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.
"Nella camera oscura" (In The Dark Room) is the Italian language edition of Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon's bestseller "In the Darkroom". The book was published in the following languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish.
Susan Faludi’s Nella camera oscura is a book that begins with a shock, one that feels like a letter from another dimension. “Dear Susan,” her father writes, “I’ve got some interesting news for you.” The “news” is that at seventy-six, the father she had long feared and barely known has undergone gender-affirming surgery and now lives as a woman named Stefánie. Attached to the email are photos: a tired figure in a red skirt and sleeveless chemise, another in a Vienna garden wearing a wig and ruffled blouse. Signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” With those few words, a relationship that had already been ruptured by violence and silence transforms into something even more ungraspable. The father who once ruled their home like a small dictatorship reemerges decades later, reborn yet still shrouded in secrecy.
Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning feminist journalist, doesn’t treat this revelation as mere family drama. She does what she has always done: she investigates. Armed with her notebooks and recorder, she flies to Hungary to meet this new version of her father, a parent she both dreads and feels compelled to understand. What she finds is not the clarity of a happy reunion but the haze of a mystery: who was this person, really? How could the same individual who once terrorized his family also live a life of constant masquerade, now claiming womanhood as both truth and salvation?
2019,
Italian,
Stefánie Faludi,
Susan Faludi,
“Mörkrummet” begins as a story about a daughter and her estranged father, but it unfolds into something far deeper, a meditation on gender, survival, and the messy work of forgiveness. In the Swedish edition of In the Darkroom, translated by Patricia Piolon, Susan Faludi takes readers on a journey that stretches from war-torn Budapest to the uneasy terrain of family reunion, from the ghosts of the Holocaust to the rebirth of identity in its most literal form. At its heart lies a story of transformation: a father who became a woman, and a daughter who became her witness.
When Susan Faludi received that fateful email in 2004, she was not expecting news that would unravel her own ideas of gender, identity, and forgiveness. Her father, once a stern and often violent patriarch, wrote to announce: “I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Attached were photographs. A seventy-six-year-old woman in a sleeveless red chemise, her eyes tired after surgery, signed the email, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” For Susan, who had spent most of her life estranged from her father, it was an earthquake in slow motion. How could the man who had once terrorized their home now stand before her as a woman?
2017,
Stefánie Faludi,
Susan Faludi,
Swedish,
Susan Faludi’s Temná komora, the Czech edition of her internationally acclaimed book In the Darkroom, is one of those rare memoirs that slips between the borders of genre and identity just as easily as its subject slips between genders and nationalities. It begins, almost cinematically, with a moment of remembrance and forgetting, a scene in the Hungarian National Museum where Faludi and her father, a Jewish-born Hungarian photographer turned American patriarch turned elderly trans woman, wander among curated evasions of history. Hungary’s right-wing government had proclaimed a year of Holocaust remembrance, yet the exhibition they encounter seems more intent on erasing guilt than confronting it. In that basement, surrounded by the portraits of survivors, Faludi’s father explodes with fury, denouncing Hungary’s complicity in the murder of its Jews. It is a moment both political and personal, as if decades of repression, denial, and disguise had suddenly cracked open.
2018,
Czech,
Stefánie Faludi,
Susan Faludi,
En el cuarto oscuro is one of those rare books that unravels the messy fabric of identity while making you feel the full emotional weight of what it means to be both someone’s child and someone’s witness. Susan Faludi begins with an email from her estranged father that detonates like a quiet bomb in her inbox. “Dear Susan,” it starts, “I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” What follows is a cascade of images that seem to belong to two different lifetimes: snapshots of a seventy-six-year-old parent in a red skirt after gender-affirming surgery, a wigged figure in a Vienna garden posing as “Stefánie.” The message is signed, “Love from your parent, Stefánie.” And with that, Faludi’s life-long investigation of gender, family, and truth begins again, this time through a lens that blurs everything she thought she knew.
Faludi’s relationship with her father had long been fractured by violence and fear. Growing up in suburban New York, she remembers a household dominated by her father’s iron will: what they ate, where they went, even what they wore was decided by him. As a teenager, she knew him as an angry, volatile man, a photographer who controlled not just the lighting of his studio but the emotional weather of the family. Then came the rupture, her father’s violent attack on her mother’s boyfriend, the police intervention, and decades of silence. When Stefánie reappears, newly reborn, Faludi boards a plane to Hungary, both journalist and daughter, recorder in hand, to meet the person her father has become.
2019,
Spanish,
Stefánie Faludi,
Susan Faludi,
Susan Faludi’s In de donkere kamer (the Dutch edition of In the Darkroom, co-authored with Patricia Piolon) is one of those rare, unsettling books that quietly detonates everything you think you know about identity, memory, and family. It begins, as many reckonings do, with an email. In 2004, the Pulitzer-winning journalist receives a message from her estranged father, a man she has barely spoken to in more than two decades. The subject line reads “Changes.” Inside is a note that is both casual and world-altering: “I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Attached are photographs of her 76-year-old parent, newly christened Stefánie, smiling shyly in a red skirt and sleeveless blouse after gender-affirming surgery in Thailand.
From that moment, Faludi’s story unfurls with the precision of an investigative reporter and the aching vulnerability of a daughter trying to understand the most enigmatic person in her life. The book follows Susan as she travels to Budapest to meet her father, who has returned to her homeland after the fall of communism. In a house perched high in the Buda hills, the two women begin an awkward, often excruciating process of reacquaintance. Stefánie greets her daughter in a sundress, asks her to zip up her gown, insists they are “all women here.” The tension between them is almost tactile. For Susan, this is not just the father who has transitioned into a woman; this is also the man who once terrorized her family, who was violent and domineering, who once broke into their house and attacked her mother’s new partner with a knife. How do you reconcile a past like that with a new identity that demands empathy and acceptance?
2016,
Dutch,
Stefánie Faludi,
Susan Faludi,
Full title: "In The Darkroom" by Susan Faludi and Patricia Piolon. The book was published in the following languages: Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish.
Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom opens not as a story of transformation, but as an investigation, into a parent, a past, and the shifting meaning of identity itself, unfolding through a tender and unsettling search for who her father, and she herself, really is. It begins with an email that upends everything Faludi thought she knew about her family, about her father, and about herself. “Dear Susan,” the message reads, “I’ve got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.” Attached to that note were photographs: her seventy-six-year-old father, once Steven Faludi, now Stephanie, smiling faintly after gender-affirming surgery. For a daughter who had known him as an authoritarian figure, sometimes violent and always domineering, the revelation was almost incomprehensible.
Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize–winning feminist journalist known for her incisive critiques of gender and power, found herself facing a question she’d never quite been able to escape: what is identity, really? Is it chosen or inherited, built or discovered, imposed or reclaimed? That question drives the book’s labyrinthine narrative, which doubles as a personal reckoning and a political meditation. When Faludi travels to Hungary to meet her newly transitioned parent, she enters not only her father’s strange and cloistered life in Budapest but also a nation wrestling with its own history of denial and reinvention.
2016,
English,
Stefánie Faludi,
Susan Faludi,
