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Trans Day of Visibility Reads
To recognize the International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV)—a day dedicated to celebrating transgender people and their contributions to society and raising awareness of discrimination faced by transgender people worldwide—we bring you books that reflect stories of transgender people and characters.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 48 results
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A Dream of a Woman
$21.95Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Award-winning novelist Casey Plett (Little Fish) returns with a poignant suite of stories that center transgender women.
Casey Plett’s 2018 novel Little Fish won a Lambda Literary Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction, and the Amazon First Novel Award. Her latest work, A Dream of a Woman, is her first book of short stories since her seminal 2014 collection A Safe Girl to Love. Centering transgender women seeking stable, adult lives, A Dream of a Woman finds quiet truths in prairie high-rises and New York warehouses, in freezing Canadian winters and drizzly Oregon days.
In “Hazel and Christopher,” two childhood friends reconnect as adults after one of them has transitioned. In “Perfect Places,” a woman grapples with undesirability as she navigates fetish play with a man. In “Couldn’t Hear You Talk Anymore,” the narrator reflects on her tumultuous life and what might have been as she recalls tender moments with another trans woman.
An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.
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A Natural History of Transition
$18.95A Natural History of Transition is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Portland-based author Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
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a place called No Homeland
$16.95Winner, Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers; American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book; Finalist, Lambda Literary Award and Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender Variant Literature
This extraordinary poetry collection is a vivid, beautifully wrought journey to the place where forgotten ancestors live and monstrous women roam–and where the distinctions between body, land, and language are lost. In these fierce yet tender narrative poems, Kai Cheng Thom draws equally from memory and mythology to create new maps of gender, race, sexuality, and violence. In the world of a place called No Homeland, the bodies of the marginalized–queer and transgender communities, survivors of abuse and assault, and children of diaspora–are celebrated, survival songs are sung, and the ancestors offer you forgiveness for not remembering their names.
Descended from the traditions of oral storytelling, spoken word, and queer punk poetry, Kai Cheng Thom’s debut collection is evocative and unforgettable.
I dream warm, wet
Earth-colored wombs,
That rise and tremble and swell with the moon
To give birth to babies connected
By blue-river veins of memory -
A Safe Girl to Love
$21.95A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett.
By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman:eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.
A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.
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Almost Feral
$24.95***CANADA BOOK AWARD WINNER******IPPY AWARDS SILVER MEDAL, CANADA-EAST BEST REGIONAL NONFICTION CATEGORY*****BEST ATLANTIC-PUBLISHED BOOK AWARD WINNER******MARGARET AND JOHN SAVAGE FIRST BOOK AWARD – NON-FICTION WINNER******CBC BOOKS WRITER TO WATCH LIST***
On July 2, 2015, influential social activist Gemma Hickey began a 908-kilometer walk across the island of Newfoundland to raise awareness and funds for survivors of religious institutional abuse. Almost Feral celebrates the community of support that gathered around this journey and recounts Hickey’s remarkable story of self-discovery which led to the realization that they are transgender. In this thought-provoking and wide-ranging autobiography, Hickey counters memories of sexual assault, bullying, and depression with inspiring reflections on faith, love, family, individual and communal identity, sex, gender, and acceptance. Through complex feelings of empathy and solitude, weakness and strength, suffering and recovery, Gemma Hickey’s Almost Feral chronicles a journey from one side of an island to the other side of personal identity—charting an unknown territory where one’s body becomes the map that leads to home. -
Any Other City
$22.95By the author of Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian): the fictional memoir of a trans indie rock musician that reveals how the act of creation can heal trauma and even change the past.
Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang.
Side B finds Tracy in 2019, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
Motifs recur like musical phrases, and traces of what used to be there peek through, like a palimpsest. Any Other City is a novel about friendship and other forms of love, travelling in a body across decades, and transmuting trauma through art making and queer sex – a love letter to trans femmes and to art itself.
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Belated Bris of the Brainsick
$18.95Belated Bris of the Brainsick traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspectives and aesthetics. If there is a narrative arc to the collection, it is not the usual one of falling ill and then regaining health; rather, it is the pursuit of a “queered” version of health.
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Big
$24.95Pop culture stereotypes, shopping frustrations, fat jokes and misconceptions about health are all ways society systemically rejects large bodies. BIG is a collection of personal and intimate experiences of plus-sized women, non-binary and trans people in a society obsessed with thinness. Revealing insights that are both funny and traumatic, surprising and challenging, familiar and unexpected, 26 writers explore themes as diverse as self perception, body image, fashion, fat activism, food, sexuality, diet culture, motherhood and more. These stories offer a closer look at what it means to navigate a world designed to fit bodies of a certain size (sometimes literally) and, in turn, invite readers to ask questions about–and ultimately reconsider–our collective and individual obsession with women’s bodies. Contributors include Dr. Rohini Bannerjee, Amanda Scriver, Cassie Stocks, Jo Jefferson, Layla Cameron, Rabbit Richards, Sonja Boon, Simone Blais, Tracy Manrell and other writers from across Canada, the US, and the UK.
