Transgender Issues and Resources
Trans Comics
We're Still Here: An All Trans Comics Anthology by Call Number: Douglass PN6729.W47 2018ISBN: 9780997048773
Transgender Graphic Novels and MANGA
The Bride Was a Boy by
A heartwarming transgender love story, based on true events! A diary comic with an upbeat, adorable flair that tells the charming tale of Chii, a woman assigned male at birth. Her story starts with her childhood and follows the ups and downs of exploring her sexuality, gender, and transition-as well as falling in love with a man who's head over heels for her. Now, Chii is about to embark on a new adventure: becoming a bride!
ISBN: 9781626928886Publication Date: 2018- ISBN: 978-1785922589
First Year Out: A Transition Story by
From laser hair removal and coming out to her parents, through to dating, voice training and gender reassignment surgery, this intimate and witty graphic novel follows the character of Lily as she transitions to living as her true, female self. Providing support and guidance on a range of issues such as hormones, medical procedures and relationships, the story traces the everyday thoughts, emotions and struggles many trans and non-binary people face and seeks to empower those who are starting to question their gender as well as promoting wider discussion about the complexities of gender and identity. Based on the author's own experiences as a trans woman, this honest and powerful work is a testament to being who you are and a celebration of gender diversity.
ISBN: 9781785922589Publication Date: 2017
- A Beginner's Guide to LGBTQ+ MangaThis page by Amanda Pagan, New York Public Library, presents some of the author's favorite Japanese manga featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes!
Works by Rutgers and Princeton undergraduate students
Authored by Rutgers undergraduate honors students Nithila Arunkumar, Kritika Singh, Oluwadamilola Omoniyi and Richard Yang, EJ's Journeys: Gender is a children's book that explores difficult concepts of gender and identity through EJ's journey of self discovery. The book project was developed in the course Introduction to Race, Gender and Sexuality. The book's intended audience is 5-12 years old. The PDF of the book is below.
The Princeton University undergraduate students (Marical Almeda, Matthew Chao, Beata Corcoran and Hannah Faghman) enrolled in the Community Engaged Research course, created the site Advancing Transgender Health Through Children's Literature site to create a "community resource in the form of a detailed compilation of children’s literature, which explores topics of gender and identity with the hope of helping parents and families of transgender youth connect more effectively with their loved ones."
Indexes and Databases (Restricted to current Rutgers affiliated)
LGBTQ+ Source (Rutgers restricted) is a major database for LGBTQ+ studies. It includes both scholarly and popular publications covering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer issues, including journals, books, magazines, and newspapers.
GenderWatch (Rutgers restricted) indexes scholarly literature and popular publications that show how gender impacts a wide range of subject areas, including gender roles, gender identity, masculinity, religion, sexuality, workplace roles, and more.
Independent Voices (Rutgers restricted) is collection of digitized alternative press newspapers, magazines, and journals published in the United States, mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. It includes LGBTQ+ articles.
Hein Database LGBTQ+ Rights (NEW - Rutgers restricted) collection charts the gay rights movement in America, showing the civil rights codified into law in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the inequalities that still exist today.
