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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 17–32 of 48 results
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Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$16.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
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Flight Instructions for the Commitment Impaired
$22.95“Wanted: lesbian couple to foster wonderful eleven-year-old African American boy with gender identity issues.”
Meet Antwan. Not only has he got gender issues, he’s severely emotionally disturbed, severely demanding and, as he puts it, “born to argue.”
In the late nineties, Nicola Harwood and her girlfriend moved to San Francisco in order to be at the epicentre of queer culture. Shortly after arriving, they encountered an ad posted in the SF Bay Times looking for lesbian foster parents. Impulsively, they decided to answer the ad and offer to foster Antwan, an eleven-year-old transgender child* who had been living in group homes since the age of six. Suffering from post-traumatic stress, numerous disabilities and behaviour issues, Antwan turns out to be not only a severely challenging child, but also an irrepressibly honest and funny one.
The sex-positive butch/femme couple, new to foster parenting but confident in their skills and experience as queers, start introducing Antwan to their gay world — including Gay Pride in the Castro, shopping for female clothing among the flash and extravagance of their Latino neighbourhood thrift stores, accompanying him to the queer youth dance club and supporting the emergence of his female identity.
But being queer is only part of who Antwan is, and the couple are soon faced with the reality that his behaviours may be more than they can handle. They become a part of the “system,” working with over-burdened social workers, therapists, group home workers, special needs school teachers, psychiatrists and foster care agencies, all trying to help Antwan succeed outside the group home. Antwan, however, is oblivious to the massive amount of funding and attention being paid to him and just wants the couple to buy him more outfits and watch him perform as Britney Spears singing “… Baby, One More Time.”
While Antwan is introduced to the gay world of San Francisco, the white couple is introduced to his black world of Oakland. As the relationship develops, members of Antwan’s birth family, many of whom he has not seen or heard from in years, begin to emerge. It turns out that Antwan isn’t the only big queer in his family. One of his sisters is a baby dyke, and his troubled mother, who shows up when Antwan is thirteen, wears the strut of an old-school butch.
Outrageous, sad and very funny, Flight Instructions for the Commitment Impaired follows the couple as they attempt to build a relationship with Antwan and his world. As the three start to connect across an abyss of trauma and abuse, a relationship develops that challenges each of their notions of race, family and commitment.
*Note about pronouns: Antwan has asked that we use male pronouns when referring to the time before she transitioned at the age of seventeen.
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Horrible Dance
$21.95A brilliant poetic debut about gender-based violence that dismantles received definitions of both gender and violence, Horrible Dance is an accomplished addition to transfeminist thought and theory.
By turns darkly comic, emotionally connected, playful, incisive, lyrical and irreverent, Lake’s poems navigate a harrowing personal and political terrain with understated, expansive wisdom. Lake persistently returns us to the search for love that lies at the core of relational trauma, even as she shows us how catastrophically such a search can be derailed.
This is a rare text able to hold the full velocity of a survivor’s hurt and rage alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the extent and complexity of harm. In their honest accounting of a wide array of bad encounters, these poems point us, again, toward compassion, tenderness, and solidarity.
can you forgive mefor how you hurt me so bad –“On Shame”
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I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me?
$17.95A funny and sweet—but not saccharine—jaunt through the back alleys of queer love.
Intimate, nostalgic, and surprising, the poems in I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? spark connections that alter trajectory and carry lasting resonance. Encounters across phone lines, over drinks, through walkie-talkies, and unspoken recognitions between queer bodies fill this collection with explorations of what it means to be seen.
The micro-narratives in I Can Hear You, Can You Hear Me? both celebrate and grieve the connections they illuminate. Nolan Natasha’s poetry is plainspoken but lyrical, sweet but frank, nostalgic but unromanticized, combining the atmosphere of Eileen Myles with the musical insight of Helen Humphreys. These poems bring an unflinching examination and a keen sense of humour to moments of human connection and self-exploration.
“Nolan Natasha’s writing is so clear-eyed, funny, tender, and absorbing. I love these poems and this sparkling debut.”—Zoe Whittall
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it was never going to be okay
$18.95it was never going to be okay is a collection of poetry and prose exploring the intimacies of understanding intergenerational trauma, Indigeneity and queerness, while addressing urban Indigenous diaspora and breaking down the limitations of sexual understanding as a trans woman. As a way to move from the linear timeline of healing and coming to terms with how trauma does not exist in subsequent happenings, it was never going to be okay tries to break down years of silence in simpson’s debut collection of poetry:i am fivemy sisters are saying boyi do not know what the word means but—i am bruised into knowing it: the blunt b,the hollowness of the o, the blade of y
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JAZZ
$18.00“There is a shadow of a boy walking within me. His spirit is lightning fire. He will not be shackled. At birth, I was labeled a girl. My name is Jazz. Like the music, I am nature’s improvisation.”
