I've been trying to read more novels for, by, and/or about trans people and have had very very mixed success. Apologies in advance if this comes across as 'look at me, I'm so smart because I read so many books.' That's really not my intent; I'm currently working very little for mental health reasons and doing a lot of reading because I can't be on a computer very long without getting bad headaches. I'm mostly trying to start this conversation because I've had a really hard time finding trans fiction, and wanted to a) share what I have found for others with that same struggle and b) ask y'all for help!
Also since I am AMAB I have been disproportionately drawn to transfemme writers since a big part of my goal has been self-discovery and to feel spoken to by the books I am reading. Transmasc and AFAB Enby voices are incredibly important too and I hope to find more books that reflect your experiences too!
Adult Fiction First the stuff I really liked in 'adult' fiction: 'Stone Butch Blues' by Leslie Feinberg, 'Nevada' by Imogen Binnie, and (with mixed feelings despite having fun) 'Detransition, Baby!' by Torrey Peters—as well as her novellas. I bounced off the surface hard of 'Little Fish' by Casey Plett and 'The House of Impossible Beauties' by Joseph Casarra.
Adult Fiction - Honorable Mentions Honorable mention to Anne Garreta who is a lesbian writer and scholar who is often read as transmasc whose books 'the Sphinx' and 'Not One day' (but especially the first) are incredible and are great images of queer love and eroticism. Another honorable mention to Maggie Nelson, wife of trans film maker Harry Dodge, who is an insufferable postmodernist and wrote 'bluets' about the color blue and penis worship, and 'argonauts' about becoming a mother while Dodge went through his own Stone Butch Blues and started T.
YA I don't read much YA fiction, but the few books I have read have featured magical (literally or not) perfect transitions which make me feel really dysphoric and depressed for not listening to all the signs when I was the same age as the protagonist. I enjoyed the Nemesis superhero books by April Daniels in spite of this, and had to quit 'If I Was Your Girl' by Meredith Russo for this reason. My ex's little brother has been super geeked about the enby character in some of the new Rick Riordan books, so that's definitely something to look out for if you like YA!
Short Fiction and Poetry In terms of short fiction and poetry, I have been reading what I can from Jamie Berrout who I first discovered through mention of her novel 'Otros Valles' which she has since pulled. She is a great poet and a committed revolutionary and I really recommend checking her out. Through her, I discovered and read some of the short story collection ' Nameless Woman' which was published by a trans women of color collective who cannot wait for mainstream publishers to be ready to publish them.
Thoughts I had discussion here a while ago about the issues faced by small, oppressed communities trying to create art for themselves and about themselves. Namely that being oppressed makes it difficult to have the time and space to develop oneself as an artist, and the being from a smaller group means there will necessarily be fewer total good artists anyways. On top of that you need to balance making art for yourself and making art accessible to a wider audience. In my opinion, 'Detransition, Baby!'—the first novel by a trans person to be published by a major publisher—did a lot of 'trans 101' for the mostly cis audience who would read it; esp. compared to Torrey Peters earlier novellas. Boo hoo poor me not being catered to, I know, I know. While I think some of the feeling seen and represented is lost in books like this, I still think it's a positive to be able to represent ourselves to the world even if I am torn. Curious to hear your all's thoughts and of course very excited to get some more recommendations!
Loosely and tangentially related, the Arcane Ascension series is friendly to LGBTQ+ matters. It includes a complex nb character with they/them pronouns who works for an organization in service to a gender fluid deity. Though they appear in the second book. This is a YA novel that I thought appropriate to recommend to my fellow chapos. It isn't specifically a trans book, but I hope this sits well with you.
Appreciate it! I'm taking a break from YA for now, but I'll keep that on my eReader for when the mood strikes :)
Disclaimer: I'm a cis guy and so are most of the authors I read. But I read lots of FALGSC-adjacent sci-fi that often involves trans or gender-bending protagonists. Not sure if this is what you're asking for but here's a few:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin: an ambassador from Earth visits a planet where everyone is ambisexual, meaning they switch gender every month.
Glasshouse by Charles Stross: a post-singularity sci-fi/horror/mystery novel about an amnesiac war criminal who signs up for an experimental recreation of a 20th-century American town. Most of the horror involves people's gender being changed against their will, and
spoiler
mind viruses that turn them into Stepford wives
CW: besides the warcrimes, there’s also
spoiler
domestic violence and rape.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow: Semi-Automated Luxury Pansexual Terrestrial Anarcho-Communism. One of the secondary characters is trans.
The Rapture of the Nerds by Stross and Doctorow: a silly, fun novel about a luddite living after the Singularity. Link is to a free ebook version
spoiler
The main character ends up trans at the end because of nanobots or something, it's been a while since I read it. IIRC their love interest is gender-fluid
Going to check out Glasshouse once I finish a few other things on my reading list! I completely forgot Charles Stross exists. His book 'Accelerando' is the only book about the singularity that is not totally insufferable.
Glasshouse is sort of a sequel to Accelerando in that the setting is very similar to the end of Accelerando
Trans Wizard Harriet Porber and the Bad Boy Parasaurolophus by Chuck Tingle
Seconding Anne Garreta's Sphinx. Emma Ramadan's translation is really impressive.
