Anti-TERF Reading List: Immigrant Stories, Fantasy, and Sci-fi by Trans, Nonbinary, and Genderqueer Writers
A Better Reading List: Cleansing Our Bookshelves of TERFs
CW: Transphobia that you’re likely already aware of if you’re trans. Please feel free to skip the intro to avoid this.
Many book nerds of color, trans book nerds, and our allies were heartbroken recently when novelist Chimamanda Adichie confirmed her status as a TERF by calling the 3500-word transphobic tirade J. K. R*wling released last summer “a perfectly reasonable piece.”
TERFs—an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists—are cis women who are so-called “feminists” and transphobic. That is, they are feminists exclusively for cis women—a kind of erasure and exclusion which should sound familiar to any woman of color—and who leverage their supposed “feminism” to oppress trans women, trans femmes, and nonbinary people.
Adichie has made transphobic comments before—in an interview three years ago she stated, “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women.” Yeah, not like any other community of women in this country has ever had to assert, “Ain’t I a woman?” (which, as this article notes, is actually a racist misquote of Sojourner Truth’s speech).
Personally, I was disappointed when I read Americanah. I’d loved the title, loved the buzz, and expected to love the book itself, but while I usually love angry books by people of color, there was just something about the protagonist’s blog that felt so indignant, unloving, and unable to see anyone else. But I do know that weird cognitive dissonance when an artist you identified with is a horrible person—I can’t stop loving David Foster Wallace’s writing, while knowing that he was a violently abusive misogynist. We as a society haven’t figured out how to reckon with artists whose work we love but whose behaviors go against our values. And this becomes even more complex when these writers or artists are still alive and can benefit from our support of their work.
While I’ve sought to center trans authors, my organizing principle for these lists was providing alternatives for specific things you may have liked about these authors’ work, so I’ve included some queer cis and cishet authors as well. It was sad to realize that I can count the number of trans authors I could find writing about Black American life on my fingers. In the words of a friend I reached out to for recommendations, “The state of trans publishing is . . . v depressing.” At the same time, this research made me so hopeful and excited about how much there is out there that I haven’t read yet. This list is just a place to start, and includes not only books I’ve read, but also ones I plan to. There are better lists than this one to come.
I want to note that you can still read Harry Potter or Americanah if you buy them used. But really, why would you want to? There are so many wonderful books out there, and more and more trans authors—and trans authors of color in particular—are being published. You don’t need to give TERF writers any more of your time or money, because Our Work is Everywhere.
Photo from Community Book Center, the oldest Black-owned bookstore in New Orleans.
A note about ethically buying books: The website Bookshop.org launched about a year ago, with a model aimed to support independent bookstores and publishers. You can even pick a specific bookstore to support, like Black-owned Community Book Center in New Orleans or Semicolon in Chicago. And Libro.fm is an alternative to Amazon-owned Audible for audiobooks.
Getting rid of R*wling
My top choices:
Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee is about a painter who is swept up in an adventure after they are recruited by the occupying government in a fantasy world modeled on the Japanese occupation of Korea. With a nonbinary protagonist (and by a trans author), it has the same childlike Bildungsroman wonder, magic heavy with metaphor, and beautiful ties to history and myth as HP, but centered in non-Western art, history, and mythologies rather than Rowling’s worship of Greco-Roman traditions, and with no wildly racist names for Asian characters or weird post-publication assertions about characters’ identities. It is a beautiful, original celebration of the power of cultural identity and art.
While Ursula K. Le Guin is not a trancestor, she wrote a much better series about a boy wizard at a wizarding school thirty years before the first Harry Potter was released. When I read A Wizard of Earthsea and the five subsequent novels at twelve, these books utterly absorbed me in a way I’ve rarely found since. Le Guin has also done significant writing and thinking about gender and pronouns. Her other masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness, is about a planet where the people do not have a fixed sex. She defended her decision to use “he” pronouns for these people in the essay “Is Gender Necessary?” but later corrected herself by publishing an annotated “redux” of the essay where she pushed for “they” pronouns to be accepted in written English. “Minds that don’t change are like clams that don’t open,” she wrote. Also, her clapback about Rowling’s boy wizard is incredible.
More fantasy and sci-fi by trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer writers
An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows
All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang
Dreadnought by April Daniels
The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Finna by Nino Cipri
The Lost Coast and The Brilliant Death by A. R. Capetta
Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey
Maiden, Mother, Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes edited by Gwen Benaway
The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Daniel Mallory Ortberg
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho
Peter Darling by Austin Chant
Pyre at the Eyreholme Trust by Lin Darrow
River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey
Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction edited by K. M. Szpara
Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2 edited by Bogi Takács
Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 3 edited by Bogi Takács
Transcendent: The Year’s Best Transgender Themed Speculative Fiction 4 edited by Bogi Takács
Wild Beauty and When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
Sci-fi with trans, enby, and genderqueer representation written by cis allies
Ancillary Justice and The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
Not Your Sidekick by C. B. Lee
N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy
Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez
Dawn and the rest of the Xenogenesis series by Octavia Butler
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley
Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu
Saga comics series by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Also shoutouts to:
Trans Wizard Harriet Porber and the Bad Boy Parasaurolophus by Chuck Tingle (unfortunately only available from Amazon). Nothing I say could do justice to this batshit-yet-soulful erotic romance novella written solely to spite JK Rowling the way this livetweeting of a read of it does.
Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place by Jackson Bird, a memoir about his transition in which he likens gender identity to the sorting hat and talks about having an emotional breakdown at a Harry Potter fan convention.
Find lots more recommendations and a veritable reading rainbow 🌈 in the Queer Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Database.