When he is forced to leave his suburban home at age seventeen, Jazz – a transgender F2M – moves into the heart of Toronto’s LGBTQ community in hopes of finding the help he needs to begin his transition. A true hero’s journey, this narrative features a cast of colourful characters, including Martine, a dope-smoking drag queen; Kimmie, a hairdresser with a heart of gold; Sister Mary Francis, a sharp-talking ex-nun, and his counselor; Kendall, who must face his own demons in order to support Jazz in his journey. With comedy and pathos, Jazz wrestles with the realities of the courage it takes to be transgendered in today’s society.
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Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian)
$18.95The playful and poignant novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) sifts through a queer trans woman’s unrequited love for her straight trans friend who died. A queer love letter steeped in desire, grief, and delight, the story is interspersed with encyclopedia entries about a fictional TV show set on an isolated island.
The experimental form functions at once as a manual for how pop culture can help soothe and mend us and as an exploration of oft-overlooked sources of pleasure, including karaoke, birding, and butt toys. Ultimately, Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) reveals with glorious detail and emotional nuance the woman the narrator loved, why she loved her, and the depths of what she has lost.
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Little Fish
$21.95WINNER, Amazon Canada First Novel Award; Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction
Finalist, Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award
A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
It’s the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a thirty-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpected phone call from a distant family friend with a startling secret: Wendy’s Opa (grandfather) — a devout Mennonite farmer — might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this revelation, but as Wendy’s life grows increasingly volatile, she finds herself aching for the lost pieces of her Opa’s truth. Can Wendy unravel the mystery of her grandfather’s world and reckon with the culture that both shaped and rejected her? She’s determined to try.
Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined.
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Lyric Sexology Vol. 1
$19.95Largely written before the current cultural visibility of trans lit, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is Salah’s prescient contribution to a canon of self-determined literature that explores transness. In this case, the author sidesteps the “I” in the text and instead draws on archives–sexological, anthropological, psychological, among others–to demonstrate the shifting and shifty nature of our identities, affiliations, and narratives.
This 2017 edition is the first to be published in Canada and features four new poems and a new cover design by Kai Yun Ching and Wai-Yant Li.
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My Body Is Distant
$24.95“My Body Is Distant is a trans, coming-out story like no other. Beautifully crafted, propulsive and by turns heartbreaking and funny, Paige Maylott offers us a guided tour of gaming communities and virtual romance, and how they can create collisions and liberation in real life.” — Farzana Doctor, author of Seven and You Still Look the SameAn electrifying and vulnerable memoir that invites readers into an intimate conversation about our digital and physical selves, gender, and belonging. In My Body Is Distant, Paige Maylott writes about her life — both virtual and IRL — as she explores her authentic self and sexuality through dream-like virtual worlds. While Paige dances in online BDSM clubs and hurls spells on virtual battlefields, she is swept into a fairy tale romance that pushes her into discovery mode: How can she transcend her carefully curated computer universe and manifest that happiness in the real world? As she discovers the person she is meant to be, Paige contends with a cancer diagnosis and an imploding marriage while struggling to convert an online love story into reality. When a humiliation at work provides the necessary push to transition, Paige finds the freedom to explore her new self.Part trans woman’s coming-out story and part heartfelt romance, My Body Is Distant follows Paige from a childhood obsession with the 1980s game Zork, through a health crisis and divorce, to, ultimately, an affirmation of authenticity and self-love.
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My Camino
$21.95Reeling from the Night of Nights, an unexpected blockbuster art show, Floss, a transgender New York gallery owner, invites subversive installation artist Budsy and their best friend the Apostle John to cycle the Camino de Santiago. When Floss tells her friends about her shocking experience at the hands of the King of the New York art scene, the journey becomes an anti-pilgrimage—from spiritual discovery to revenge fantasy. Moving from New York to Spain to Dublin, My Camino is a book about misfits, identity, art and spirituality narrated by the audacious Apostle John whose telling sometimes rhymes, is often hilarious and is always a blistering account of the contemporary art world.
