A random collection of over 1994 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: "Quem?" (Who?) by Rute Bianca.
Rute Bianca’s autobiography Quem? arrives in the reader’s hands like a confession whispered after a lifetime of storms. It is not a book that hides behind stylistic flourishes or careful literary embroidery. Instead, Bianca writes with the urgency of someone who has lived intensely and who now feels compelled to lay her story bare. She writes as a woman shaped by resistance, using that word with the weight of personal history. Resistance marks every chapter of her life, because for her growing up was never simply growing up. It was surviving a cultural, religious, and social dictatorship that tolerated no deviation from a rigid gender model. She calls herself a child of April, a reference to the Portuguese revolution that promised freedom, although many of those promises never reached the lives of people like her.
In Quem? Bianca recounts the adventures and misadventures that made her who she is, never pretending that the path was tidy or dignified. She admits that her life may appeal to some and repel others, but she insists that it is hers. She writes from the perspective of someone who tried to be happy and, in many moments, succeeded with a joyful intensity that still echoes through her memories. Yet she also writes as a woman aging in a world that once felt endlessly vibrant. The contrast between her youth, full of motion and appetite, and her present life, shaped by routine and quiet, fills her with a bittersweet understanding. She goes to the sea, walks, shops for groceries, takes care of her mother, reads, and savors the awareness that life is precious precisely because it ends. She knows she cannot be young in this era, nor would she want to be. Her youth belonged to a different world, one she remembers as warmer and richer in human feeling.
2025,
Portugal,
Portuguese,
Rute Bianca,
Original title: "Transcartografia: Atrizes e Atores Trans na Cena Teatral" (Transcartography: Trans Actresses and Actors in the Paperback Theatre) by Jerônimo Vieira de Lima Silva.
The work "Transcartography: Trans Actresses and Actors in the Theatrical Scene" starts with a focus on the LGBTTQ+ movement in Brazil and Portugal to analyze the theatrical scenario in both countries.
Official statistics and data on transphobia are presented, as well as a mapping of transsexual actors and actresses inserted in the political and social contexts of these countries. The aspects of theatricality and performativity that are inserted in the construction of genders are also listed, especially with regard to the transsexual.
2020,
Brazil,
Jerônimo Vieira de Lima Silva,
Portugal,
Portuguese,
Original title: "Obviamente mulher" (Obviously Woman) by Filipa Gonçalves & Maria Carvalho Costa.
'Filipa Gonçalves was born a boy in Lisbon in April 1979. At the age of three, she began to assert herself as a girl, rejecting being a boy. Observed by physicians of various specialties from an early age, it was confirmed, over the years, her determination to be a woman.
At the age of 16, still as a boy, she took a modeling course at The Idealis School. Invited by seamstress Luís Barbeiro to be the bride in his next parade, she started her career on the fashion catwalk. Soon several successful advertising campaigns followed. She became a successful model before her gender reassignment surgery, hiding her male ID document.
2010,
Filipa Gonçalves,
Maria Carvalho Costa,
Portugal,
Portuguese,
Original title: "Caminhos Tortuosos de uma Transgénero" (Tortuous Paths of a Transgender) by Francisca Solange Vaz Martins.
'Tortuous paths, freedom restricted to the will of the other, life in captivity, no guilt, no crime. Injustice, frustration, unceasing search. Massocratic stereotypes, dignity of the dying human person, struck at every moment. The war for liberation, fought for decades, alone.
Finally, she had finished, the beginning of the path always dreamed of, her own managed to prevail. - Now, in freedom, I could say it out loud!!! ... - In all the paths I've traveled all my life, I didn't mean to be a psychologist!
I didn't want to be a lawyer! Lawyer or Historian! Not even a thinker or writer! wanted to be, just and only, a woman!!!!! ... I am finally. My own - The Francisca Solange.
2020,
Francisca Solange Vaz Martins,
Portugal,
Portuguese,
Original title: "Ontem Homem, Hoje Mulher" (Yesterday Man, Today Woman)
João Décio Ferreira, a doctor, one of the leading specialists in gender change surgeries, was immediately interested in the case of the boy with a girl figure. Patricia was still Nuno, but whoever saw her saw a woman. Blonde, expressive-looking, and a smiling girl, trapped in the wrong body. Only, when she managed to free herself from the body that imprisoned her, the singer went through a long ordeal.
First, as a child, she struggled with identity issues. She played with dolls and that was the nickname she had at school. She cried in the silence of the room.
At one point, increasingly aware that something was going on, Patricia would put together coins that she then exchanged for girly clothes and make-up. It was at the fair, and in the stores of the 300, that she was tied up in women's accessories.
2014,
Patricia Ribeiro,
Portugal,
Portuguese,