Sexuality and Gender
Female Husbands: A Trans History by
Long before people identified as transgender or lesbian, there were female husbands and the women who loved them. Female husbands - people assigned female who transed gender, lived as men, and married women - were true queer pioneers. Moving deftly from the colonial era to just before the First World War, Jen Manion uncovers the riveting and very personal stories of ordinary people who lived as men despite tremendous risk, danger, violence, and threat of punishment. Female Husbands weaves the story of their lives in relation to broader social, economic, and political developments in the United States and the United Kingdom while also exploring how attitudes towards female husbands shifted in relation to transformations in gender politics and women's rights, ultimately leading to the demise of the category of 'female husband' in the early twentieth century. Groundbreaking and influential, Female Husbands offers a dynamic, varied, and complex history of the LGBTQ past.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 1108596045Publication Date: 2020
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives--ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials--early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films--Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the "father of American gynecology," to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of "cross dressing" and canonical black literary works that express black men's access to the "female within," Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 1452955867Publication Date: 2017
Bodies of Evidence: the practice of queer oral history by
Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History is the first book to provide serious scholarly insight into the methodological practices that shape lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer oral histories. Each chapter pairs an oral history excerpt with an essay in which the oral historian addresses his or her methods and practices. With an afterword by John D'Emilio, this collection enables readers to examine the role memory, desire, sexuality, and gender play in documenting LGBTQ communities and cultures.The historical themes addressed include 1950s and '60s lesbian bar culture; social life after the Cuban revolution; the organization of transvestite social clubs in the U.S. midwest in the 1960s; Australian gay liberation activism in the 1970s; San Francisco electoral politics and the career of Harvey Milk; Asian American community organizing in pre-AIDS Los Angeles; lesbian feminist "sex war" cultural politics; 1980s and '90s Latina/o transgender community memory and activism in San Francisco; and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.The methodological themes include questions of silence, sexual self-disclosure and voyeurism, the intimacy between researcher and narrator, and the social and political commitments negotiated through multiple oral history interviews. The book also examines the production of comparative racial andsexual identities and the relative strengths of same-sexuality, cross-sexuality, and cross-ideology interviewing.
Call Number: RU onilne and Dana, Douglass HQ76.3.U5B63 2012ISBN: 9780199742738
Gender Diversity, Recognition and Citizenship by
This book examines the meanings and significance of the UK Gender Recognition Act within the context of broader social, cultural, legal, political, theoretical and policy shifts concerning gender and sexual diversity, and addresses current debates about equality and diversity, citizenship and recognition across a range of disciplines.
Call Number: Douglass HQ77.9.H557 2013ISBN: 9780230271890
Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (won 2017 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies) by
From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms. Trans Studies is an interdisciplinary essay collection, bringing together leading experts in this burgeoning field and offering insights about how transgender activism and scholarship might transform scholarship and public policy. Taking an intersectional approach, this theoretically sophisticated book deeply grounded in real-world concerns bridges the gaps between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.
Call Number: Douglass HQ77.9.T71534 2016ISBN: 9780813576404
Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity by
Ben, Parker, Lucas, Nadia are four patients of Florida's Dr. Charles Garramonepreparing to receive surgery to masculinize their chests on the same day. In the following years, they, along with more than a hundred others across the country, opened up to the award-winning professor of gender and sexuality Arlene Stein about how they conceive of their identities and sexuality, how they decided to transition, how they were received by their families and communities, and the joys and challenges they continue to face after transitioning. Weaving together the history of the transgender movement and the personal journeys of these transgender individuals, Stein sheds light on how transgender men tell their stories, make sense of their lives, and build communities in the face of skepticism, confusion, ignorance, and, often, violence. Because despite any progress we've made as a culture in accepting alternative identities, Ben and the others Stein meets continue to live in a world that is dangerous to them. In this moving, raw, intimate book about the lives of transgender men, Stein reveals how transgender men as a group, largely invisible in previous decades, today exert a significant impact on business, medicine, culture, and have drastically reshaped how we as a nation conceive of gender, sex, and identity. In so doing, Stein has also created an essential resource on female to male transitioning- for parents, educators, friends, and those who question their identities and seek further information.
Call Number: Douglass HQ77.9.S74 2019ISBN: 9781524747459
Journal Articles
The journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014- )provides a "high-profile venue for innovative research and scholarship that contest the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives." Select articles on transgender issues from the TSQ and other scholarly journals are available here.
Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies (2022- ) is an open access academic journal that publishes "research on the social, cultural, and political issues facing transgender community around the globe." It is a publication by the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.
Works by Transgender Authors (compiled by Catherine Fitzpatrick, Director of Women's and Gender Studies - RU-Newark)
Apsara Engine by
The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality. A woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforseen past, and a nonbinary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak. Painted in rich, sepia-toned watercolours and showcasing a series of fraught, darkly humorous, and seemingly alien worlds, Som captures the weight of twenty-first century life as we hurl ourselves forward into the unknown.
