Books by trans-identified authors have traditionally fallen into two categories: memoir and theory. The memoir came first – Lili Elbe (subject of the film The Danish Girl) was one of the first recipients of sex-reassignment surgery, supervised by pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Elbe died following an operation in 1931, but two years later, Man Into Woman was published. It was a strange text: edited by “Niels Hoyer”, the pen name of Ernst Ludwig Jacobson, it also used pseudonyms for Elbe and her friends. However, it launched a genre that developed in parallel with gender identity clinics’ management of people’s transitions and mass-media interest in transsexual and transgender people. The most widely read example in Britain remains Conundrum by Jan Morris, published in 1974.



By the late 1980s, authors were questioning the conventions of these memoirs, in particular how they represented the space between “male” and “female”– or failed to. They also spoke out both against gender identity clinics which told service users to keep their histories secret and transphobia within second-wave feminism. Artist/activist Sandy Stone brought these concerns into The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto, which circulated in early online communities. Opening some fascinating possibilities, it suggested that trans writers consider themselves “as a genre – a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption … has yet to be explored”.

A range of theoretical texts followed, which sought to give a language to trans and genderqueer identities, self-defined rather than imposed. They aimed to organise a community and stimulate discussion within it, and the memoir – seen as written for the benefit of outsiders – became less popular. But most of these works drew on personal experiences, and in a time when autobiographical writing is in fashion, with many writers explicitly using their own lives in novels, such works can serve a useful purpose in bringing trans politics, history and culture to a wider audience in an accessible way. I’ve tried to do this with Trans: A Memoir, and these are some of the books that have inspired me.

1. Cobra by Severo Sarduy (1972)

Where trans people have appeared in literary fiction, as minor characters, they have often served as a cipher for an author’s opinions about gender or to make scenarios more exotic. One exception is this novel by Cuban author Severo Sarduy, which put a transvestite who aims for physical transformation at its core. It seldom addresses any challenges of cross-gender living, instead being a radical, witty experiment with literary form, praised by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text, but it is immersed in mid-20th century drag and transgender subculture.

2. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1993)

One of the first novels to seriously explore the gender identity of its protagonist, and written by the author of Trans Liberation and Transgender Warriors, Feinberg’s book follows “stone butch” Jess Goldberg through small-town America, bars and factories, dealing with sexual violence, discrimination from the police and the medical establishment, before eventually deciding to stay safe and live as a man. It’s a moving insight into the difficulties of trans-masculine existence, made all the more powerful for its incorporation of Feinberg’s own experiences.

3. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein (1994)



Gender outlaw ... Kate Bornstein. Photograph: D Dipasupil/FilmMagic

Sold as “an account of Bornstein’s transformation from heterosexual male to lesbian woman, from IBM salesperson to playwright and performance artist,” Gender Outlaw made a demand for a new writing style that would help outsiders understand transgender experiences. It politicised the memoir in a bold new way, hooking autobiography into discussions of gender identity and sexuality, transphobia and transgender artists and writers past and present.

4. Man Enough to be a Woman by Jayne County (1995)

Many transsexual memoirs used surgery as a moment to move from one gender to another – County’s brought a couple of paragraphs explaining her decision not to bother into a life story that moved from Dallas to New York. It tells how she was present at Warhol’s Factory and the Stonewall riots, before becoming part of punk rock scenes in the US and London, and West Berlin’s queer underground. It’s full of insights into a vanishing counterculture, and an enjoyable alternative to stories that prioritise a desire to fit into bourgeois norms.

5. Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism by Patrick Califia (1997)

A comprehensive effort to define a past, present and future, exploring trans people’s relations with healthcare, feminism, academia and activism. Beginning with the categories created by inter-war sexologists, Sex Changes looks at how the first transsexual people used memoir to explain their motivations and actions, and then how community and culture developed in response to feminist attacks. It includes one of the first critical studies of the “transgender” texts that followed Sandy Stone, calling for a world in which sex and gender are far more flexible.



6. Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People by Viviane K Namaste (2000)

Invisible Lives responded to 1990s theoretical works, grounding itself in the realities of cross-gender living. Namaste worried that the notion of “transgender” erased differences among gender-variant people, outlining the consequences of language’s failure to convey them – trans women being put in male prisons, for example. The chapter on gender-bashing, asking if and when violence recorded as homophobic was actually regulating people’s gender presentations, was a particularly important contribution.

7. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano (2007)

Serano’s collection of essays was a blistering combination of attacks on media stereotypes, reflections on feminist transphobia and interventions into transgender theory. Exploring how privilege and prejudice intersected, Whipping Girl is a powerful evisceration of “trans-misogyny” with plenty of suggestions for how trans and queer politics could evolve.

8. Transgender History by Susan Stryker (2008)

Like Califia, Stryker focused on sexology, feminism and trans activism. Her book started with the industrial city, which allowed new levels of anonymity and ultimately the emergence of modern LGBTQI identities, and drew a line from 1920s Berlin to post-war America. The book takes in the Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall riots, problematic relationships with gay and lesbian politics and then new levels of confidence in the early 21st century. It is a highly accessible starting point for those wishing to know more about what lies behind the apparent explosion in trans visibility in recent years.

9. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Beatriz/Paul Preciado (2008)

Like Bornstein, Feinberg, Serano and others, Preciado also brought personal experiences into a theoretical and historical text, but it sets identity politics aside to focus instead on how medical technology has changed people’s social and sexual possibilities. Testo Junkie alternates between high-octane accounts of Preciado’s testosterone use and relationship with writer Virginie Despentes and a history of hormone treatments and the industries behind them, heavily influenced by Foucault. It’s a dense read, always intelligent and often exhilarating.

10. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock (2014)

Passionate advocate ... Janet Mock. Photograph: Splash News/Corbis

After coming out as transsexual in an article for Marie Claire, journalist Janet Mock became a passionate advocate for trans people, particularly those of colour. In Redefining Realness – named after Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning – Mock hooks plenty of information about trans healthcare, communities and culture onto a personal narrative. This explains how her gender identity was policed and how she did sex work to fund surgery – and why she felt compelled to tell her story in the way she did.