Replacing Adichie
My top choice:
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi is the perfect antidote to Adichie—an immigration and self-discovery novel by an Igbo and Tamil nonbinary writer who grew up in Nigeria. The book follows a child from a mixed Nigerian and Tamil family who is inhabited by an ogbanje, an Igbo trickster spirit that occupies a human body. Gorgeous, fascinating, and strange, it is ultimately about finding freedom through multiplicity. Emezi is a former student of Adichie’s, and their recent Twitter thread about her is heartbreaking and very real. “I am fucking honored to be writing books for Black queer and trans people,” they wrote. “We are impossible things cracking the world open.”
Immigrant and second-gen trans writers on the immigrant experience
Beyond the Gender Binary and Femme in Public (poetry) by Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender nonconforming Indian American, who also has so many essays available on their website
Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam, a nonbinary femme of Bangladeshi descent
God Loves Hair and She of the Mountains by Vivek Shraya, a trans second-gen Canadian of Indian descent
Fairest: A Memoir by Meredith Talusan, a trans Filipina American with albinism
Hood Criatura (poetry) by Féi Hernandez, a nonbinary Mexican American poet
More Than Organs (poetry) by Kay Ulanday Barrett, a disabled nonbinary Pin@y American
Here are three essays by Ola Osaze, a trans Nigerian writer and immigrant
While They Sleep (Under the Bed Is Another Country) (poetry) by Raquel Salas Rivera
Queer novels about the immigrant experience
America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
Disoriental by Négar Djavadi
No One Can Pronounce My Name by Rakesh Satyal
Other cis Nigerian disaporic authors
Everything by Helen Oyeyemi, start with What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Everything Good Will Come and Swallow by Sefi Atta
Happiness, Like Water and Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
Open City by Teju Cole
The Spider King’s Daughter by Chibundu Onuzo
Better Never Than Late and On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe
Black trans writers on the Black American experience
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low by C. Riley Snorton
Don’t Call Us Dead and Homie (both poetry) by Danez Smith
Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
Hoodwitch (poetry) by Faylita Hicks
Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis
Outside the XY: Black and Brown Queer Masculinity edited by Morgan Mann Willis
Kai M. Greene’s essays are absolute gems. Start with their conversation/collab with Darnell L. Moore published in Guernica.
Raquel Willis is also an incredibly talented essayist
Forthcoming: The Passing Playbook by Isaac Fitzsimons
Find more on this list of Black trans memoirs.
Queer writers engaging the Black American experience
Black Girl Dangerous: On Race, Queerness, Class and Gender by Mia McKenzie
Black Panther: World of Wakanda by Roxane Gay
Coffee Will Make You Black by April Sinclair
Complete works (poetry) of Pat Parker (if you haven’t, please read “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend”)
How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones
Invisible Life by E. Lynn Harris
Living as a Lesbian (poetry) by Cheryl Clarke
Make Me Rain and collected (poetry) Nikki Giovanni
No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America by Darnell Moore
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, an Oral History by E. Patrick Johnson
The Tradition (poetry) by Jericho Brown
The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom by Barbara Smith
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
We Should All Be Actual Feminists
Feminist and transfeminist books by trans authors
Amateur: A Reckoning with Gender, Identity, and Masculinity and Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee
Females by Andrea Long Chu
I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
Rebent Sinner by Ivan Coyote
Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton
Trans Like Me: Conversations for all of Us by C. N. Lester
Two free essays in this genre that you can read online now:
“The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” by Sandy Stone (the OG transfeminist text)”
The introduction to TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly’s special issue Trans/Feminisms by Susan Stryker and Talia M Bettcher
Feminist Writing by Trans Allies
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed (In which she writes of TERFs, “I find this work so violent and reductive that I have not wished to bring it into the body of my own text.”)
Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene Carruthers
Two TERFs with One Stone
If you loved both of these writers and want to replace them in one fell swoop, then Nnedi Okorafor, the incredible Nigerian American “Afrofuturist and Afrojujuist” fantasy and sci-fi writer, is for you. Start with Hugo and Nebula winner Binti.
Raising Loving Kiddos: Children’s Books with Trans Representation (* denotes a BIPOC protagonist)
*The Boy & the Bindi by Vivek Shraya and Rajni Perera
A Fox Called Herbert by Margaret Sturton
*From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea by Kai Cheng Thom, Kai Yun Ching, and Wai-Yant Li
*Ho'onani: Hula Warrior by Heather Gale and Mika Song
*I Promise by Catherine Hernandez and Syrus Marcus Ware
I’m Not a Girl by Maddox Lyons and Jessica Verdi
Introducing Teddy by Jessica Walton and Dougal MacPherson
*It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book about Gender Identity by Theresa Thorn and Noah Grigni
*Julián is a Mermaid by Jessica Love (my favorite, by a white cishet author with an amazing accountability statement) and Julián at the Wedding
*The Moon Within by Aida Salazar
My Dad Thinks I'm a Boy?!: A Trans Positive Children’s Book by Sophie Labelle
*My Rainbow by DeShanna Neal and Trinity Neal
*When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita
Sara Carminati
Sara Carminati (she/they) is a writer and arts administrator based in Bulbancha (the Choctaw name for the place we call New Orleans) who believes that brave and imaginative storytelling can advance justice, belonging, and joy. Sara began her career with the Kenyon Review, an Ohio-based literary arts organization that champions and nurtures the work of emerging writers. Most recently, she worked as an editor at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also served on the organizing team for the museum’s MASS Action (Museums as Sites for Social Action) social justice reading group. She is committed to global ambassadorship and knowledge exchange and has previously taught at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on a Fulbright grant and held a variety of roles in scholarly publishing. In her current role at the National Performance Network, Sara is committed to honoring and amplifying the voices of BIPOC, trans, queer, and disabled artists and uplifting arts organizations, as well as the communities they come from and the communities they serve.