ISBN: 9781936932818Publication Date: 2020
Darryl by
Darryl Cook is a man who seems to have everything: a quiet home in Western Oregon, a beautiful wife, and a lot of friends to fuck her while he watches. But as he explores the cuckolding lifestyle, he finds himself tugging at threads that threaten to unravel his marriage, his town, and himself. With empathy and humor, debut author Jackie Ess crafts a kaleidoscopic meditation on marriage, manhood, dreams, basketball, sobriety, and the secret lives of Oregonians. "Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim's Progress refracted by queer internet culture." -Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
ISBN: 9781944866846Publication Date: 2021-05-18
Deep Wheel Orcadia by
Deep Wheel Orcadia is, effortlessly, a first: a science-fiction verse novel written in the Orcadian dialect, it's also the first full-length book in the Orkney language in over 50 years Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind. Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science fiction verse novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire - all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.
ISBN: 9781529066609Publication Date: 2022-02-01
A Dream of a Woman by
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.
ISBN: 9781551528564Publication Date: 2021-09-21
The Girl Who Was Convinced That Beyond All Reason She Could Fly by
A visionary young-adult illustrated novel about Eggs, a homeless girl who knows how to fly. In a rusted unnamed city full of five-dollar hotels and flea markets, a young homeless girl named Eggs is trying to make her way in the world. She's shy and bold at the same time, and wary of strangers, but she is convinced beyond all reason that she can fly. And fly she does, from rooftop to rooftop, from chimneys to phone wires; she scurries up the sides of buildings and sneaks into secret lairs. Eggs is a loner, but she makes two friends: Grack, who sells 100 different kinds of hot dogs from his bicycle cart, and Splendid Wren, a punk rocker whose open window Eggs came crashing through one night. Both Grack and Splendid Wren try their best to protect her, but Eggs meets her match when on a cold night she swoops onto a rooftop and steals a warm jacket belonging to Robin, a neighbourhood baddie with anger management issues. Can Eggs elude his wrathful revenge? Beguiling and otherworldly, The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason That She Could Fly is a fevered dream about a young girl's flights of fancy in order to survive, and to thrive. Ages 14 and up. Full-colour throughout.
ISBN: 9781551528175Publication Date: 2020-11-10
Light from Uncommon Stars by
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts. Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six. When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate. But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San Gabriel Valley, Shizuka meets Lan Tran, retired starship captain, interstellar refugee, and mother of four. Shizuka doesn't have time for crushes or coffee dates, what with her very soul on the line, but Lan's kind smile and eyes like stars might just redefine a soul's worth. And maybe something as small as a warm donut is powerful enough to break a curse as vast as the California coastline. As the lives of these three women become entangled by chance and fate, a story of magic, identity, curses, and hope begins, and a family worth crossing the universe for is found. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
ISBN: 9781250789075Publication Date: 2021-09-28
Summer Fun by
From acclaimed author Jeanne Thornton, an epic, singular look at fandom, creativity, longing, and trans identity. Gala, a young trans woman, works at a hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She is obsessed with the Get Happies, the quintessential 1960s Californian band, helmed by its resident genius, B----. Gala needs to know: Why did the band stop making music? Why did they never release their rumored album, Summer Fun? And so she writes letters to B---- that shed light not only on the Get Happies, but paint an extraordinary portrait of Gala. The parallel narratives of B---- and Gala form a dialogue about creation--of music, identity, self, culture, and counterculture. Summer Fun is a brilliant and magical work of trans literature that marks Thornton as one of our most exciting and original novelists.
ISBN: 9781641292382Publication Date: 2021-07-27
Outside United States
Streetwalking: LGBT lives and protest in Dominican Republic by
Streetwalking: LGBTQ Lives and Protest in the Dominican Republic is an exploration of the ways that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer persons exercise power in a Catholic Hispanic heteropatriarchal nation-state, namely the Dominican Republic. Lara presents the specific strategies employed by LGBTQ community leaders in the Dominican Republic in their struggle for subjectivity, recognition, and rights. Drawing on ethnographic encounters, film and video, and interviews, LGBTQ community leaders teach readers about streetwalking, confrontación, flipping the script, cuentos, and the use of strategic universalisms in the exercise of power and agency. Rooted in Maria Lugones's theorization of streetwalker strategies and Audre Lorde's theorization of silence and action, this text re-imagines the exercise and locus of power in examples provided by the living, thriving LGBTQ community of the Dominican Republic.
