Transgender Day of Remembrance
Trans people have always existed. Transgender Day of Remembrance is November 20th. This is a day to mark the lives lost to violence in the transgender community. Here are some books that capture the history, complexity, and dynamism of the trans experience. Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed. (Created November 2024)
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Our Work Is Everywhere
Over the past ten years, we have witnessed the rise of queer and trans communities that have defied and challenged those who have historically opposed them. Through bold, symbolic imagery and surrealist, overlapping landscapes, queer illustrator and curator Syan Rose shines a light on the faces and voices of these diverse, amorphous, messy, real and imagined queer and trans communities.
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
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A Quick & Easy Guide to Coming Out
From finding supportive resources, navigating awkward conversations, and embracing queer joy and community, this guide explores the twists and turns of coming out as every shade of LGBTQ+, helping you walk the path of sharing the truest you.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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And They Lived
Chase Arthur is a hopeless romantic, but he's also struggling to figure out his gender identity and recover from an eating disorder. When Chase starts his freshman year of college, he has to navigate being away from home and missing his sister, finding his squad, and will have to learn to love--and be enough for--himself, while discovering what it means to truly live.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Black on Both Sides
Drawing on 19th and 20th-century medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive-slave narratives, true-crime books, documentary films, and poetry, the author analyzes the connections between blackness and trans identity in the context of ongoing black and trans deaths. He considers the pasts that have been discarded to create blackness and transness as categories of social valuation; the insights that occur when ignoring these social markers; and how condensing transness into the category of transgender is a racial narrative, as well as how blackness is articulated within transness. He examines sex and gender as racial arrangements that are mutable and subject to rearrangement in medicine and law, looking at the founding of American gynecology and the archives of J. Marion Sims and his experiments on female slaves, as well as cross-dressing in fugitive-slave narratives; the transgender implications of Booker T. Washington?s Up from Slavery, W.E.B. Du Bois? The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; and the negation of blackness, with discussion of trans embodiment in the postwar period through the media narratives of Christine Jorgensen, Lucy Hicks Anderson, Georgia Black, Carlett Brown, James McHarris/Annie Lee Grant, and Ava Betty Brown in the black press, as well as the murders of Lisa Lambert, Brandon Teena, and Phillip DeVine, focusing on DeVine's life and death. -- Protoview.com
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Model Home
The three Maxwell siblings keep their distance from the lily-white gated enclave where they grew up. As the only Black family in the neighborhood, the neighbors acted nice enough, but soon bad things, scary things - the strange and the unexplainable - began to happen in their house. Whatever it was, the family stayed put, unwilling to abandon their home, terrors and trauma be damned. As adults, the siblings got away, leaving their parents alone in the house. But when news of their parents' death arrives, they return, to reckon with their family’s past and present, and to find out what happened while they were away. It was not a “natural” death for their parents… but was it supernatural?
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Spellbound
This graphic novel memoir by a transgender woman explores the concept of identity by inviting us to move through her life as she would have us see her, that is, as she sees herself. A candid autobiographical narrative gives us the opportunity to enter the author’s daily life and explore her thoughts on themes of gender and sexuality, memory and urbanism, love and loss.
Format: Graphic Novel
Availability: Available
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Bad Girls
Taken under the wing of Kat, a veteran stripper, Tender and Goldie must turn to the streets and strip clubs as a way to survive difficult times.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Make It Count
Chronicling her efforts to achieve her Olympic dreams, the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship shares how she had contended to transphobia on and off the track since childhood and how she found clarity in her sport that otherwise eluded her--sense of being simply alive and finally, herself.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Falling Back in Love With Being Human
An award-winning writer, performance artist and community healer presents a collection of tender and poetic love letters that guide readers towards cultivating empathy, forgiving others and embracing oneself while teaching readers to fall back in love with being human.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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I Hope We Choose Love
A collection of personal essays proposing heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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