The Transfeminine Review

Welcome back! I hope you all enjoyed the first installment in our “A Brief History of Transfeminine Literature” series – if you missed it, you can go and check it out here. Obviously there’s much more to come on that front, but today I wanted to take the time to respond to a comment I got on my last Casual Wednesday post that was hoping for a better picture of how I go about finding all of these obscure novels. I thought that this would be a great opportunity to give some insight into my research process for this project!

Obviously not everybody has as much time to research this as I do. I get wanting to pave your own path, though, so if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and wander into the abyss, here’s my advice for how to go about it.

Step One: Use Pre-Existing Resources

Obviously I’m gonna start by recommending that you check out the resources right here on The Transfeminine Review! We have a couple of great places where you can start looking for books by transfeminine authors, including but not limited to:

Bethany’s Masterlist: My comprehensive list of every published book by a transfeminine author that I have ever read, including my review of every single book, where to buy it, author socials, demographics, genre, and a whole bunch of other info. I’ve also got my full TBR listed if you want to see books I’m hoping to read soon.

New and Upcoming Releases: A lot of the books on this list won’t have made it onto my Masterlist yet for one reason or another. If you’re looking for a complete list of every upcoming title that I’m aware of, or if you want to keep up to date with the industry, this is a good place to look.

Start Here: If you haven’t read that deeply into the genre yet, then I’d suggest that you read this list of fifty-three book recommendations from transfeminine authors first. It’s got longer write-ups and should give you some great starting points.

Useful Links: Every link on this page will direct you to a place where transfeminine literature can be found in abundance.

Between these four links (and the various other resources found within), you should be able to find all of the most successful career transfeminine fiction authors. The reality is that the trans publishing industry just isn’t that large or old, and that it has a tendency to coalesce in ways that are, while not easy to map, relatively predictable. I do know that there are entire sections of the literature that I have yet to document, so don’t worry – I’ve got a boatload of other advice too.

Aside from my website, the best place to find extensive lists of books by transfeminine authors is on Goodreads. Here are two Goodreads lists that have been useful in my research:

Transfeminine Publications by Year: This is, without any competition, the best place on Goodreads to find books by transfemme authors. I’ve covered most of the books here at least somewhere, but it’s definitely extensive enough that you’ll find a shitton of stuff that I haven’t. It’s also organized by year (though everything before ’19 is lumped together which is annoying) which means that you can do at least a little filtering. Easily the best masterlist I’ve found beyond my own.

Trans Books by Trans Authors: This one was absolutely crucial during the research phase of this project. However, it’s a little outdated, and it’s much less likely to have books I haven’t listed here. It’s also completely co-ed. Peruse as you will.

There are a couple other resources which you may have already found on our Useful Links page, but I’ll reiterate them here anyway:

The Trans Literature Database – If you’re a library-head, this is gonna be one of your best resources. My only caveat here is that it doesn’t have a super broad documentation yet, but it’s actively expanding and definitely a project to keep an eye on.

Transcendent Books – A Substack that sends out occasional updates about new releases and reviews some buzzy books. This is a great resource if you want push notifications about new books or to read reviews.

Y/A and Middle Grade Trans Masterlist – Ray Stoewe’s personal project, rather similar in aims to what I’m doing here. This is hands-down the best resource for finding Trans YA, so if you’re looking for that, I would start here.

Writings on Other Topics – Trans historian Zagria Cowan has compiled a very useful list of books by trans authors that have no obvious connection or relation to transness, if you’re looking for trans professionals but don’t need trans subject matter.

If you’re a Reddit person, then you can also check out r/transbooks or r/lgbtbooks to either post for recs or sort back through what people have recommended in the past.

IF YOU USE THESE LINKS, YOU WILL BE ABLE TO FIND THE VAST MAJORITY OF TRANS-AUTHORED NOVELS. IF YOU ADD UP EVERY BOOK ON THESE LISTS AND GOOGLE THE AUTHORS WHO WROTE THEM, YOU WILL EASILY FIND SEVERAL THOUSAND BOOKS.

I want to be very clear – by the end of Step One, you will have already reached the point of diminishing returns as far as fiction goes. I had a serious crash at the end of last summer when I realized that, no matter how hard I looked, there was not a hidden trove of trans novels that I had missed and overlooked. Indie gems and underground titles? Sure. But as far as novels goes, I had already found 90% of all traditionally published transfeminine fiction in less than six months.

If you’re really interested in delving deeper down this rabbit hole, let me give you my solemn warning – this way lies heartache. Anything more that what you can find above is gonna require digging through a lot of tragedy and a lot of porn. It may be rare, expensive, or both. But if you’re willing to get into the trenches, here are some of the way I’ve gotten the expertise to make this website.

