Some trans science fiction and fantasy books. You can find my earlier recs for f/f science fiction and fantasy here.
Also I somehow totally blanked on this while making the powerpoint, but Charlie Jane Anders’ stuff should be in the last slide. Her two books are CITY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT and ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY. I’ll link to some of her short stories below the cut.
The queer SFF database’s tag for trans books is here. There’s more than I included in the rec post, so go knock yourself out!
I included the author identities because I figured people would want to know if the book was own voices. Disclaimer that gender is a weird nebulous thing and life isn’t easy or straightforward, so depending on when you’re reading this post (I’m writing 8/2/19), some of the authors I listed as cis might have had gender realizations. I literally saw this on Twitter this morning with one of the “more trans SFF” books, so figured it was worth saying.
Below the text cut you’ll find the titles and authors, links to my queer SFF database (which includes links to trans reviewers and content warnings), and some of my favorite SFF short stories by trans people.
“We chose the term “asexual” to describe ourselves because both “celibate” and “anti-sexual” have connotations we wished to avoid: the first implies that one has sacrificed sexuality for some higher good, the second that sexuality is degrading or somehow inherently bad. “Asexual”, as we use it, does not mean “without sex” but “relating sexually to no one”. This does not, of course, exclude masturbation but implies that if one has sexual feelings they do not require another person for their expression. Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.”
And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.
So, no: we are notjust Tumblr trenders. Get out of here with that.
[cw for cissexist language on the basis that I’m not going to try and box 130 year old understandings of sex and gender and today’s understanding of sex and gender together] [BUT I want to note that trans people are included in these descriptions by Hirschfeld, terminology was just a mess back then and also distinguishing (assigned) sex vs. gender is a mess in German because the actual translation for ‘gender’ also means ‘sex organ’ and is technically more gendered then ‘sex’ is, so we stole the English ‘gender’ as a third word a few decades ago to be able to apply modern understandings lol]
There’s some people criticizing the source, and idk about that, but I’d like to point out that Magnus Hirschfeld described both Asexuality as the extreme 1 (absolute indifference to sex, no sexual attraction) on a 1-10 scale of sexual attraction, as well as at least indirectly the split attraction model in 1896.
‘Ist schon der Character, die Dualität des Geschlechtstrieb keine einheitliche(sic), so ist seine Stärke, seine Quantität noch um vieles verschiedener. Es gibt Individuen mit gar nicht vorhandenem sexuellen Begehren (Anästesia Sexualis), bis zu solchen, deren ganzes Sein, Sinnen und Trachten von ihrer Geschlechtssphäre beherrscht wird (Hyperästesia Sexualis).’
- Magnus Hirschfeld under the pseudonym Th. Ramien, Sappho und Sokrates oder Wie erklärt sich die Liebe von Männern und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechtes?, Spohr 1896, p. 6
‘If the character, the duality of the sex drive is already not a uniform one*, so is it’s strength, it’s quantity even more diverse. There are indivuals with no sexual desire (Anästesia Sexualis) all the way to those who’s entire being, thought and intent is ruled by their sexual sphere (Hyperästesia Sexualis).’
I say indirectly describes the split attraction model, because if I understand right, a lack of sex drive does not preclude love in this description. Even if I’m misunderstanding these weird graphs (there. are graphs.), he still describes what I’d identify as ace, aro and aroace folks in Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (1904), (which I love to confuse with Was muß das Volk vom Dritten Geschlecht wissen! (1901)), aka ‘gay’ men who desire no sex, but same-sex romantic relationships, and ‘gay’ men who desire no relationship at all, but not because they are celibate**, and who are part of what we’d describe as the Queer Community today, eg. involved in the subculture etc.
I want to point out again that all of these descriptions are 100 to almost 130 years old. Asexuality has been a thing since forever, and we have been writing about it for ages, and we have been writing about it in the context of queerness since ages.
*this is a reference to the previous explanation sorting sexual attraction roughly into five categories: Homosexual, Bisexual, Heterosexual, with the note that Bisexuals (called ‘spiritual hermaphrodites’ in this, which still makes me laugh) apparently can have no preference or a mild to strong preference in either direction, thus making the sex drive not uniformly categorized.
**(which are a different group he also describes, and who, unlike asexuals, apparently have a higher tendency to become depressed and/or hooky from repression istg this shit is funny sometimes)
This is new to me, and a very appreciated addition. Thank you! I knew Hirschfield was the MVP but I didn’t know he was That Cool.
Fuck the Nazis for destroying so much of his work.
No prob.
