It was Kate Bornstein’s “Gender Outlaw,” originally published in 1994 and revised last year, that radically reconfigured the genre. Bornstein — actor, provocateur, gleeful troublemaker — playfully mixed memoir and gender theory, and popularized the idea that gender isn’t a binary. Many people find their best, true selves somewhere between the extremes of male and female, she wrote (the subtitle to her book is “On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us”). In her revision, Bornstein wished to correct her thesis that we must do away with gender entirely. “If I used to say binary = bad, and nonbinary = good, I’ve since come to believe that in fact, both binary and nonbinary, as ways of being, are good,” she told me. “Whatever people need to do to find their happiness, as long as they’re not mean, is fine with me.”

Bornstein paved the way for books like Jamison Green’s “Becoming a Visible Man” (2004), the first great memoir by a trans man. Green takes an explicitly intersectional angle and echoes some of the gender theory that made “Gender Outlaw” so unnerving — and so entertaining.

Where do the books by Mock and Jenner (both of whom I know) fall in this tradition? “Surpassing Certainty” is partly in the mode of “Gender Outlaw,” and positions its story within a larger history of a struggle for human rights. But Mock’s book is also a work of the heart, much of it focusing on the dissolution of her first marriage, and her journey from a Honolulu strip club to an editor at People magazine.

Jenner, who didn’t come out until after she was eligible for Social Security, has a very different story to tell. Much of her book is about the millstone of celebrity; it’s more Chaz Bono (“Transition,” 2011) than Kate Bornstein. In my own memoir, “She’s Not There,” I wrote that the biggest change in life was not going from male to female but going from a person with secrets to a person without them, and Jenner shares this plaint. But she’s found peace at last: “The more we celebrate our difference, the more we will be celebrated,” she writes. “There are too many of us out there anyway just waiting to bloom.”

I like to tell people, “If you’ve met one trans person, you’ve met … one trans person”; the diversity of experience within our community is what I find most important. Unlike the writers who’ve come before, Mock and Jenner are freed from the burden of pioneering the genre. And it isn’t their trans identities that make their stories worth reading. It’s their courage and grace — qualities that are, of course, neither male nor female, but human.