NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — The Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts is a cradle of social progress — a place where L.G.B.T.Q. is often followed by I.A. (for intersex and asexual), there’s a Stonewall Center (now 33 years old), and gender-nonconforming parents have a nickname of choice (it’s “Baba”).

On a Maple-lined street here in Northampton, in a white gablefront house, lives one such Baba, a.k.a. Andrea Lawlor, a gender queer novelist and visiting lecturer at Mt. Holyoke College; Lawlor, who uses the pronoun they, shares the first floor rooms with their girlfriend, their 5-year-old child, and their child’s sprawling Lego constructions. The second floor is occupied by Lawlor’s best friend of 25 years, Jordy Rosenberg, a transgender novelist who teaches 18th century literature, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sometimes they call their home a “queer commune.”

Lawlor’s debut novel, “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl,” set in the 1990s and featuring a shape-shifting (and sex-obsessed) protagonist, was published last year by Rescue Press — and received enough attention that Vintage/Anchor and Picador will reissue the book next spring. Rosenberg’s first novel, “Confessions of the Fox,” which reimagines the legend of the 18th century English thief and jailbreaker Jack Sheppard as that of a transgender man, was put out this summer by One World — a recently relaunched Random House imprint dedicated to diversity — and promptly heaped with praise. (The New Yorker called it “a cunning metafiction of vulpine versatility.”)

This also represents progress.

Fictional gender benders may be as old as Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” But recent years have seen a boomlet in transgender literature. In a field previously dominated by memoir and genre fiction (sci-fi, young adult), a number of first novels with more purely literary designs — including playing with genre — are getting attention. “It’s really exciting to see an emerging crop of trans-related fiction by trans people,” said Meredith Talusan, a journalist who writes about L.G.B.T.Q. issues. “It takes a lot of mettle to tread narrative terrain without a real tradition and without a lot of cultural support.”