What always gets me is not just how much was destroid, but how little access there is to what little we have. So here’s a link to the Magnus Hirschfeld foundations’ linkspam of scanned and transcribed copies for anyone who speaks German. Barely any of this is translated, and it’s even less in the ‘public’ conscious, so to say. I keep meeting people (especiallyNorth-Americans) who seem to have no connection to queer hist. past the last few years, who think more out-there, abstract queer theory is a white thing (it’s not, the Berlin and Paris queer scene I’m talking about rn was diverse and international as fuck, and we need to put non-western queer history before and concurrent to that more into the public conscious), people who think queer history started at Stonewall or who are aware that there was stuff before that, but treat is as negligible.
A lot of that is inaccessible and several broken-up generations of queer people, yes, but we have to be prefectly honest: A lot of this is extreme American-centrism. I was reading an article a while back that was supposed to mention ‘So and SO many important Queer World History Moments that aren’t Stonewall’ or something like that, and literally not a single point wasn’t about the US, and one point was literally ‘so this guy went to Berlin, saw the awesome scene and science there, and decided to found the same thing back in the USA’ and I wanted to *scream*. American Queer History is important, but we have to stop pretending it’s the be-all, end-all at the cost of our actual history.
Berlin is my darling, obviously, but this goes just as much and more so for non-western history, and even marginalized history within the western sphere.
[cw eugenics] As for Magnus Hirschfeld, as far as I can see he actually was that cool a person? Like even the stuff he wrote that makes me as a disabled and chronically ill person go *taxidermy fox face*, and where I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t really blame him for following the accepted theories of his day, is insurmountably kinder then anything else I’ve read on the subject. I’m specifically talking about some of the stuff he wrote on Reproductive rights, because he was adamantly pro-sex-ed and pro-contraceptives and pro-choice, except he occasionally drops into that huge, gaping Social Darwinism trap (that, by the way, the current day pro-choice movement also happily tramples around in every other week, so why am I even surprised ._. ) and declares stuff like, well, those poor lower-class alcoholics and mentally ill and disabled people, they just can’t help having bad genes, and shouldn’t we offer them free access to birth control and abortions and education on these subjects so that they might freely take themselves out of the gene pool as well as alleviate their families suffering (by having less/no disabled/mentally ill/poor children)? Which, like I said, *taxidermy fox face* and ‘men of their time’ and ‘oh man you are so close to getting it’.
But even that, naive to downright stupid as it is in the face of the political and societal climate he was writing in, is an insurmountably kinder take (those poor mother’s having five, seven, ten children, those poor children being neglected and poor, we can’t fix their genes, but we can offer them free choice and help!) then literally anything else written at the time (which, like, we are talking about the country that issued Aktion T4 a few decades later because disabled babies just cost to much so let’s murder them I guess). Not only is it kind, it’s sympathetic to poor people (if in a misguided way) and that actually makes it a lot more bearable.
Sandy Stone also documented that in this manifesto over thirty years ago. Transmisogyny is the main/entire reason behind “you need dysphoria to be trans” even existing, and they went as far as to create “charm schools” to enforce it
Ah so that’s even more reason why transmed rhetoric sounds so close to terf rhetoric when you do more critical analysis of it,
They didn’t wanna do surgery on “sociopaths” (not my words), so they created a diagnosis based just on gender performance and the words of this one guy who wrote a book.
Hello people! I am a nonbinary person from Germany and currently a student at an University. It is pretty difficult to use gender-neutral language in Germany, and for many words we only have male and female versions. (For us the word “Student” is only the male version and we have to add a “-in” to talk about a female student). This is a very big problem at my university as well.
But now I finally made contact with at least one instituiton of my university, and they asked me, if I would like to meet with them to work on an inclusive language for mails and documents they send out. For this meeting I would love to collect as many ideas as possible, and “represent” as many (nonbinary) people as possible. For that I made this google survey to collect some ideas and thoughts on the versions that I know.
So if you live in Germany or speak German, I would love it and be very grateful if you could find the time to take part in that survey! https://forms.gle/JiaSp3WbN6XfpMmd7
Thanks so much for your time! If you have any problems with the survey please feel free to pm me! Sharing is welcomed very much, so that many people can participate!
You know what Good Omens does NOT get enough credit for? How it never, not once, makes gender presentation the butt of a joke.
Crowley presenting as female to be Warlock’s Nanny? The way this was filmed, acted, and written wasn’t made to be funny whatsoever. She was stunning, I loved the hat!
Pollution using they/them pronouns while the postman used the gender neutral honorific of sir for them? What’s there to make fun of? They’re royalty.
Archangel Michael, who has a traditionally male name, played by a female actress? Never questioned.
Lord Beelzebub’s androgyny? Only respect for the Lord of Hell.
Aziraphale sharing Madame Tracy’s body? Crowley recognized his angel and accepted it no problem. He was right about the dress too, it did suit him!
Crowley’s pure, unfiltered non-binary/gender-fluid energy in general? Fucking fabulous. Who could seriously make fun of this demon’s style? As someone once pointed out to me, you could swap him with Tilda Swinton and I’d see no difference. What an icon.
