The Transfeminine Review

Ah, Barnes & Noble.

Like many others, I’ve got conflicted feelings about the biggest bookstore chain in the world. When I was a little kid? Magical. It was the best thing in the whole wide world to go to a three-story bookstore in Bethesda or Manhattan, leaning over the escalator rubber, watching the mystery titles whirl by. It felt like they had every book in the world in that store.

Then I grew up, and the world got smaller. Barnes & Nobles nearly collapsed, and Amazon gobbled it up. Now, if you ask me about my favorite bookstores, my answer will always be that you should shop local, shop indie, and shop queer!

Barnes & Noble is none of those things.

So, why write this article?

Well, not everybody can easily access a good independent bookstore. And even if they can, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that they’ll be stocking books by transfemmes – in fact, the vast majority will have none. If you live near a major urban center, you might have a queer bookstore somewhere in the city, or at least a queer-friendly bookstore. But there are vast swathes of the United States that aren’t economically viable places to run a queer bookstore, forget about safety. And if you’re in an area that isn’t super trans-friendly, the likelihood that your local bookstore is gonna be stocking trans books is very, very low.

The fact of the matter is that for the majority of Americans, local bookstores aren’t a viable way to find transfeminine authors. Anybody can order books online, obviously, but it won’t capture that joy of going to a bookstore. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Barnes & Noble has a very small but not insignificant number of trans books in their regular stock. There are also 627 locations in all 50 states in the US, which means that if you live near a big city, there’s probably a Barnes & Noble near you. If you know how to look for them, you might be surprised at how many are hiding in the stacks! For the closeted and the isolated among us, here’s a down-and-dirty guide to sussing out trans books from an overwhelmingly cis landscape (especially the ones that don’t have glaring pride flags on the cover that’ll immediately get you outed). Hopefully this article will reach people who haven’t previously had access to trans literature and give them a chance to see themselves in fiction, no matter where in the United States they might live ❤

We begin our adventure at my local Barnes & Noble in Center City, Philadelphia. As you can see, even though Amazon’s horrible brick and mortar bookstores might be gone, their terrible decision to display books cover-out (even at the expense of diversity of titles) has left its mark on the B&N landscape. Basically the entire first floor of this bookstore is nothing but covers-out New and Notables books.

If you’re looking for books by transfeminine authors, I would recommend entirely skipping this section and heading straight for where they keep the actual books. You’re not gonna find anything here.

So, where will our adventure begin?

The Queer Section

Straight off the bat: if you’re deep in the closet, this might not be an option. While there are some good titles on the shelves here, you can read the majority of them at transreads.org for free in a discrete manner (if you want some tips, many of the books on my Start Here list are there!). It’s also entirely possible that a Barnes & Noble in the heart of a Conservative state might not even have a queer section. To be honest, once you subtract the books that you can easily borrow on the internet, this section is a mixed bag. Trust me – you’re not missing much.

So, what’s here? You’ll find a motley mix of memoirs, histories, theory texts, coffee table books, and what I like to call the ‘Out and Proud’ book, which is basically anything that gonna blast a pride flag or an identity category at you from the spine. The Queer Section is one of the most segregated places in any bookstore – in all likelihood, the store will have put all of their non-fictions books about or by queer authors here. What does that mean? If you’re looking for a trans memoir, you’ll find it in the Queer Section. If you’re looking for a sociology text, you’ll find it in the Queer section. If you’re looking for a piece about 17th Century history, you’ll find it in the Queer section. If you’re looking for an influencer’s book about how they’re So Queer and think you’re Really Brave for being queer too, that’ll be here too. So on and so forth.

You get the point.

I found almost as many transfeminine authors here as in the entirety of the rest of the two-level store. So. Y’know. Yeah. With all of that being said, here’s some recommendations for some hidden gems you can find in this unholy pit of queer literature – as well as some recommendations on what to avoid.

If you want a book about trans issues, pick one of these three! If your local store has a Queer Section, it’s quite likely that they’ll have at least one of these books in stock, and any of the three are very much worth your time. I would recommend Gender Outlaw if you’re looking for a gender primer; The Transgender Issue if you want a book that gets into the real nitty-gritty about trans liberation and modern transphobia; and Whipping Girl if you want a crash-course in transfeminism. Of the three, Whipping Girl would be my top recommendation, but they all have their virtues.

Looking for a memoir? There are four worth reading that are pretty common across most stores. Note that Conundrum isn’t so much a book that I would recommend as a book that will improve your literacy and understanding about trans history and culture. But Janet Mock, Raquel Willis, and Meredith Talusan have all lived really interesting lives, and their stories are told here in compassionate and innovative ways.