Thanks for not spoiling it! She has a new translation of another garreta novel coming out this month iirc
Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee is a trilogy of military scifi novels by a transmasc author that has trans characters but isn't really about transness.
I don't remember if I've self-recommended it before to you (someone asked about 'Detransition, Baby!' and I may have mentioned it there also), but Urasaria Academy is free on WebNovel. (You mentioned headaches from being on the computer; I believe there are extensions to export webnovels as epubs to eReaders, if that's easier on your eyes.)
UA is LGBT+ superhero fiction/literature, although I wouldn't call it YA -- it's character drama interspersed by murdering the unholy fuck out of superpowered criminals, written at a level teenagers can enjoy but adults will understand deeper. (Villains include border patrol agents, serial killers, Neo-Nazis, human experimenters & such: so no great loss there.) It's a 600k+ word series and the transgender character shows up around 120k words in, so I'll effortpost to give you an idea if the novel might interest you or anyone else:
spoiler
There are 4 years to Urasaria Academy and each is 120-150k words long, further delineated into arcs that act as brackets around a particular plot or drama in the main character Mia Schultz's life. Urasaria's #2 main character is the transgender woman Serena Kunst, who is assigned as Mia's protege at the beginning of Year 2. She is characterized in several non-transgender-specific ways.
As an otaku heavily into videogames & anime:
If there was anything that set their house apart, it was that most of what was in it was stolen. Much of the wall space was taken up by posters or shelves of figurines that made it it unpresentable to normal people, and many a night of the two had been absorbed into the early AM on their computers, both playing some videogame and typing to the other a dozen feet away.
A love for violence exceeding even her ultraviolent classmates,
Her tentacle slashed off his left leg and filled it with knives, newly formed blades spraying blood in four directions as he fell back along the sidewalk; Serena stomped on his chest, stepping on and over him. Tendrils of fog grew from her tendril and filled each gone-limb with acid, corroding them away. She remembered what he had called her earlier and stomped his face in to the pavement.
"I wish I had a better line here, eel-dipshit." she grunted. His blood was draining out: he would be a corpse pretty soon. "I'm just glad I-I finally get to do that." She stepped off of him and started back down the sidewalk, hearing him still shouting nasty names & slurs at her. "Mia can set you on fire if you're still alive when she gets here, eel-bitch!"
(I'm so desensitized to violence in text. Notably, UA's version of superpowers innately give base-level desensitization, so it isn't indicative of sociopathy/psychopathy.)
Issues with her voice that stem loosely from her dead father:
He had died to a host when Serena was 2½, so her memories of him were always what others said of him or told her rather than anything she remembered herself. This made him idea, not reality, and so Serena never felt guilty over nor regretted his passing. Because her mother regretted that Serena had no masculine role model as she grew up, she took to calling Serena the 'man of the house': this meant Serena was entrusted to the signing of packages, writing thank-you cards for birthdays & holidays, and answering the phone or making calls. Thus Serena's own voice had always appeared to her to be stamped by that quality.
Worries how she acts around cisgender women:
She worried that growing up male had given her a different way of thinking that other women could detect & instinctively repel.
She implicitly saw other women as superior to herself.
And lastly, her self-esteem issues with her intelligence:
This feeling of ignorance reminded her of when she had nearly failed a grade in highschool, that remained with her not because it proved she was stupid: but that she was only four points away from it. This was perhaps worse for Serena, for where failure may have engendered passion to change, now she was merely precarious and worried.
Or:
Deeper reasoning was generally not a skill Serena carried, for she was essentially a series of moments & memories given movement and mostly unable to fully comprehend them in their inter-relatedness, even as they have been well-catalogued and explained throughout this novel. This was not to say Serena was stupid or ignoble, but Naomi thought through things better, even if so doing made her more miserable. Humans are distinguishable from animals in that they are able to think through their self-created circumstances and how to change them, even if in the end they cannot entirely evade them. Sometimes they recognize this but reconcile themselves to it, or are stuck in reaction to forces in their past that confront them like an alien power.
Generally, I do not like wholly identity-based characterizations and dislike most LGBT+ fiction for that reason; they tend to be ephemeral rather than enduring, and it impairs identification with a character when it is too specific. I mention that just to give an idea how I write, of course. The reader is expected to know/pick up things about Serena's transgenderism - there are no real discussions of hormones, although Serena does (and I'm not sure if this would trigger the "magical transition" issue you mention) save up $50,000 to have her sex changed by a superpowered non-binary person in Thailand.
(However, just like surgery in reality, this does not solve all of her trans-related issues; only her low self-esteem in her appearance & genital dysphoria.)
Nor are characters automatically accepting: some mock Serena behind her back, others do not understand her being "a transsexual" but defend her regardless, for they respect her for other reasons, a couple realize instantly but do not ask and Serena comes out directly to a few. There is much more to her, but that gives a few points about her. She's certainly one of my favorites, and likely the 3rd or 2nd most complex character of the series.
