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: "Atrevidas: relatos polifónicos de mujeres trans" (Daring: Polyphonic Stories of Trans Women) by Camila Schumacher.
"In 2013, Camila Schumacher was offered a job as a communicator at the II Central American Meeting of Women in the Performing Arts, where she met Dayana Hernández, current president of the TransVida Foundation, a Costa Rican organization created in 2009, by and for trans people. with the purpose of working for the human rights and identity of trans women; the search for attention and opportunities in health and education for this sector, as well as access and decent conditions for their work.
2019,
Camila Schumacher,
Costa Rica,
Spanish,
Original title: "Batido de Trolo" (Trolo Milkshake) by Naty Menstrual.
"Naty is not dizzy in the lukewarm lights of the biggest publishing houses, or the book fairs where it is measured who has the longest time, or the meetings in which four or five poets or writers look at each other's faces in a bookstore in Palermo Soho to read their "unpublished" books and applaud each other while they call each other beings of light (even if they want to devour each other) and believe that if one improves the typography and reads while Nina Simone plays, the texts seem better written. Naty is not one of those.
Her writing is compared to that of Quevedo, Lemebel, Aristophanes, Puig, Copi. And that's encouraging. But Naty has her own style, it's not comparable. It is unique and unrepeatable. And if sons or daughters come to him, we can talk about a way of making literature that is as vital as life and could be called natymenstrual literature. Or Natilesco. Or menstrual or something that serves to stop comparing her with others. Naty is her own comparison (creation)."
2005,
Argentina,
Naty Menstrual,
Spanish,
Original title: "Lola Cruda: Atípica, atópica, utópica" (Lola Cruda: Atypical, atopic, utopian) by Lola Bhajan.
"When I was a child, I prayed to God to wake up like a baby," says Lola Bhajan, an Argentinian trans musician and writer, in one of the chapters of Lola Cruda. She is a versatile artist and trans activist involved in musical projects such as “Hermanas Travestis.” She impresses with her powerful voice and her passion for traditional music such as baguala and vidala, whose roots lie in northern Argentina.
Her first novel, marked by a literary discourse that portrays the passage of a trans girl, who goes from puberty to youth; that measure of time where the world inexorably begins to take other forms.
2019,
Argentina,
Lola Bhajan,
Spanish,
Original title: "Soy una tonta por quererte" (I'm a fool for loving you) by Camila Sosa Villada.
"In the middle of the 90s, a woman earns her living as a surrogate bride for gay men. In a Harlem smoking room, a Latina transvestite becomes intimately acquainted with none other than Billie Holiday. A group of rugby players haggle over the price of a night of sex and in return get their comeuppance. Nuns, grandmothers, children and dogs are never what they seem... The nine stories that make up this book are inhabited by quirky and deeply human characters who confront an ominous reality in ways as strange as themselves.
Soy una tonta por quererte confirms that Camila Sosa Villada is one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. Owner of a dazzling and daring imagination, she is capable of both speaking the language of a victim of the Mexican Inquisition and of building a dystopian universe where transvestite existence takes its revenge. Owner of a unique style, Sosa crosses the boundaries between reality and magic in these tales, honoring the oral tradition with unparalleled ease and solidity."
2022,
Argentina,
Camila Sosa Villada,
Spanish,
Original title: "Nuestro Códigos: Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina" (Our Codes: Trans Argentina Memory Archive) by Trans Memory Archive.
Archivo de la Memoria Trans (AMT), in the words of its members, is a space for the protection, construction, and vindication of trans memory. Since the late 1990s, activists Claudia Pía Baudracco and María Belén Correa had dreamed of gathering their friends and fellow survivors—of violence and murder by police, imprisonment, and the AIDS pandemic—to share memories and images of one another.
In 2012, months after the death of Claudia Pía and the approval of Argentina's Gender Identity Law (which removed barriers to legal gender recognition and provided healthcare to trans youth and adults), Belén founded AMT on social media while living in exile in Germany. Together with photographer Cecilia Estalles, Belén developed the project, collecting and scanning the personal archives of Argentine trans women and sharing their lives and histories online and through print publications.
2023,
Argentina,
Spanish,
Trans Memory Archive,
Original title: "TranSER: Experiencias de vida de mujeres en tránsitos de género en Colombia" (TranSER: Life Experiences of Women in Gender Transitions in Colombia) by Paula Andrea Hoyos-Hernández and Laura Juliana Valderrama Orbegozo.
TranSER: life experiences of women in gender transitions in Colombia, allows us to delve into the experiences of 139 women from Cali, Calarcá, Armenia, Jamundí, Bogotá, Bucaramanga and Cartagena, throughout their lives and their different processes of gender transitions. It gives an account of the different human dimensions that contribute to the experience of sexuality and human life, such as the family, the couple, the occupation, integral health, the socio-cultural, the care and the right to health.