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Our Work Is Everywhere
$23.95A visually stunning graphic non-fiction book on queer and trans resistance.
Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real, and imagined queer and trans communities.
In their own words, queer and trans organizers, artists, healers, comrades, and leaders speak honestly and authentically about their own experiences with power, love, pain, and magic to create a textured and nuanced portrait of queer and trans realities in America. The many themes include Black femme mental health, Pacific Islander authorship, fat queer performance art, disability and health care practice, sex worker activism, and much more. Accompanying the narratives are Rose’s startling and sinuous images that brings these leaders’ words to visual life.
Our Work Is Everywhere is a graphic non-fiction book that underscores the brilliance and passion of queer and trans resistance.
Includes a foreword by Lambda Literary Award-winning author and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.
Full-colour throughout.
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Out Proud
$19.95Produced in partnership with Egale Canada Human Rights Trust, Out Proud: Stories of Pride, Courage, and Social Justice is the second in a series of essay anthologies designed to give attention to issues that are sometimes ignored in the mainstream media—and a voice to those most closely affected by them. Expertly edited by sociologist Dr. Douglas Gosse, Out Proud features more than fifty short essays on the experience of LGBTTIQQ2SA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Intersexual, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirited and Allies) and written by members of our diverse, Canadian community. Following the critical success of the first book in the series, Out Loud: Essays on Mental Illness, Stigma and Recovery, Out Proud aims to broaden the conversation around sexuality and social justice.
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Pass Me By: Gone Fishin’
$20.002020 BPAA Best Illustrated Book Of The Year Award Winner
Pass Me By is an award-winning queer, coming of age, and coming out romance. A five book series starts with Ed, a reserved man recently diagnosed with dementia, living in a small northern Canadian town. As Ed’s memory declines he loses touch with the present and spends more time in a past he chose to forget, touring with a glam rock band across Canada in the early 1970s. In Gone Fishin’, we are introduced to Ed, a retired man spending his time fishing and ordering the same dishes at the local diner with his close friend Rory. Rocked by a recent dementia diagnosis, Ed attempts to keep a semblance of a normal life. As his health worsens and daily routines become increasingly difficult, his panic begins to grow. Forgetting what he orders every day at the diner, disoriented by a grocery list, lost in familiar spaces, Ed’s memories become a faded photograph of a past with the potential to disappear forever.
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Plenitude
$20.00A non-binary faun wishes their body had a variety of sex organs, interchangeable daily. A prison abolitionist scrutinizes Rothko paintings on the carceral state’s boardroom walls. The insurrectionary tactics of mass social movements spread, like a secret handshake, from Chile to Hong Kong to Toronto.
Shaped by Daniel Sarah Karasik’s experience of grassroots social and political advocacy, these poems are an offering to those engaged in struggles for a better world—and an acknowledgement of the sometimes contradictory meanings of those struggles. How do individual erotic desires relate to collective desires for deliverance from alienation and exploitation? How might we dream of a more humane future, and work towards building it, without minimizing the challenges that stand in our way?
Plenitude cartwheels towards a world that might be: a world without cops or bosses, without prisons, without oppressive regulation of gender and desire. It is a song for the excluded and forgotten and those who struggle alongside them.
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Radiant Voices
$22.00A collection of essays inspired by EMMA Talks, a speakers’ series committed to amplifying the voices of thinkers, activists, scholars, artists, and community builders who are also women-identified, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks.
From Idle No More to Black Lives Matter to the Me Too movements and more, one thing is certain: There is a burgeoning collective desire to hear non-dominant voices in subtle, curious, generative ways.
The Vancouver-based EMMA Talks speakers’ series amplifies the voices of women-identified, trans, and gender-nonconforming folks. Curated by carla bergman, the series showcases a diversity of writers, thinkers, activists, scholars, artists, and community builders. Radiant Voices is the anthology inspired by EMMA Talks.
Through engaging essays by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Silvia Federici, Vivek Shraya, Chief Janice George, dr. amina wadud, Astra Taylor, and others, seasoned writers align with emerging writers who share from a worldview that promotes anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-ageism, and anti-ableism, and much more. Themes of connection, rediscovery, creating, social justice, celebration, and matriarchy are revealed in these 21 essays.
This is an era in which the marginalized can publicly share their stories en masse. Now is the time to celebrate the eruption of all these radiant voices.