March 31st is Trans Day of Visibility, so we're taking this opportunity to spotlight some of our favourite recent books from transgender, nonbinary and gender diverse authors. With trans rights increasingly under attack around the world, this day is a reminder of how important it is to support the LGBTQIA+ community and to uplift trans voices.
We have a whole collection of great books from gender diverse authors, so once you've read your way through this blog, check out that list and support trans writers all year round!
Fiction
Eros
Zoe Terakes
Eros is a stunning collection of short stories, grounded in truth and coloured with dazzling imagination and alluring, unpredictable mystery. Revealing how queerness, nature and myth have been intertwined for eternity, these are stories of gods and goddesses: of Zeus, of Aphrodite, of Hermaphroditus, of Icarus before he flew into the sun. Stories of queer life, lust, revenge, wrath, passion and sex. Of yearning, love, loss. Some stories span across a life, and others, an evening. Perspectives will shift. Houses will burn. Lovers will learn their fate.
Zoe Terakes has skilfully blended myth and modernity to illuminate the complex and enduring truth of trans lives, resisting a history of erasure and delivering a sexy, soul-touching book to read to your lover … or yourself.
Best Woman
Rose Dommu
Julia loves her family. They stood by her when she came out as a woman and have been nothing but supportive of her life in New York. So when her brother asks her to be 'best woman' in his wedding, how could she say no?
Now though, Julia's facing a week in her hometown dealing with bridezilla and her cronies, her parents' messy post-divorce relationship, and a mountain of old memories she's done her best to avoid. She's totally fine. That is, until Julia learns that Kim Cameron – gorgeous, self-assured, and the object of Julia's unrequited high school crush – is maid of honour.
Thinking no harm will come of it, Julia tells a tiny little lie to win Kim over. But the lie quickly snowballs, jeopardizing both their blossoming attraction and Julia's relationship with her family. As Julia struggles through the wedding week and tensions begin to boil over, can the best woman fix her worst mistake?
Songs of No Provenance
Lydi Conklin
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage. With the threat of an internet storm looming over her, Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she's forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking – and her complicated history with a friend and mentee – while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
Lydi Conklin boldly explores kink, shame, queer appropriation, fame hunger, cancel culture, trans nonbinary identity and how to make art without ego, all the while asking how Joan might forge a new future for herself.
Nonfiction
Worthy of the Event
Vivian Blaxell
Set against a backdrop of trans life that begins with her own transition in the 1960s, Vivian Blaxell takes us on a witty and expansive sweep through history, from Australia to Japan, to Hawai'i to Mexico, to heretofore unmapped regions of the mind. In seven devastatingly intelligent parts, her essay covers a vast range in time and space – from the arson of a Japanese temple to a transformative encounter with a coral reef, from Nietzsche and Hegel to Indigenous metaphysics, from a perplexing relationship with a beautiful man to the unknowable minds of animals.
Fleshy and philosophical, searching and exalted, utterly distinctive and assured, Worthy of the Event belatedly establishes Vivian Blaxell as one of the major writers of her generation.
Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything
Alyson Stoner
Raised on soundstages and studio lots from the time they were six, shuffling between auditions for Disney Channel, Cheaper by the Dozen, or a Missy Elliott music video, Alyson experienced their defining moments of childhood inside the bizarre fishbowl of Hollywood. From being eight with an 80-hour work week, differentiating fan inquiries from kidnapping plots, and TV execs telling them they're 'not anorexic enough' to stop working and get help, they struggled to find stability and sanity in a chaotic world.
In Semi-Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything, Alyson shares their powerful story for the first time, detailing a turbulent home life with addict parents, harrowing accounts from rehab, the messy process of discovering their sexuality in church, rebuilding a life after an early professional peak, and charting a path of self-discovery and advocacy.
Detachable Penis
Sam Elkin
As the inaugural lawyer of Victoria's queer law service, Elkin is quickly immersed in thorny debates around trans inclusion in sport, children's access to puberty blockers, birth certificate law reform and the Christian right's demand for enhanced religious freedoms. Set against the backdrop of a growing moral panic about the 'trans agenda', he reflects on the double-edged sword of visibility post the 'transgender tipping point'.
Undogmatic and refreshingly open-minded, Elkin explores his ambivalence about aspects of his own transition and masculinity as he encounters a new world of gender-affirming psychologists, surgeons and speech pathologists. He offers an honest, unflinching account of chest surgery, phalloplasty, the emotional impact of cross-sex hormones and the perils of airport body scanners.