2021,
Colombia,
Laura Juliana Valderrama Orbegozo,
Paula Andrea Hoyos-Hernández,
Spanish,
Original title: "En el camino de la feminización: Estudio de las prácticas de intervención corporal de travestis del área de influencia del Hospital Santa Clara E.S.E. de Bogotá, Colombia" (On the road to feminization: A study of the body intervention practices of transvestites in the area of influence of the Santa Clara E.S.E. Hospital in Bogotá, Colombia) by María Mercedes Lafaurie Villamil.
Study on the practices of corporal intervention with a view to the feminization of a group of transvestites located in the tolerance zone of downtown Bogotá, between the towns of Los Mártires and Santa Fe. The reader will find a rigorous description of the artisanal techniques used by these people to acquire a feminine appearance; the health risks involved in such practices; of the imaginaries and conceptions that drive them, and of the socio-cultural contexts to which the subjects addressed belong.
2014,
Colombia,
María Mercedes Lafaurie Villamil,
Spanish,
Original title: "Devenir trans: Relatos biográficos del tercer sexo en Popayán" (Trans Becoming: Biographical Accounts of the Third Sex in Popayán) by Yinna Ortiz Ordoñez.
Talking about females with penises seems more like a paradox than the experience of a series of people who experience corporalities and subjectivities on the frontiers of 'normality'. This book proposes a reflection on trans experiences, which is not situated in the reductionist rhetoric of trans as a linear and univocal change from man to woman or vice versa, but rather thinks about the tensions and paradoxes of much more complex, dynamic and unfinished processes in the ways of experiencing 'sex', gender and corporeality.
Through a biographical approach, the book presents a life story accompanied by other experiences that allow access to intimate and profound elements about these transitions, but also to structural factors of social and gender norms.
This book is an invitation to imagine in other ways, to denaturalize and disrupt the discourses that tie bodies to rigid ways of being and being in the world, but also to look sharply at the tensions posed by trans subjectivities.
2019,
Colombia,
Spanish,
Yinna Ortiz Ordoñez,
Original title: "Transformando la televisión: Representaciones en series que revolucionan la hegemonía cis" (Transforming Television: Representations in Series That Revolutionize Cis Hegemony) by María Toscano-Alonso.
Trans identities have been silenced and made invisible for years, having been scarcely represented in mass culture, and when they have appeared it has been under negative stereotypes. In the last decade, new representations have begun to proliferate in television series and digital platforms that have given space to diverse trans-identity realities, from a trans woman imprisoned in prison, in Orange Is The New Black, to a trans man in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, in Las chicas del cable.
2022,
Cristina La Veneno,
Mar Cambrollé Jurado,
María Toscano-Alonso,
Spanish,
Original title: "Una mujer" (A woman) by Judith Juanhuix.
"The most hidden women in history have always existed. I'm sure you've only known us recently, maybe we're totally new to your world, but we've reached the surface to stay. We're here. And I've written you a book."
There are times in life when we finally see ourselves in fullness. That's when we stop questioning ourselves, we understand ourselves and we decide, simply, to be. Moments of an impressive transformative capacity that mark us because they define us and make us free forever.
In the life of our protagonist, this clarifying and magical photograph came about, after years of intimate doubts about gender identity and sexuality, when she opened Pandora's wardrobe and tried on her partner's sky-blue nightgown: "In the mirror in the room I finally see myself in a shape of my own. I've curdled. The Taboo is broken. Life that used to spin like a spinning top now takes on meaning."
2023,
Judith Juanhuix,
Spanish,
Original title: "El pozo de las cerezas" (The Well of Cherries) by Susana Cabrera.
Susana Cabrera chooses two very different angles to directly address sexuality and eroticism: excellent interviews – which she conducts personally with a taxi-boy, a transsexual woman, and a sexologist – and a selection of texts by prominent writers, philosophers and researchers that refer to sensuality, voluptuousness and passion.
Cabrera dialogues, in Socratic style, with the three chosen protagonists and contrasts their experiences with the experiences and reflections of diverse and well-known authors that are wisely interspersed. The author asks, questions, enriches and manages to bring out of the shadows, but also out of the frivolity, an erotic diversity that reflects deep currents of the human soul.
2008,
Spanish,
Susana Cabrera,
Uruguay,
Original title: "Vivir en el cuerpo equivocado" (Living in the wrong body) by Juan Pablo Proal.
Living in the Wrong Body is a compendium of chronicles and reports about people who have been excluded from the "world of normals". Out of ignorance and lack of sensitivity, transsexuals, intersexed, transgenders, and transvestites are commonly killed, tortured, and discriminated against in Mexico. They do not have access to formal work, social security, and a dignified life.
This book summarizes the stories of those who, with the world against them, managed to earn a place in life. The work is full of revelations and written in the best of journalistic languages: agility, rhythm, and clarity.
2013,
Juan Pablo Proal,
Mexico,
Spanish,
Original title: "El futuro es sin género: Historias trans de Colombia, Chile y Argentina" (The Future is Genderless: Trans Stories from Colombia, Chile, and Argentina) by Sandra Sanchez Lopez.
The book tells the stories of trans people from three places in Latin America: Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. In addition to reports, interviews, and chronicles, this book presents reflections on an inclusive journalistic profession, in which we make the political commitment of communication more transparent and leave behind fears and prejudices in the face of the encounters between journalism and activism.
