The Transfeminine Review

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Hello all!

The nominations for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards were officially released on July 30th, which means that we’ve got a new crop of transfemme novelists and authors to celebrate! This isn’t going to be the most involved article, but I wanted to compile all of the transfemme finalists into a reading list for those who want to read the nominees ahead of the ceremony on October 4th, 2025.

I had never encountered some of these authors before, so I’m super excited to check some of these titles out in the coming months ❤ I’m gonna go alphabetical by authors. I’ll also be noting whether each book was nominated/won a TFR award so that you can compare the industry prestige award to our smaller community-voted awards. The vast majority of the titles on this list were not part of the TFR Awards, and I think it’s super cool that there are so many books recognized without overlap. This is the exact reason I created the TFR Awards, and I’m always happy to see more transfemme authors gain a bigger platform!

If you’re curious to hear more about my personal takes on the Lambda Awards, I wrote about their history in December.

So, without further ado, here are all of the nominees!

1. The 2025 Lambda Literary Award Nominees
   1. How to Fuck like a Girl by Vera Blossom
   2. Yellow Barks Spider by Harman Burns
   3. Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland
   4. I Don’t Want to Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
   5. Arasahas: Poems from the Tropics by Jaya Jacobo, trans. Christian Jil Benitez
   6. Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski
   7. Love/Aggression by June Martin
   8. Trans Femme Futures by Nat Raha and Mijke Van Der Drift
   9. The Sunforge – Sascha Stronach
   10. When Monsters Speak: a Susan Stryker Reader – Susan Stryker, ed. McKenzie Wark
   11. Make it Count by CeCé Telfer
   12. Girlmode by Magdalene Vissagio, ill. Paulina Ganucheau

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The 2025 Lambda Literary Award Nominees

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Nominated For: Transgender Nonfiction

A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.

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Nominated for: Transgender Fiction

At ten years old, Kid is increasingly disturbed by strange spider-infested visions of his next-door neighbour’s shed. Pursued by shadowy memories that torment his waking thoughts, Kid falls deeper and deeper into a haunted inner world, retreating from his family and friends. Beneath this overwhelming pressure, the text itself begins to crumble, splintering as the workings of Kid’s imagination become animate — and language self-destructs. Emerging from this anguish, Kid surfaces into adulthood as she navigates love, sex, addiction, and self-discovery as a trans woman. But, when a family member falls ill, she is forced to return to her hometown and confront all the old fears she thought she’d left behind.

Yellow Barks Spider is an unforgettable portrait of trauma, isolation, and self-compassion. It is a deeply-felt exhumation of memory, love, and the human spirit, and it announces a bold new voice by a debut author.

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Nominated for: Transgender Fiction

Through playful poetic prose, sharp social commentary and self-deprecating gallows humor Love the World or Get Killed Trying dives into the mind of Alvina, a trans woman on the eve of turning 30. The reader is invited to follow her journey through the breathtaking wilderness of Iceland and busy city boulevards of Berlin and Paris as she probes questions of eternity, sexuality, longing, death, love, and how hard it is to remain soft when you’re a ceaseless target of straight men’s secret lust and open disgust. This novel tackles universal issues through a trans woman’s specific lens – insisting on these experiences speaking to far more than just issues of sexuality and gender.

Reaching its climax through an urgent wildfire scream-of-consciousness, cry-of-love-manifesto, Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a raw and vulnerable work of magical brutalist autofiction; abstract in the sense of poetically digging beneath the surface, and experimental in the sense of trying to find out new things and express them in new ways, while concretely asserting that if trans women one day collectively outed every man who seeks them out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall.

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Nominated for: Transgender Poetry

A transsexual woman pieces together fragmented details of a repressive religious childhood and an unsupportive family, drawing from autobiographical experiences of the poet’s life.

I Don’t Want To Be Understood is a work of resistance against the conventional trans narrative, and a resistance against the idea that trans people should have to make themselves clear and understandable to others in other to deserve human rights. This is a compelling, urgent collection about the body and survival that asks how we learn to love in a culture where normal is defined by exclusion and discrimination.

These poems stretch from childhood to the present day—resisting typical narratives of self-discovery, resilience, and personal growth—and instead asks what it means to be granted or denied personhood by the world around you. It is a personal archive of a trans life laid out in all its messiness and unknowability, and is a book for anyone who has questioned why we place so many limitations on who gets to be considered a human being. These poems do not celebrate survival, but rather ask why transsexuals and other gender non-conforming people must fight so hard to survive in the first place.

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Nominated for: Transgender Poetry

In Arasahas, poet and educator Jaya Jacobo writes of the tropics as both time and place, as well as a sensibility through which one may understand and come to terms with the world. Translated into English by Christian Jil Benitez, the poems in this collection intimate how being tropical not only conjures torridities, but more importantly, entitles one to tenderness.