Now, the nice thing about the Queer Section is that in addition to your regular stock, you should be able to find a decently varied rotating cast of other lesser-known books worth reading! Take the time to look, and you should be able to find some cool stuff. For example, here’s my haul from the last time I browsed this section:

Cool stuff, right? Raving is about the underground queer and trans raving scene, which I know absolutely nothing about! It’s always fun to pick up a book about a topic I know nothing about. Then there’s Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction this June and is supposed to be simply fabulous. I’m quite excited to read it.

Unfortunately, though, not everything in the Queer Section is going to be worth reading. In fact, I would argue that the Queer Section is full of misleading advertisements and traps that’ll make it harder to parse out the books that are actually worth reading. Ergo-

Pitfalls in the Queer Section

#1 – Blatant Transphobic Propaganda

Alright kids, let’s play a fun little game called “Which one of these books is transphobic slop?”

Ding ding ding! You guessed it – it’s the one with the trans flag colors!

First of all, it’s ridiculous that this book is subtitled “The Book that Amazon Doesn’t Want You To Read,” given that it is being sold inside a Barnes & Noble. Secondly, look at the way this book is packaged. Trans flag-ish covers, a big bold title. Any trans person with an ounce of critical thinking will take one look at this and immediately know it’s a giant walking dogwhistle. But this book isn’t marketed for trans people; it’s marketed for white cisgender Christians in their 50s who just learned their kid is trans and get nostalgic over 80s romcoms. Books like this are bigotry bait, pure and simple. They are designed to reel in people who don’t know any better and make their opinions about trans people crueler and less-informed. And they are, of course, just sitting on the shelf right next to books that will actually educate about trans issues, with no way whatsoever for a clueless cis person to tell the difference.

#2 – Blatant Ungendering

When you walk up to the Queer Section, you’ll probably notice that most of the books with covers showing are flashy covers that make a spectacle out of their transgender subject. This is almost always a transfeminine person or a drag queen. Why? Because it makes them money. It makes money for the publishers, it makes money for Amazon, and it makes money for whichever transfeminine person is going along with it at the moment. What this does is create the impression of a Queer Section where every book is about a brash, sexually provocative queen who’ll be as quick to chat about her genitals as she will be to give you gratuitous and often-inaccurate transition advice. Either that or the clinically miserable transfemme whose every waking moment is a misery. Two sides of the same coin.

Luckily I couldn’t find it at this Barnes & Noble, but Sissy by Jacob Tobia is another frequent offender.

And it’s like. In isolation, it’s not an awful title or cover. I haven’t read Grace’s memoir, I can’t tell you if the text is any good or not. The problem is that in practice, chain bookstores and publishers love to flash the most spectacular and gruesome images of the transfeminine body they can get their hands on, and covers like this just feed into that cycle.

#3 – Blatant Pinkwashing

I didn’t find either of these books at the store this time, but I did buy them both at B&N, so I wanted to talk about them. Both of these are published by Jessica Kingsley Publishing, both of them are practically lab-engineered for the Barnes & Noble and Waterstones of the world, and they are both terrible in their own special ways:

For those who don’t know what “pinkwashing” is, it’s when a publisher or company douses a product with pride flags and other various Queer iconography, obscuring the fact that the actual product itself is anything but progressive or liberatory for trans people. These books are both excellent examples. To My Trans Sisters is a collection of letters from trans people in positions of power! You can read all about how trans CEOs, trans businesswomen, trans influencers, trans athletes, and trans women of every other stripe want you to succeed at Capitalism! Which, like, sure. I wanna get my bag too. But there’s no coherent message or vision to the book other than “We are trans women and so are you lmao,” and a fair number of the letters are terrible, either in content or form.

Trans Power is probably the worse offender though, in that it’s blatantly riffing off of the “Black Power” slogan and presenting itself as a ‘hoo-rah’ queer liberation text. You could easily pick this up and think, oh, wow, trans power! Hell yeah!! What you find inside, though, are a baffling set of interviews in which Roche asks her various interviewees inexplicably graphic questions about their sex lives, and spends at least a third of the book pontificating on her genitals. It is so, so, so ridiculously far from a theory of “trans power” that it’s honestly offensive. And with both of these books, the only real tell that either of them aren’t good is simply how IN YOUR FACE they are about their transfemininity. If the book is practically slathered in pink and is falling over itself to tell you how trans it is, avoid it. It’s probably bad.

