
1972,
Italian,
Lisetta Carmi,
Original title: "Vita da travestito: Transessuali chi dove e come sono" (Life as a transvestite: Transsexuals who where and how they are) by Maria Adele Teodori.
I came across this book in the eBay webshop. If you have read the book or you know the details of this book, please let me know.
1979,
Italian,
Maria Adele Teodori,
Original title: "Uguali e diversi: I travestiti come e perche" (Same and different: Transvestites how and why) by Edoardo Ballone
This publication is one of the first books about the transgender and transvestite community in Italy, written by Edoardo Ballone (1942-2011), an Italian journalist from La Stampa.
1978,
Edoardo Ballone,
Italian,
Original title: "Donna come donna: Storie di amori e lotte dei transessuali italiani" (Woman as Woman: Stories of Love and Struggle of Italian Transsexuals) by Pina Bonanno and Paola Astuni.
At night we transsexuals are accepted and not during the day, by the same people, because among our clients are civil servants, priests, policemen, and judges. All those who don't want to give us a legal status as women, depriving us of the possibility of finding a job other than being a call girl.
1981,
Italian,
Paola Astuni,
Pina Bonanno,
Original title: "Essere o apparire: Nascondersi è un po' morire" (To be or to appear: Hiding is a bit like dying) by Paola Catanzaro.
When duality dwells in us, there is always a predominant part. In me surely the strongest part was the female one, despite my body being male. Those who have divided the human race into two genders have not taken into account that in nature there is always an exception.
So how to overcome preconceptions, phobia and differences? I wrote this book to tell the true story of a "woman by choice". My life, my pains, my battles. The wounds inflicted for no reason, which healed and made me stronger. The tears, which dried up new horizons for me. Hiding is useless, hiding is like dying.
2022,
Italian,
Paola Catanzaro,
Original title: "Princesa" (Princess) by Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque and Maurizio Jannelli. The was published in 1994 and republished in the Italian language in 1997.
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.
1994,
Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque,
Italian,
Original title: "Luna, l'altro. Itinerario breve sulla rotta di un cambiamento di sesso" (The Other Moon: Short itinerary on the route of a sex change) by Simona Segalini.
This is the first part of the sequel. In 2009, Simona Segalini published the second part - "Luna l'altro dieci anni dopo. Itinerario sulla rotta di un cambiamento di sesso" (The Other Moon ten years later. Route of a Gender Change).
A short itinerary on the route of a sex change. Sonia and the author found themselves behind a table to build that monologue to elaborate on gender change, one of the most challenging moments in the life of a transgender woman.'
1999,
Italian,
Simona Segalini,