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Care Work
$21.95Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative “collective access” — access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure — in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour.
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
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Dandelion Daughter
$21.95A runaway bestseller in Québec, where it has captured the hearts of readers and pushed trans-identity into the mainstream conversation
Dandelion Daughter is an intimate, courageous portrait of what it’s like to grow up having been assigned the wrong sex at birth. Set against the windswept countryside of the remote Charlevoix region some five hours north of Montreal, Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay‘s autobiographical novel immortalizes her early years as an alienated boy trapped in a world of small-town values and her parents’ dissolving marriage, through complex adolescent years of self-discovery and first loves, to the harrowing episodes that fuel the growing realization that she must transition and give birth to her new self if she is to continue living at all. One of the first novels of its kind to appear in Québec, this inspiring story has already connected with a wide readership, and has been adopted by many schools to help expand worldviews and curriculums.
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Death Threat
$16.95Finalist, Lambda Literary Award and Doug Wright Award
In the fall of 2017, the acclaimed writer and musician Vivek Shraya began receiving vivid and disturbing transphobic hate mail from a stranger. Celebrated artist Ness Lee brings these letters and Shraya’s responses to them to startling life in Death Threat, a comic book that, by its existence, becomes a compelling act of resistance. Using satire and surrealism, Death Threat is an unflinching portrayal of violent harassment from the perspective of both the perpetrator and the target, illustrating the dangers of online accessibility, and the ease with which vitriolic hatred can be spread digitally.
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Disintegrate/Dissociate
$16.95Winner, Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers (Writers’ Trust of Canada) and the Indigenous Voices Award; finalist, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
In her powerful debut collection of poetry, Arielle Twist unravels the complexities of human relationships after death and metamorphosis. In these spare yet powerful poems, she explores, with both rage and tenderness, the parameters of grief, trauma, displacement, and identity. Weaving together a past made murky by uncertainty and a present which exists in multitudes, Arielle Twist poetically navigates through what it means to be an Indigenous trans woman, discovering the possibilities of a hopeful future and a transcendent, beautiful path to regaining softness.
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Dragonfly
$15.95In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos. So often, it is the external changes in trans lives that the world is exposed to and confronts. Here as Lara says, is the “inside voice” of a trans child, ever present, ever demanding to be heard, ever rising upward, to growth, peace, security and love.
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Dream Rooms
$23.00Part essay, part poem, part fever dream journal entry, Dream Rooms is a book about personal revolution, about unravelling a worldview to make space for different selves and realities. Set in the years that led up to author River Halen coming out as trans, this collection concerns itself with what sits on the surface of daily life, hidden in plain view, hungry for address—what it means to take a stranger’s pet rabbit to the vet in a year of accelerating extinctions, to lose your clothes to a moth infestation then buy a duvet made of fossil fuels, to learn your bookshelf is full of work written by rapists and rape apologists, to consider a birth control device as a narrative about bodies and their possibilities, then pull the string. Deeply queer and trans not only in its content but in its thinking, Dream Rooms invites readers to that place in consciousness where fear and desire, hidden information and common knowledge brush up against each other and are mutually transformed.
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Duecentomila
$18.95Estranged teenage cousins Eli and Kat have recently met online and bonded over their queer identities, but they have a limited understanding of each other’s very different realities. In Italy, soft-spoken Eli is trying to find a way to come out as trans to his conservative Roman Catholic family. In Canada, strong-headed Kat is desperate for connection to a culture and place she’s never known.
Kat and her friend Hannah are the only ones who know that Eli is trans—not even his brother Matteo knows. And while her intentions are good, Kat’s decision to crowdfund a flight for Eli to attend Toronto Pride unknowingly outs him to the public, setting off a chain of events that leave the cousins and their loved ones reeling.
Full of poetry, laughter, and big questions, this touching story paints a portrait of what it’s like for young people wanting to reconcile what they’ve inherited with what feels right.
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Emanations
$18.00In Prathna Lor’s first full-length collection we are introduced to a unique voice in Canadian poetry. Moving fluidly between prose poems and more fractured, open verse, Lor meditates on voice, on disaster and on identity, pushing always against commodification, against a consumable narrative.