Like I said earlier, though, going to the Queer Section might not be an option if you’re closeted or trying to be discrete with your purchases. So, how can you find trans books outside of the Queer Section? Let me take you on a quick walkabout and tell you everything I found over the last few days at my neighborhood store.

Literary Fiction

Fig. 10 – Pictured: Nevada by Imogen Binnie; Hav by Jan Morris; Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada; Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

I found a grand total of four (4) novels by trans women in the entire literary fiction section of my local Barnes & Noble. Yup – four.

Your safest bets are Nevada by Binnie and Detransition, Baby by Peters, which are inarguably the two biggest commercial successes in the transfeminine literary sphere, and will probably be at most bookstores. The reason that Hav by Morris is here is because the first of the two novellas in the volume, 1985’s Last Letters From Hav, was nominated for a Booker Prize way back when. Of these four, the indisputable steal on this shelf is Bad Girls, the English translation of Camila Sosa Villada’s masterclass novel Las malas. If I saw that book on the shelf and hadn’t read it, that would be an instant buy for me.

When I came back for Day Two of my perusing, I noticed that there was also a Queer Fiction display that I had somehow overlooked:

Which, I suppose this is cool, but there’s only two books by transfemmes here and one of them is Nevada, which we’ve already found on the shelf. The other is Patricia Wants to Cuddle, which is the only book of these five that I haven’t read yet. I didn’t get it this time, though. Again, if you don’t live in a heavily Liberal/Progressive area like I do, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find one of these. Go in prepared to dig through the stacks.

Horror

Fig. 12 – Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin; Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt

To my great surprise and delight, the second most successful place to find fiction in the store was the horror section! I may have only found Manhunt and Tell Me I’m Worthless, but I’ve seen other books from both Felker-Martin and Rumfitt at B&N before, so there’s a real chance for more.

But by far, the biggest surprise of my entire B&N walkabout came here from a super unexpected source:

I found not one, not two, but three Hailey Piper books sitting on a random shelf in Barnes & Noble! This is a wild find, considering that I’ve been looking for Piper’s books for a while and keep coming up short. To me, this is proof that it is worth looking for trans authors at Barnes & Noble, if you come armed with a list and know what you’re looking for. They may be buried deep in the catalogue, but there are trans authors in this store to be found, and the more you’re willing to dig, the more you’ll probably be able to uncover.

For a brief moment in the horror section, I remembered how it felt to actually have a choice in which books to buy. But that would be fleeting given my next destination…

Science Fiction/Fantasy

I was actually really disappointed with the selection of trans SFF authors at this B&N, not in the least because this section was one of the absolute worst offenders for the BookTok-ification of the corporate bookstore (half of the books here were covers-out):

Fig. 13 – The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

Limp. Very very limp. One Anders title. The only reason this section isn’t lower is because you can usually also find Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, and it’s not uncommon to find two or three CJA novels instead of one.

Young Adult

Guess where I found literally all of these? That’s right – it’s the Queer Section for Kids, only here instead of lumping together just the nonfiction, they lump the fiction and the nonfiction! I found a grand total of one transfeminine author of YA fiction on this shelf:

Yep… Just McLemore… But at least you’ve got three options to pick from?

The Queer Section for Kids is honestly something that’s really cool and I’m glad that Barnes and Noble has it. Unlike the adult section, where I have loads of criticism, I think this small selection of nonfiction texts for trans teens is an invaluable resource and ought to be praised:

Jazz and Juno – you’re doing the most. Thank you for being a lifeline for trans kids.

Everything Else

Outside of those four sections (Queer Section, Literary Fiction, SFF, and YA), I found a grand total of four (4) books by transfeminine authors. If you want Middle Grade fiction, Alex Gino is basically your only option. There’s some cool trans graphic novels out there, but the only one I found was Galaxy: The Prettiest Star by Jadzia Axelrod. Finally, the only trans memoir that was actually shelved in the memoir section was Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There.

And… yup. Out of the tens of thousands of titles in this bookstore, that was every single trans book (aside from a bunch in the Queer Section that I didn’t find noteworthy) that I found in the entire two-story Barnes & Noble in Center City, Philadelphia.

What I Didn’t Find

Any comprehensive survey is only gonna be as good as the research behind it, and mine is obviously fallible. While it’s entirely possible that I know as much about this as anyone on the planet, I’m positive that there are transfeminine authors I didn’t notice, or didn’t know to count. What I do know is that for the authors I know (and also some of the ones in the Queer Section that I Googled in the store), this is everything I found.