Call Number: RUonlineISBN: 9781978816503Publication Date: 2020
Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty by
Evocative, innovative ethnography of spiritual practices and forms of queer, black, and indigenous life in the Dominican Republic.
Call Number: RUOnlineISBN: 9781438481098Publication Date: 2020
Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran by
Since the mid-1980s, the Islamic Republic of Iran has permitted, and partially subsidized, sex reassignment surgery. In Professing Selves, Afsaneh Najmabadi explores the meaning of transsexuality in contemporary Iran. Combining historical and ethnographic research, she describes how, in the postrevolutionary era, the domains of law, psychology and psychiatry, Islamic jurisprudence, and biomedicine became invested in distinguishing between the acceptable "true" transsexual and other categories of identification, notably the "true" homosexual, an unacceptable category of existence in Iran. Najmabadi argues that this collaboration among medical authorities, specialized clerics, and state officials--which made transsexuality a legally tolerated, if not exactly celebrated, category of being--grew out of Iran's particular experience of Islamicized modernity. Paradoxically, state regulation has produced new spaces for non-normative living in Iran, since determining who is genuinely "trans" depends largely on the stories that people choose to tell, on the selves that they profess.
Call Number: Douglass HQ77.95.I7N35 2014ISBN: 9780822355571
Philippine gay culture: Binabae to bakla, silahis to MSM by Call Number: Douglass HQ76.2.P6G37 2008ISBN: 9789715425773
A Third Gender by Call Number: Art NE1321.8.T55 2016
Queer Voices from Japan by
iQueer Voices from Japani examines the wide range of queer voices in Japan, and the longevity that these minority communities have enjoyed in society. Mark McLelland, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker bring together historical and contemporary narratives that contribute to the study of sexual identities in Japan.
Call Number: Robeson HQ76.3.J3Q44 2007
Books for Children & Resources on Parenting
Being Jazz by Call Number: Douglass HQ77.8.J47A3 2016ISBN: 9780399554674Publication Date: 2016
George by Call Number: Douglass PS3607.I4583G46 2017ISBN: 9780545812573The story of George and her challenges in navigating the gender boundaries in school and with the members of her family.
He's Always Been My Son: a Mother's Story About Raising Her Transgender Son by Call Number: RUONLINEISBN: 9781785927478Publication Date: 2017
All Boys Aren't Blue by
A New York Times Bestseller! Optioned for television by Gabrielle Union Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature stories Velshi Banned Book Club Amazon Best Book of the Year Indie Bestseller Teen Vogue Recommended Read Buzzfeed Recommended Read People Magazine Best Book of the Summer A New York Library Best Book of 2020 A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2020 ... and more! In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults.
ISBN: 9780374312718Publication Date: 2020
Calvin by
In this joyful and impactful picture book, a transgender boy prepares for the first day of school and introduces himself to his family and friends for the first time. Calvin has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl. He knows who he is in his heart and in his mind but he hasn't yet told his family. Finally, he can wait no longer: "I'm not a girl," he tells his family. "I'm a boy--a boy in my heart and in my brain." Quick to support him, his loving family takes Calvin shopping for the swim trunks he's always wanted and back-to-school clothes and a new haircut that helps him look and feel like the boy he's always known himself to be. As the first day of school approaches, he's nervous and the "what-ifs" gather up inside him. But as his friends and teachers rally around him and he tells them his name, all his "what-ifs" begin to melt away. Inspired by the authors' own transgender child and accompanied by warm and triumphant illustrations, this authentic and personal text promotes kindness and empathy, offering a poignant and inclusive back-to-school message: all should feel safe, respected, and welcomed.
ISBN: 9780593108673
Real Talk for Teens Jump-start Guide to Gender Transitioning and Beyond by Publication Date: 2015