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Nominated for: Transgender Fiction

Best friends Lily and Zoe fight, separate, reunite, and repeat, each time deepening the belief that the other is the source of their problems. Once Lily, a struggling tattoo apprentice, is exiled from their shared house, she bounces from an artist’s fixer-upper, to a cult leader with a harem of subs, to a house shared with the goddess of transfemininity. Meanwhile, rising movie star Zoe becomes more cutthroat by the day in her relentless quest for fame. If Lily can’t give up her desire for control, if Zoe can’t lay aside her cruelty and ego, they’ll never escape their intolerable places in the world. Traversing art, domination, sex, and shape-shifting houses, Love/Aggression is a novel about the indignity of depending on other people, and the terrible cost of trying not to.

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Nominated for: Transgender Nonfiction

‘Femme’ describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging, and harm, this book offers transfeminist contributions to movements for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionize our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives rather than institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

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Nominated for: LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction

Sascha Stronach’s queer, Maori-inspired Endsong trilogy reopens on a city in flames, where a magic-wielding pirate crew uncovers an age-old fight between the gods that threatens their world.

The steel city of Radovan is consumed by fire between. Stranded in its harbor is the crew of the Kopek, the survivors of a bioterror attack overseas. But they bear scars: their captain, Sibbi, has gone missing; Yat, their newest Weaver, is fighting for control of her own mind; and their Weaving powers are in a badly weakened state.

To disable the technology that prevents the group from escaping, Sen and Kiada must plot their way through the ruins of the foreign capital, which is patrolled by a hostile militia, using wits alone. But to navigate through Radovan, Kiada will have to rely on her own history with the city—one she shares with a band of misfits dubbed Fort Tomorrow and their leader, Ari, a charismatic thief.

Ari may hold the key not only to saving Radovan from complete annihilation, but the history of their world, which will come into play as the gods begin to unleash destruction on humanity and one another.

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Nominated For: LGBTQ+ Studies

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.

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Nominated for: Transgender Nonfiction

By turns harrowing and hopeful, MAKE IT COUNT is the inspiring story of the first openly transgender woman to win a NCAA title, following her traditional upbringing in Jamaica, her fight to become a US citizen, and her efforts to achieve her Olympic dreams.

CeCé Telfer is a warrior. The first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA championship, she has contended with transphobia on and off the track since childhood. Now, she stands at the crossroads of a national and international conversation about equity in sports, forced to advocate for her personhood and rights at every turn. After spending years training for the 2024 Olympics, Telfer has been sidelined and silenced more times than she can count. But she’s never been good at taking no for an answer.

MAKE IT COUNT is Telfer’s raw and inspiring story. From coming of age in Jamaica, where she grew up hearing a constant barrage of slurs, to beginning her new life in Toronto and then New Hampshire, where she realized what running could offer her, to living in the backseat of her car while searching for a coach, to Mexico, where she trained for the US Trials, this book follows the arc of Telfer’s Olympic dream.

This is the story of running on what feels like the edge of a knife, of what it means to compete when you’re not just an athlete but treated like a walking controversy. But it’s also the story of resilience and athleticism, of a runner who found a clarity in her sport that otherwise eluded her—a sense of being simply alive on this earth, a human moving through space. Finally, herself.

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Nominated for: LGBTQ+ Comics

The last thing Phoebe Zito wants is to be noticed. The newest kid at Sally Ride High School, newly arrived in Los Angeles, and newly transitioned, she’s just trying to blend in while she figures out exactly who she is. But with her mom checked out, her dad still adjusting to having a daughter, and no guidebook on how to be a girl, that isn’t going to be easy.

Enter Mackenzie Ishikawa. She’s the girl who all girls want to be, and all the boys want to be with—and, Mackenzie has decided, Phoebe’s new best friend. Mackenzie knows what it takes to survive and thrive as a girl in high school, most of all that no matter who Phoebe wants to be, or who she wants to date, she’s going to need someone having her back.

Phoebe soon realizes what Mackenzie knows too well: Being true to yourself is going to mean breaking some hearts. But as Phoebe discovers what kind of girl she is—and what kind of girl everyone around her thinks she’s supposed to be—she worries one of those hearts will be her own.

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And that’s a wrap! Eleven nominations for transfeminine authors would have been unthinkable a decade ago – I’m so happy with this year’s slate of nominations, and I’ll definitely be making an effort to check the ones I’ve not read out in the coming weeks and months.

If I’ve missed a transfemme author, please let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

Happy reading, Beth 💕

LAST WEDNESDAY: #12 – Bookshelf Tour 2025!

NEXT WEDNESDAY: #14 – An Afternoon with Erica Rutherford

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