I went through most, but not every, section of the bookstore. Whenever I felt I didn’t have a proper knowledge of transfeminine writers in the field, I skipped over it. Ergo, I didn’t find any transfemme mangakas because I don’t have a complete list memorized off the top of my head, nor did I bother trying to sort through the picture book section. I did not look through the cookbooks, nor I did not comprehensively sort through large swathes of the non-fiction (though I did a sweep of the Travel, Religion and Spirituality, Memoir, Biography, and Social Sciences sections, where I do have a decent amount of knowledge).

There were, however, entire sections where I did not see a single transfeminine author. There were zero transfeminine authors in the Poetry section (No Vivek Shraya?). There were zero transfeminine authors in the Thriller and Mystery section (No Robyn Gigl?). There were zero transfeminine authors on the entire first floor of the building (Hence why I have advised my reader to skip the New Releases section completely).

Overwhelmingly, when transfeminine authors were present, they were segregated into the various Queer Sections around the bookstore: the Queer Nonfiction, the Queer YA, and the Queer Literature displays. This often involved yanking entire genres out of their sensible places and putting them there instead. There were at least two dozen trans memoirs in the Queer Section, and there was one in the Memoir section. As far as I can tell, there were only sixteen books by transfeminine authors in the entire store not found on a Queer Section display. While I understand this in principle, what I find frustrating is that books by transfeminine authors that were shelved in the Queer Section were almost never also shelved elsewhere. Literally the only book – the only book – that I found both on a Queer Section display and in the stacks with the rest of the fiction was Nevada.

There were also some glaring omissions. I was perturbed by the fact that despite having nearly every single other Jodi Picoult book on the shelf, Mad Honey was absent. Recent traditionally published successes from transfeminine authors were also missing. I was surprised not to find Bellies by Nicola Dinan, give that it was, at least at one point, optioned for a TV show. I was very surprised not to find Light From Uncommon Stars on the shelf.

What doesn’t surprise me, however, is the absolute dearth of indie publishing in the store. I mean, duh – it’s B&N, what did you expect? As far as I can tell, the only books by transfeminine authors from indie presses in the entire store were from Hailey Piper, hence my shock at finding them (and so many to boot).

And I do, of course, want to remember that Barnes & Noble is going to constantly rotate their stock, not to mention the high degree of variability possible from store to store. What I found in Philadelphia might not be there in Los Angeles or Kansas City, and it’s entirely possible that those other stores will have hidden gems I couldn’t find here.

What’s the Takeaway?

I know that I’ve read more books by trans authors than 99.9% of people ever will. Please don’t let my experience distort what you’re looking at here – if you’ve never read a trans book before, you have lots of options! More importantly, as long as you’re not picky about it, in 2024, there should be at least an option, and that’s more than one could have said about most bookstores a decade ago. If you’re willing to search for them, there are some great books to be read here, and they’re probably closer than you might think.

The burning question: even if you know the books are there, how am I, random internet stranger who doesn’t have a list of over 200 working transfeminine writers memorized, supposed to pick out the trans books from the cis books? I’ve included below a full list of every transfeminine author I spotted on my walkabout, including the section I found them in. Wanna really do a comprehensive search? You can go and check out the authors in Bethany’s Masterlist, which sorts out by genre and also has a very long TBR section for authors I haven’t read yet.

It’s my earnest hope that this guide can help people find transfeminine authors within the maze of cis authors at chain bookstores. Let me know what other trans books you’ve found at Barnes & Noble!

The list is here:

Queer Section

• Samantha Allen
• Munroe Bergdorf
• Kate Bornstein
• Shon Faye
• Laura Jane Grace
• Miss Major
• McKenzie Wark
• Sarah McBride
• Janet Mock
• Jan Morris
• Julia Serano 
• Susan Stryker
• Meredith Talusan
• Mia Violet
• Raquel Willis

Fiction

• Imogen Binnie
• Jan Morris
• Torrey Peters
• Camila Sosa Villada
• Samantha Allen

Horror

• Hailey Piper
• Alison Rumfitt
• Gretchen Felker-Martin

YA

• Anna-Marie McLemore
• Juno Dawson
• Jazz Jennings

SFF

• Charlie Jane Anders

Memoir

• Jennifer Finney Boylan

Young Readers

• Alex Gino

Graphic

• Jadzia Axelrod

Thanks for reading! Keep an eye out for our next article this Sunday. It’ll be the first one in a new series called “A Brief History of Trans Literature;” first up will be “Part One – The Moral Origins of Obscenity.” For more details on the updated posting plan, you can see this thread on Bluesky.

LAST WEDNESDAY: #2 – Bookshelf Tour!!

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #4 – How I Discover Transfeminine Fiction