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.
We ❤️ the dictionary and we extra ❤️ all of our fabulous transgender and non-binary patients and community members! Your pronouns matter! You matter! ❤️
Anyway, here is your regular reminder that the term genderqueer was coined in the 90s; the creation of the term is generally credited to trans activist, author, and academic Riki Anne Wilchins. The label was very popular in queer and trans zines at the time.
Genderqueer identity and culture existed well before this hellsite did and will continue to exist long after tumblr has gone down in flames.
We’re here, we’re genderqueers, and we won’t be erased.
“It’s about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transsexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven’t even been named yet.” - Riki Anne Wilchins (source: here)
“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.”
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.