Through an examination of Elkin's legal casework and law reform efforts, Detachable Penis offers a kaleidoscopic view of LGBTIQA+ communities living on the margins. This politically sharp narrative offers a nuanced account of the lateral violence, poor mental health and activist burn out that besets the contemporary LGBTIQA+ rights movement.
Graphic novels
The Past is a Grotesque Animal
Tommi Parrish
A rich collection/scrapbook of over two dozen short stories, plus diary entries, photos, and other images fueled by a propensity to understand the way we relate to each other, and told with a visual and lyrical beauty and raw emotion that collectively reaffirms the power of art.
Tommi Parrish is an Australian trans cartoonist and one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Balancing emotional honesty with a keen awareness of the human condition, Parrish navigates fear, loneliness, identity, body politics, queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the ever-fluid nature of all human relationships.
Parrish's autobiographical elements inform their voice as a writer and the ways their characters constantly find one another adrift in their own seas of experience, current situations, trauma, and desire.
Cannon
Lee Lai
We arrive to a wreckage – a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Our protagonist, Cannon, was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, she destroyed it. The horror-scape left in her wake is not unlike the films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together.
Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror movies on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their relationship. In high school, they were each other's lifeline – two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself very uncharacteristically surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her out.
In Cannon, Lee Lai's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a part of what is on offer. Lai's sharp sense of humour and sensitive eye produce a story that explores the intimacy of queer friendship and weight of family responsibility, and breaks open the question of what we owe both to each other and to ourselves.
Leo Rising
Archie Bongiovanni
Lesbian influencer. Lifelong Alaskan. Part-time owl researcher. Leo Rising follows self-proclaimed 'celesbian' Laura on a hilarious and heart-wrenching exploration of queer spaces, sexuality, and fame. After years of struggling for acceptance, Laura knows exactly who she is – or does she?
By day, Laura thrives as the Internet's lesbian bestie, a role model for thousands of followers worldwide, while working part-time at the Alaska Bird Observatory. But when an old friend returns to town and introduces Laura to queer parties and sex apps she's never experienced, she starts questioning her gender and sexuality simultaneously.
Seeking answers, Laura creates Leo, a secret trans identity. As Leo's encounters become more and more steamy, Laura's divergent identities collapse – with real-world consequences.
Young adult fiction
Weaving Us Together
Lay Maloney
A sharp and funny Australian YA about a non-binary Aboriginal person as they transverse the ups and downs of life, including finding their family, healing from trauma, and figuring out who they are.
When I look back, I realise everything I needed was there all along.
I'm Jean O'Ryan and this is my story. I didn't know who I was or where I belonged when I moved with my dad to a little town surrounded by hills. In that valley where the rivers meet the sea, Seraphina Landry found me fallen over on a road. With a hand from Seraphina and the rest of The Crew, we weave our lives together using threads of hope, grief, joy and love. Never alone, I find my mob, face the worst of days, search for answers, and figure out what kind of person I wanna be.
Queen of Faces
Petra Lord
In the nation of Caimor, the wealthy buy and trade bodies like clothes. But Ana can only afford a grey, damaged male form, and by her seventeenth birthday, it’s already falling apart. As her extraordinary magical ability grows, but her body continues to fail her, she is left with only one choice: become an assassin for Paragon Academy, Caimor's prestigious school of magic.
But rebellion brews in Caimor, and at its helm is Khaiovhe, the most infamous dark mage in history. As Ana steals, fights and kills for Paragon, and forms a tentative alliance – and maybe more – with the elusive Wes, she discovers secrets that transform her concept of hero and villain … while striving, above all, to become her truest self. And that might just be the most powerful thing of all.
The Spider and Her Demons
sydney khoo
Moving and funny by turns, this is a story about what it takes to make peace with your demons – literal or otherwise. An urban fantasy spin on growing up as a second-generation immigrant, struggling under the overwhelming pressure to make others proud, while feeling trapped inside your own body.
Between surviving high school and working at her aunt's dumpling shop, all Zhi wants is to find time for her friends … and make sure no one finds out she's half spider-demon.
But when she accidentally kills and eats a man in front of the most popular girl in school, she discovers she might not be the scariest thing in the shadows …