Focused on trans lives and voices, this set of contributions suggests that the public conversation is enriched when we stop dodging the dilemmas that we still have to solve as a society, while strong citizens, with determination, carry forward their struggles.
2021,
Argentina,
Chile,
Colombia,
Sandra Sanchez Lopez,
Spanish,
Original title: "Brigitte Baptiste: un homenaje ilustrado" (Brigitte Baptiste: an illustrated tribute) by Brigitte Baptiste.
"Brigitte Baptiste. Illustrated story. A tribute to the great ecologist and defender of the environment. The life and work of Brigitte Baptiste, as well as her vision of science and the world, converge in this graphic journey, which is nothing more than an emotional illustrated tribute."
Brigitte Baptiste is a prominent figure in both the scientific and transgender communities. Born Luis Guillermo Baptiste1, she is a Colombian cultural landscape ecologist and an expert on environmental issues and biodiversity in Colombia1. She has served as the director of the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute and is currently the director of Universidad Ean.
2019,
Brigitte Baptiste,
Colombia,
Spanish,
Original title: "Valientas: nuestra historia" (Brave: Our Story) by Diego Fernando Montoya-Bermúdez.
In this album you will find the story of Colombian women with personalities as diverse as the hues of the sea. Brave women, who have learned to recognize their true essence and have decided to fight to be faithful to them. From their privacy they open the door to their life and tell us a little about their journey.
This expanded photographic album is the result of co-creation practices between women from the trans community, students and professors of Communication and Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali. As the core work of the transmedia intertextual system, it brings together the stories of nineteen women from different municipalities in Colombia.
2022,
Colombia,
Diego Fernando Montoya-Bermúdez,
Spanish,
Original title: "Inacabada" (Unfinished) by Ariel Florencia Richards.
"“Maybe the trans experience is inseparable from the rituals of death. Holding a vigil for the broken body, embracing it and caring for it in its passage,” wonders a daughter who yearns to end the silence that reigns between her and her mother on the topic of her sex change. Her thoughts circle back to two words – I am a woman – that imply both a rebirth and mourning for the person she has been for thirty-seven years. But does the transition ever end?
Full of profound reflections, Unfinished is a novel that explores the interstices between literary genres to find a language for bridging distances and soothing the grief of an unspoken identity even as it offers an intelligent appraisal of the potential to throw off family burdens and start living again."
2024,
Ariel Florencia Richards,
Chile,
Spanish,
Original title: "Otras Vidas. Activismo y Resiliencia Trans en Chile" (Other Lives. Trans Activism and Resilience in Chile).
The publication "Other Lives", which is part of a Fondart 2020 project, portrays the experiences of three Chilean trans women in different historical contexts. The stories of Katty Fontey, Silvia Parada and Carla Sepúlveda come together in a welcoming, enlightening and autobiographical book, which delves into the history and memory of the obstacles that trans people faced, and still face, in our country.
To this end, the text reviews relevant milestones, such as the configuration of San Camilo Street as a red light district in Santiago, their experience during the dictatorship and the persecution they faced, the HIV crisis in the eighties, and the formation of TravesChile after the return to democracy. More current events such as feminist marches and the struggle for the Gender Identity Law are also reported.
2021,
Carla Sepúlveda,
Chile,
Katty Fontey,
Silvia Parada,
Spanish,
Original title: "Una crónica trans" (A trans chronicle) by Ema De Griguori.
"Anxiety leads me to get up and write to you, my friend, to tell you that this spring my life is going to change completely. And I know that when I wake up it will be a magical moment, partly thanks to you, who gave me all your support and love, every time I felt alone and didn't know who to turn to".
"The name mom and dad chose when I was born is not the same name my friends call me today. The clothes, the haircut, the uniform that mom chose for her to go to school have changed a lot (a lot) today. My name is Ema, I am 22 years old and this is a chronicle of my experiences before and after my gender reassignment surgery."
2022,
Ema De Griguori,
Spanish,
Original title: "Efecto mariposa" (Butterfly Effect) by Jedet.
"The personal diary of one of Spain's most provocative artists.
You have in your hands my diary, which I have been writing on the blog, notes from my mobile, and composed of reflections, confessions,
real and imaginary conversations that I wanted to keep,
phrases, poems and lyrics of songs that have never seen the light ...
Among these pages you will find me naked.
I want you to know some of my scars and my delusions,
I want to confess to you things that I have not shared with anyone before, and that
after reading me you love me, understand me and want to hug me, or
you hate me, judge me, and wish to spit on me. Whatever you want, whatever is born to you."
"Jedet (Polícar, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist who sings, acts, writes and struggles every day to become the woman she always dreamed of."
"Disidentes de género: la nueva generación" is the Spanish language edition of "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation" by Kate Bornstein.
"Transgender narratives have made their way from the margins to the mainstream and back again, and today’s trans and nonbinary people, genderqueers, and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being.
Edited by the original gender outlaw, Kate Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, Gender Outlaws collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers - new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected publications. Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives."
2019,
Interview,
Kate Bornstein,
Spanish,
USA,
