The Transfeminine Review

AKA One of the best curated resources for finding novels by trans women on the internet

If you’re looking for your new favorite trans book, you’ve come to the right place! If you want to, you could click through to the masterlist right now – but for those who really want to dig their teeth into this resource, please take a few moments to read some important clarifications about what this list is (and isn’t.)

If you’ve never read a trans book before, this list will probably be completely overwhelming, and I don’t recommend that you start here. Head over to our Start Here page, which offers a bunch of targeted recommendations for good gateway books.

• Bethany’s Masterlist is a record of every book by a transfemme that I have personally read. While I have read hundreds of other literary materials by transfemmes that have never made their way to a full print/e-book edition, this list is not attempting to be comprehensive, nor is it a catalogue of literally every single thing ever printed by a trans woman. There is also a TBR section, but it has substantially less detail.
• The focus of this list is books written by trans women, not about trans women. I have read, for example, books like Middlesex, which involve some degree of genderfuckery as seen through the eyes of straight men. The ‘Gender Novel,’ as Casey Plett has christened it, will not appear on this list. As such, in edge cases where the author is suspected to have been trans, I have also left that off the list. Self-identification is the name of the game here. This leaves out certain edge cases, such as Geoff Brown’s 1966 novel I Want What I Want (see this article for an example of the sort of speculative gender IDing I have excluded). I have also read a smaller (but still not-insignificant) number of books by transmascs and enbies, which are also not listed here
• The ratings and notes included on this spreadsheet are my personal opinions, which are inherently subjective. I am not an arbiter of taste, just a voracious reader and an amateur scholar. There are books that I didn’t like that are excellent, and books that I did like that may be terrible or flawed. Please treat these ratings as you would any book review – a single datapoint to be compared among many.
• My preferred literary form is the novel. As such, there are better places to find lists of transfemme short story writers, poets, memoir writers, and theorists. While I’ve noted down everything I’ve read, please note that the ‘Fiction’ section is far more expansive than the others.
• The focus of this project is on contemporary transfeminine literature. My focus has been on people who have self-identified by a label under the modern trans umbrella, which largely limits the scope of inquiry to around the late 1800s and more recent. There are entire fields like Early Modern Trans Studies which are dedicated to studying gender non-conformity in literature before the late 1800s. This is, however, neither my primary interest nor my expertise, so don’t come in expecting to see Milton or Shakespeare here.
• I am only 23. I was born after 9/11. At no point in my life did I live in the 20th Century. When Nevada was published, I was getting ready to graduate from elementary school. While I’ve been transitioning since 2017, which is a decently long time in trans years, my youth will be a factor in the number of books I’ve read and have exposure to, my opinions, my general awareness of historical trans books, etc.
• An author’s presence on this list does not indicate an endorsement of their moral or political views, nor their particular takes on trans identity, and neither does my ratings of their work. There are problematic authors of every stripe on this list, from Virginia Prince to Jan Morris and beyond. There are bigots, conservatives, transvestites, cross-dressers, imperialists, racists, detransitioners, and douchebags of every kind. There are also anarchists, communists, furries, pornographers, and every stripe of progressive under the sun. I am not creating this list to police or gatekeep the boundaries for morally acceptable transness. Please exercise your critical thinking skills and don’t shoot the messenger.
• If there’s a book missing from both the masterlist and the TBR, feel free to let me know! I’m always researching for new books, but it’s a big world out there. You can email any news about new releases, obscure titles, or other finds to info@thetransfemininereview.com. Be forewarned that there are hundreds of books on my TBR and I may not get to it for a long time.

Anticipating a couple likely questions:

• What’s the best way to use this list? There are lots of filters! You can look for specific genres, books that have won Lambda awards, my personal favorites, year published, author biography, and a bunch of other stuff. Every book has its summary listed in the final column. Also, bear in mind that most if not all of the authors on this list have published other books too. If you’re not seeing exactly what you want, I would suggest picking an author that sounds interesting and seeing if they’ve written anything else. This is a starting point, not a one-stop shop.
• How can I support these authors? Whenever possible, my masterlist includes links to the author’s website, Patreon, and Bluesky/Twitter, as well as a variety of links to buy each individual book. Some books are available for free online, so personal research would also be advisable. If there’s no purchase link for the book, it’s probably rare, obscure, or out of print. If there are no links for the author’s personal sites, either they don’t have an internet presence (a reasonable decision for a trans author), they use different platforms to promote their work, or they are dead.
• This information is wrong, Beth. Probably lol. Shoot me an email at info@thetransfemininereview.com and I can make appropriate corrections. I’m human, and this has been a labor of love. I apologize in advance for any mistakes or shortcomings in this resource.
• Why not include works by non-transfeminine trans people? Isn’t this whole project arbitrary and exclusionary? There’s a couple reasons. Firstly, I just like reading books by trans women and transfemmes more. If I didn’t narrow the scope, there would be way fewer books on the list by non-transfemmes, and that’s incredibly lame. I’d rather be upfront about my specific interests than half-ass it, under-represent transmasculine and non-binary authors, and get (justifiably) criticized down the line. It’s like filtering for ‘F/F’ or ‘Trans Female Character’ on AO3 – I’ve just done it manually because all the other search metrics are shit (Amazon’s ‘transgender fiction’ tag can rot). Secondly, I don’t think that specificity equates to exclusion. Transmasc and non-binary literature are also totally fascinating and worth exploring! I’m coming to this project from a specifically transfeminist standpoint – part of what I want to interrogate is the particularities that emerge within the literature of people affected most strongly by transmisogyny and transmisogynoir. It is my opinion, after reading dozens and dozens of these books, that the situation of the trans woman writer has a number of unique challenges, themes, tropes, and expectations which are not easily mapped onto a transmasculine or non-binary experience. That specifically is what I’ve set out to explore here, and I hope that other people pick up their pens and keyboards to fill in the blanks I’m leaving unmarked!
• What are you going to read next? Only God knows.

If you read all of that, thanks for humoring me. If you didn’t, I can’t say I didn’t warn you!