Step Two: Google Until Your Hands Hurt

“Trans Fiction.” “Trans Woman Fiction.” “Trans Women Writer.” “Trans Women Author.” “Books with Trans Women.” “Books About Trans Women.” “Transfeminine Fiction.” “Transfeminine Novels.” “Transfeminine Authors.” “Trans Books Recs.” “Trans Fiction Recs.” “Trans Women Fiction Recs.”

“History of Trans Fiction.” “Trans Fiction 2020.” “Trans Fiction 80s.” Google every year and decade for good measure. “Trans Woman Mystery.” “Trans Woman Science Fiction.” “Trans YA.” “Transfeminine Horror.” Google every genre you can think about for good measure. “Imogen Binnie.” “Torrey Peters.” “Casey Plett.” “Ryka Aoki.” Go to their websites. Read their interviews, read through the websites that published those interviews, see what other authors they talk about. Google them too. Google every transfeminine author you’ve ever heard of. Then learn about some new ones and Google them too. It’s an Escher Loop, a Gordonian Knot. The world folds back in on itself. Everyone knows everyone. Sometimes you’ll find a indie author hidden away in the depths of another author’s wake. Those are the good days.

It’s not enough. Google’s a monopoly – don’t trust what the search results tell you. I’ve used French Google. Japanese Google. German Google. Spanish Google. They’ll all give you different results. Get a VPN and route yourself through different countries. Search in foreign languages. Deploy foreign terminology. Abuse Google Translate. They’ll all show you different stuff. Hell, ditch Google altogether. Use DuckDuckGo. Or Bing. Or Ecosia. You never know what Google deprioritizes in its search results, and it’s not like trans content doesn’t get flagged and hidden all the time. If you want to find stuff that you wouldn’t have been able to find anyway during Step One, you’re going to need to try as many permutations as possible. Don’t stop on page one. Go to page twenty. Hell, go to the last page. Dig all the way to the bottom and keep digging.

Step Three: Tag Diving and Keyword Search

By the point where you can recognize basically every article that’s ever been written about trans literature on sight, you’ve gotten as much as you’re gonna get out of the search engines. So, what next?

At this point, 99.9% of the texts you’re dealing with are gonna be from indie or self-published authors who either never had the resources to do good marketing, didn’t want to or know how to network, or both. It’s usually both. You’re gonna find a lot of unpolished covers, sparse descriptions, scanty internet presences. But some of the best books out there look like that, so don’t give up on them before you’ve given them a chance.

The first step is to identify websites that have a large community of trans authors that may not have left the subculture of that particular space. Here is an incomplete list of every website that I have scoured in search of underground authors:

• Amazon
• Patreon
• Scribblehub
• itch.io
• Tumblr
• BigCloset TopShelf
• Goodreads

Obviously many of these are enormous sites that no one person could conceivably work through. Moreover, you’re specifically looking for the detritus that isn’t going to otherwise come up in a search. How do you even begin to find stuff?

Patience. Lots of patience.

The trick here is to find a work that’s visibly trans, then do some research about the author to figure out if they’re trans too. If you don’t research the authors, you will end up reading a lot of books by cis people. That may be what some are looking for, but obviously my project was focused on the trans author, not the trans subject matter, so it’s a crucial step to actually finding the good stuff.

Tag diving is by far the easier method. There are a lot of websites that have a “transgender” tag (or sometimes even an “MTF” or “trans woman” tag). These tags will be massively bloated by cookie cutter porn, cis gender novels, and some absolute transphobic drek, but a lot of trans novels will be hiding in the cracks. Amazon and Goodreads both have “Transgender” tags that could best be described as absolute dumpster fires, but they are also likely the largest unplumbed gold mines of trans fiction on the planet. A lot of the best underground picks I’ve found have been from trawling endless pages of Amazon or Goodreads results, so it is absolutely worth it if you’re dedicated enough and razor sharp with your research.

A brief aside here – I have found that trans women get weird, sometimes downright cruel, about the writers of TG/TF and trans erotica on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. I would remind my wonderful reader that a lot of those authors are also transfemme. Some of them are on my Masterlist! I have heard, at various points, trans women on the internet claim that transfeminine folks who write sissy porn are “inherently sexist,” “not real trans women,” and also suggest that they’re all just fetishists masquerading in dresses and writing dehumanizing propaganda for the cis male gaze. Not only is this severely hypocritical, but it also denigrates the fact that working transfeminine erotica writers are also self-employed in a sex work adjacent field. The quality of their work frankly doesn’t matter – you can diss on poorly written slop with AI-gen covers all you want, but don’t use the content of their work as a flimsy excuse to question the transness of those trans women erotica writers. It’s transmisogyny and we’re better than that. And frankly, even if they are cross-dressers or transvestites by self-identification, it doesn’t matter. “Trans” used to be an inclusive umbrella term for understanding all manner of gender expressions, and our literature reflects that. We should uphold that and the working writers who publish in that vein instead of creating arbitrary litmus tests for morally acceptable producers of transfeminine literature.

