By Hudson Lin & Ardo Omer
In the last decade, we’ve seen an increase of trans authors sharing their stories and taking control of their narratives both in fiction and non-fiction. While fiction has the power to transport a reader, let’s not underestimate the visceral truth of non-fiction especially memoir.
Memoir reveals to us the most intimate parts of a person’s life and with the increase of transphobia, it’s more important than ever to listen to the stories of trans people. No community is a monolith and we hope these diverse stories within the trans community inspires you to read more from trans authors.
1) I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya (Penguin Random House Canada)
As one of the FOLD’s 12 Books that Shaped the Way We Read, I’m Afraid of Men‘s Vivek Shraya explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl–and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century.
Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she’s endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak.
Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate. I’m Afraid of Men is a journey from camouflage to a riot of colour and a blueprint for how we might cherish all that makes us different and conquer all that makes us afraid.
2) I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press)
What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author’s characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as adrienne maree brown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.
3) Dancing the Dialectic: True Tales of a Transgender Trailblazer by Rupert Raj (TransGender Publishing)
Rupert Raj is a trailblazing, Eurasian-Canadian, trans activist, and former psychotherapist, who transitioned from female to male in 1971 as a transsexual teenager. Dancing the dialectic between gender dysphoria and gender euphoria, cynical despair and realistic hope, righteous rage and loving kindness, this Gender Worker tells us all about his lifelong fight for the rights of transgender, intersex, and two-spirit people—and his later-life role as a Rainbow Warrior working to free Mother Earth’s enslaved animals. He is (co-)editor of Trans Activism in Canada: A Reader, and Of Souls and Roles, Of Sex and Gender: A Treasury of Transsexual, Transgenderist and Transvestic Verse from 1967 to 1991.
4) Transland: Consent, Kink, and Pleasure by Mx. Sly (Couch House Books)
A memoir of transformation and self-discovery that explores fetish communities from a gender diverse perspective
Transland is a fiery and revealing memoir that delves into what happens when a non-binary person goes looking for self-worth and a sense of belonging in fetish subculture, only to find that fetish communities come with just as many problematic rules, expectations, and hierarchies as mainstream ones.Moving from wide-eyed optimism that the fetish community is the promised land to realizing the ways fetish communities – even queer ones – reinforce the commodification of bodies, Mx. Sly examines how BDSM helped them understand and articulate their gender, how kink helped them turn shameful experiences into liberating ones, and how they became disillusioned with the BDSM scene – without rejecting the lessons fetish taught them.The stories in this memoir explore PTSD, intergenerational trauma, memory, consent, gender transition and diversity, queer relationships and subculture, and a lot of bondage. From dating a charismatic Toronto femmedom to being bone bros with an Aussie rope bondage expert, Transland is an odyssey of kinky hookups and gender euphoria and a wandering quest through sensuality toward personal strength and self-reliance.
Sexy, gutting, graphic, and existential, Transland is about finding oneself through intense sensations, reaching a point where being hit has diminishing returns, and coming out wiser on the other side.
The FOLD Admin