Good Omens is the first big show I’ve seen to basically avoid transphobia all together when the opportunity presented itself, and even say fuck you to the gender binary as a bonus. If the biggest binary in all the universe, Heaven and Hell, don’t give a damn about it then why should you?
We ❤️ the dictionary and we extra ❤️ all of our fabulous transgender and non-binary patients and community members! Your pronouns matter! You matter! ❤️
These are probably skewed more towards modern authors and books, but that’s because I tend to read newer stuff, not because only men or only white people wrote sci-fi in the past.
Authors and books below the cut, including links to Goodreads. I’m not providing trigger warnings (if I make the post too long Tumblr starts freaking out about it), but you can use the search function on Goodreads reviews to find more specifics.
I’ve done some Twitter threads on this topic, so thought it might be nice to do a Tumblr post too. One of my pet peeves is when people act like adult fantasy (or sci-fi for that matter) is just a straight white dude thing and that diversity only exists in young adult fantasy. That’s such a disservice to all the authors of marginalized identities currently writing adult fantasy!
Authors and books below the cut, including links to Goodreads. I’m not providing trigger warnings (if I make the post too long Tumblr starts freaking out about it), but you can use the search function on Goodreads reviews to find more specifics.
“I have a vagina. Just thought you should know. Just thought you should know. I look like a woman. I’m dressed like one, I guess. The thing is, I also have balls….I’m not male or female. I’m intersex.
“Most people assume that you’re biologically either a man or a woman, but it’s actually a lot more complex than that. There are so many ways somebody could be intersex.
In my case, it means I was born with XY chromosomes, which you probably know as male chromosomes. And I was born with a vagina and balls inside my body. I don’t respond to testosterone, so during puberty, I grew breasts… I don’t actually have a uterus – I was born without one, so I don’t menstruate, I can’t have biological children…
“We put people in boxes based on their genitalia. Before a baby’s even born, we ask whether it’s a boy or a girl, as if it actually matters; as if you’re going to be less excited about having a baby if it doesn’t have the genitals you wanted; as if what’s between somebody’s legs tells you anything about that person.
Are they kind, generous, funny? Smart? Who do they want to be when they grow up? Genitals don’t actually tell you anything. Yet, we define ourselves by them. In this society, we love putting people into boxes and labeling each other…
“But there’s one really big problem: biological sex is not black or white. It’s on a spectrum. Besides your genitalia, you also have your chromosomes, your gonads, like ovaries or testicles. You have your internal sex organs, your hormone production, your hormone response and your secondary sex characteristics, like breast development, body hair, etc.
Those seven areas of biological sex all have so much variation, yet we only get two options: male or female. Which is kind of absurd to me, because I can’t think of a single other human trait that there’s only two options for: skin color, hair, height, eyes…”
Listen to whole talk here. Believe me, it is worth your time!
“First, there is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies, just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination. To see trans body alteration as participating and furthering binary gender, to put trans people’s gender practices under a microscope while maintaining blindness to more familiar and traditional, but no less active and important gender practices of non-trans people, is exactly what the transphobic medical establishment has always done.”
I did my master’s thesis on emergency contraception and I used gender-neutral language throughout. Most people didn’t notice. My supervisor occasionally asked me to use the word “women” instead of the word “people” but didn’t care enough to follow up when I ignored him. None of the people who reviewed and marked my thesis made any comment on the language I chose to use.
Using gender-neutral language was easy and I suffered no consequences for doing so as an academic, even when writing a detailed thesis on human reproductive biology.
why are we still telling women in academia to be more assertive, to hedge less, and pretending that this is supportive advice?? what if, instead of telling women to hedge less and be more assertive, we told men to hedge more and to be less assertive??
why is ‘male’ writing the standard to which women should aspire?? why are we perpetuating the gender binary in this way?? there are as many writing styles as there are genders and sorry, but all the best scholarship i’ve ever read is explorative and suggestive and experimental and open to refutation. it hedges. hedging is good. things grow in hedges, grow from hedges, grow around and between hedges.
Look, language is messy and people are messy and there’s nothing we can do about it but just TRY.
Every single time someone whines about pronouns being too difficult to learn or damage language through ‘new’ ambiguity I think that that person has never written in the third person a long conversation between two men, because English writers have been writing books about men talking since it was invented (and they don’t seem to be stopping anytime soon) and we still managed to make it.
The thing that makes a lot of male authors unacceptable to me is that they’ll construct all sorts of fantasy worlds, such as in GRRM’s case, a world with sorcerers and witches and dragons and ice zombies and blood magic, and yet they have to include rampant, consistent, horrific, excessive sexual violence toward and objectification of women for some kind of “social commentary”. You could do a brilliant commentary on patriarchy without explicit scenes of rape or sexualization - female authors manage to do so all the time, funnily enough. We have to realize at some point that male authors have a macabre and voyeuristic obsession with women being subjected to violence of all kinds.
