I'm a transfemme woman of Punjabi Sikh and Welsh ancestry, living in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), and I’m privileged to have both a loving biological family and an extensive chosen one. I know that many folks like me experience more grief than joy these days, despite how many times Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are trotted out every June. I join a diverse range of women and femmes under the trans, Two-Spirit, and non-binary umbrellas in finding solace and liberation in the words of our sisters and siblings. In a guest post for the School Library Journal that inspired this list, author Naomi Kanakia under scores the double-edged reality that we continue to face: “Yes there is joy, and it does get better, but you also have to be very smart [... When] you live in a police state, you cannot just expect things to work out.” Each of the titles in this reading list celebrates the resilience of transfeminine joy a little differently, from showcasing imagined futures still full of transfemmes ready to speak their truths to sidestepping transphobic rhetoric by addressing its speakers directly and intimately.
In her introduction, Kai Cheng Thom describes her fifth book as a collection of “love letters to weirdos and monsters, to transphobes and racists, to everyone and everything [she has] ever had trouble holding in [her] heart.” The assortment of letters are addressed to many entities both abstract and specific, from J.K. Rowling and Jesus Christ, to “the church of social justice” and “the sisterhood of trans femmes.” Interspersed between the letters, Thom lists practical and poetic suggestions on how to engage the book’s principles in your own life. My favourite of them exemplifies Thom’s refusal to engage in carceral systems of justice: “Think of someone you’d like to punish. If it’s safe to do so, send them a book of poetry instead.”
Transfemmes are a hypervisible population, particularly those of us who are Black, Indigenous, and folks of colour. This means that the cisgender majority frequently only values our identities through the lens of cultural capital, especially within the institutional dynamics of diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Like Thom, Benedict Nguyễn’s writing teases out the nuances of thorny interpersonal exchanges to repair the extractive patterns to which power all too easily resorts. Nguyễn’s zine draws from her years of freelancing for numerous American arts organizations to compile a broken series of emails she sent to address the oppressions she faced in her work. In a playful – and hilarious -– repurposing of the professionalist expectations Nguyễn experienced, she concludes her emails by invoicing the institutions for the labour of educating them about her marginalization. As Nguyễn confides, “The zine’s title comes from a non-profit board member who bemoaned the fear that my ‘nasty notes’ ... would never stop coming.”
The ubiquitous edict “be gay, do crime” might as well be rephrased to “be crime, do gay,” these days, given the immeasurable ways in which Black transfemmes and other marginalized queer, trans, and Two-Spirit folks have to live outside of repressive state laws. In Shola von Reinhold’s debut novel, we meet 20-something narrator Mathilda as she cons her way into working at the U.K.’s National Portrait Gallery archive in search of “Transfixions,” forgotten queer and racialized icons from history upon which she religiously fixates. LOTE reaches deeply and lovingly into the past to feature both real and imagined historical figures, and in doing so defies the narratives of whiteness that pervade early 20th-century depictions of Europe. The way that the novel, through Mathilda, revives decadence as an artistic expression of excess aligns well with the fight to protect marginalized lives; our bodies, just like our joy, have always exceeded state and societal attempts to restrain them.
Florence Ashley, (pronouns: “they/them/ that bitch”), is a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Alberta. Their essay collection of “academic smut” invites readers cis and trans alike, to dwell in the – sometimes erotically – painful paradox of transfeminine life and embodiment. Ashley’s wry, dry sense of humour pervades the essays, though they’re not afraid to get (metaphorically) wet with their prose or indulge in frequent so-cringe-it’s-funny puns that “put the sex back in transsexual.” In “The Cutting Table,” their essay on their gender-affirming bottom surgery, they write: “I do not wish or expect to be a whole new person. I cared enough to cheat at the [surgeon] strangers’ dehumanizing games and welcome […] their scalpels.” Marvelling at their body the morning after, they “relish in seeing [their] altered body as transfiguration – a way of making [theirs] a body [they] did not recognize, shaping a poetic rhyme out of previously alienating flesh.”
To conclude this list, I present a novel of “dystopian autofiction.” Translated by Natalia Hero, Valid, by Chris Bergeron, is “[set] in a disturbingly transfigured Montreal in the year 2050” where an Artificial Intelligence, David, has taken over what remains of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyaang as well as most of Turtle Island beyond it. The novel’s 70-year-old narrator, Christelle, delivers her powerful prose as a monologue to David as she comes out of the closet as transfeminine. Through her experience living outside the colonial gender binary, her conversation with David calls out the intelligence’s fascistic enforcement of said binary. “I’ve found a path that leads me to my hereditary anger,” Christelle tells David. “You aspire to become our father. I have no intention of being your son, but well … Has no one ever told you that fathers are destined to fall at the hands of their sons?” A prescient, gender-affirming and liberating work, Valid offers a view into both the joy and the defiance that come with being transfeminine today or tomorrow.