Anyway.

Tumblr and Scribblehub both have considerable tags as well. Both are obviously also propagated by unpublished fiction, but you’ll find a fair amount of published stuff if you dig. Scribbehub is also an ideal place to look because lots of authors will link their Patreons, which can be a goldmine for finding underground fiction.

BigCloset TopShelf is obviously a dedicate transfemme fiction site, and it’s been overrun by Kindle ads for years now, which is terrible if you’re looking for the free stuff but awesome if you’re trying to find underground published work. Good place to poke around.

Keyword searching is a much more dubious prospect, but it’s also a much more universal one – you can do it on any social media site or any site where fiction can be found. TLDR: Repeat Step Two, but in the website searchbar instead of Google. Websites tend to only index a certain number of high-traffic pages, and what we’re looking for is decidedly not that. You will turn up things you didn’t on Google. You will also, however, have to research every single item to learn more about its authorship, which is hardly for the faint of heart.

Step Four: Word of Mouth

Most trans authors will know at least one or two other trans authors. Ask them about them! Ask people for their most obscure trans novel rec. When I posted this on Bluesky, I got dozens of interesting responses with tons of books I’d never heard of:

What’s your favorite book by a trans woman? Asking for a friend

— The Transfeminine Review (@thetransfemreview.bsky.social) August 26, 2024 at 12:17 PM

https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js

(Feel free to go add your responses over there!)

At the end of the day, there’ll come a point where you’re gonna hit a research wall on the internet, and your only options will be either to go read one of the books you’ve already found (Again – thousands. Anyone who claims to have read every transfeminine novel is lying.) or to touch grass and talk to a real living breathing trans person, whether it’s on the internet or in person. Be prepared for the reality that, unless you’re talking to a writer or an industry professional, most transfemmes probably won’t have any more knowledge than you do.

An important resource here can be local queer bookstores! Lots of small bookstores are vital lifelines for indie authors, and it’s entirely possible that queer bookstores around the world will have local transfeminine authors that are impossible to find online! It’s worth trawling through their websites, calling them, or even paying them a visit if you can.

Step Five: Archival Research

As we’ll be covering in our “A Brief History of Trans Literature” series, obscenity laws arose in the United States and Britian in such a manner that not only were obscene publications often considered to not be protected by First Amendment laws, but also that allowed for the immediate destruction of obscene materials upon discovery. This unfortunately means that there likely isn’t a large body of trans work sitting in the depths of the Library of Congress or the British Library waiting to be discovered, at least not prior to the later part of the 20th century. Want to learn more about why? Make sure to keep up with our series on transliterary history!

That being said, there are a lot of smaller archival projects that may have trans holdings, and enough work in larger archives that trans researchers shouldn’t give up on them so quickly. Archiving contemporary trans literature is a project that has barely begun, so this is a vast and unexplored field of study that will hopefully turn up all sorts of interesting things in the coming years. For now, though, it remains a bit of a black box.

Conclusion

For the record, if you’re casually looking for books to enjoy, I wouldn’t recommend going much further than Step One. My methodology is, in principle, an academic one, and most trans readers neither need nor want to put in all this work! If you do want to go beyond Step One, though, I would recommend mixing and matching these steps to suit your preferences. Don’t like talking to people? Use the internet! Don’t wanna use the internet? Ask people for recs or go to a local queer bookstore! All of this advice is whatever you make of it: go forth and find cool books by transfeminine authors :))))

There’s always gonna be more transfeminine-authored fiction out there than you think, and there’s always gonna be less of it than you hope. What you shouldn’t lose hope in, though, is that there’s a novel out there that’s got everything you’re looking for. If you’re willing to give underground, self-published, and obscure fictions a try, there’s a whole trove out there that may be waiting for its first, or tenth, or hundredth reader, even decades after its initial publication. And if you’re like me, that’s more than enough reason to keep fighting the good fight.

LAST WEDNESDAY: #3 – How to Find Books by Transfeminine Authors at Barnes and Noble

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #5 – An Overview of Major Trans-Forward Publishers