Transgender literature is a collective term used to designate the literary production that addresses, has been written by or portrays people of diverse gender identity.
History
Representations in literature of transgender people have existed for millennia, with Ovid's Metamorphoses (written in the year 8 CE) containing some of the earliest accounts.
The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp, surveys core topics in transgender literary theory and criticism, such as performativity, visibility, temporality, and monstrosity, as well as diverse genres ranging from life writing and science fiction to comics and manga. The handbook includes overviews of trans literature from six periods: Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist.
Susan Stryker’s Transgender History: The Root’s of Today’s Revolution, revised edition published 2017, is a guide to the general history of American transgender culture. Both the original and revised editions are short books, but they provide a good overview of transgender history. Stryker covers topics from terminology to social movements. This book can be a good introduction to transgender culture and a guide for those unfamiliar with the LGBTQIA+ community and culture.
20th century In the twentieth century, it is notable that the novel Orlando (1928), by Virginia Woolf, is considered one of the first transgender novels in English and whose plot follows a bisexual poet who changes gender from male to female and lives for hundreds of years.
Before Orlando, The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum was published in 1904. Its main character, Ozma, was born female but turned into a boy named Tippetarius/Tip as an infant, and raised male until at the end of the book discovering their true identity as the princess of Oz.
Beyond Orlando, the twentieth century saw the appearance of other fiction works with transgender characters that saw commercial success. Among them is Myra Breckinridge (1968), a satirical novel written by Gore Vidal that follows a trans woman hellbent on world domination and bringing down patriarchy. The book sold more than two million copies after publication, but was panned by critics.
Trans literature was heavily marginalized and mostly shared underground during the 1900s. Red Jordan Arobateau self-published many forms of literature on trans subjects throughout the 1900s. Underground zines like gendertrash and TransSisters were sources of some trans fiction during the 1990s. In 1993, Leslie Feinberg published a seminal work in trans literature and culture, Stone Butch Blues.
Transgender memoirs Many of the first publications that foregrounded transgender individuals and their experiences were memoirs. Perhaps the earliest example is Man into Woman (1933), by Lili Elbe. The older Autobiography Of an Androgyne (1918), by Victorian/Edwardian era activist Jennie June/Ralph Werther is also an important but often muddy insight into the lives of what he/she called "Ultra-Androgynes", a gender identity of which closest modern equivalent borders closely with transgender woman or effeminate-leaning non-binary.
For many decades, trans literature released by large mainstream publishers was very limited, and took the form of memoirs explaining a trans writer's life to an assumed cisgender audience. Critiques of these tropes evolved out of the new field of trans theory that developed during the 1990s. According to Kuchenga Shenjé, the shared structure and themes of these books were due to their political intentions. Commonly, the books focused on white trans women and followed a prescribed narrative: they were assigned male at birth, realized they were women, endured violence or discrimination before leaving for a big city, undertook medical transition, and thus finished their journey by "becoming woman". These tropes are further discussed by Jonathan Ames in Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs.
Trans memoirs during the 1990s grew more diverse in their exploration of gender experiences than the model set by earlier memoirs like Jan Morris's Conundrum. Early acclaimed memoirs written by trans people include Gender Outlaw (1994), by Kate Bornstein; Man Enough to be a Woman (1996), by Jayne County; and Crossing: A A Memoir (1999), by Deirdre McCloskey.
21st century Transgender literature emerged as a distinct branch of LGBTQIA+ literature in the early twenty-first century, when the number of fiction works focused on trans experience saw a pronounced growth and diversification. This was accompanied by a greater academic and general interest in the area, as well as a process of differentiation from the rest of LGBTQIA+ literature. In recent decades, more books than ever have been written by transgender authors with an intended audience of transgender readers. Many academic writings on transgender topics are gathered in Transgender Studies, a set of volumes edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura.
Critical and commercial success came to more memoirs in the 2000s, including the Lambda Literary Award winners She's Not There, by Jennifer Finney Boylan (2003); Becoming a Visible Man (2004) by Jamison Green, one of the first memoirs by a trans man to receive wide readership; and Dress Codes (2002), by Noelle Howey, about growing up with a trans parent.
Shenjé found that the trans memoir genre started to diversify, increasing the presence of Black trans narratives during the 2010s, such as Redefining Realness (2014), by Janet Mock. Still, many of these books had to be self-published. They include Dominique Jackson's The Transsexual from Tobago, Ts Madison's A Light Through The Shade: An Autobiography of a Queen and Hope Giselle's Becoming Hope: Removing the Disguise.
Other memoirs during this decade pushed against the narrative tropes of the trans memoir genre, in works like Juliet Jacques's Trans, Zoe Dolan's There is Room for You, and Thomas Page McBee's Amateur. Vivek Shraya examined how her relationship to men has changed over time in I'm Afraid of Men. In 2019 some of the first nonbinary memoirs were published, including Luna Ferguson's Me Myself, They: Life Beyond the Binary, T. Fleischmann's Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Jacob Tobia's Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story.
Publication of trans literature grew as small and indie presses enabled trans authors to traditionally publish authentic narratives. Self-published works also sustained the genre's growth. Like many other communities marginalized by their identities, trans writers had previously been excluded from most of the publishing industry. Tom Léger, Julie Blair, Riley Macleod, and Red Durkin founded Topside Press in 2011 to support trans publishing. Their press supported the careers of many new trans authors of the 2010s, pushed mainstream presses to support trans writers, and inspired further indie publishers of trans literature. They published Imogen Binnie's Nevada in 2013, which became a cult classic and breakthrough work of trans literature. Other writers associated with Topside included Ryka Aoki, Sybil Lamb, Casey Plett, and Kokumo.
During the late 2010s, more works of traditionally published trans literature could challenge and complicate literary ideas about trans people and writing. In 2015, Roz Kaveney published Tiny Pieces of Skull, a novel centering on a trans protagonist. Kaveney wrote the book in 1988 but could not get a publisher for years, even after other authors pushed for the book to be published. In 2016, Kai Cheng Thom subverted the tropes of the transgender memoir as a frame for her novel Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir. In 2017, C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides was one of the first academic books to examine Black trans intersectionality. Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton published Trap Door the same year, an anthology sharing art, publications, and political materials produced by trans people. In 2018, Jordy Rosenberg published Confessions of the Fox with Random House, making it one of the first books written by an out trans author and published by a mainstream publisher. Also that year, Jules Gill-Peterson published Histories of the Transgender Child, an influential academic response to contemporary opinions about trans children.
Contemporary trans literature began receiving more critical notice and acclaim in the 2020s. In 2020, Dutch-born Lucas Rijneveld, who is non-binary, won the International Booker Prize with his novel The Discomfort of Evening. Torrey Peters' 2021 Detransition, Baby achieved immense popular and critical success. More trans writers and themes have since been published across a range of genres.
Still, intersectional trans literature is a slow-growing genre. Scholar Bethany Karsten found very few Black transfeminine novelists upon a survey of the field in 2024. Novels published in the 2020s included Shola von Reinhold's LOTE, Alexandrine Ogundimu's The Longest Summer, Kuchenga Shenjé's The Library Thief, and Denne Michele Norris's When the Harvest Comes. Kuchenga Shenjé praised the nuanced intersectional transmasculine narrative within the 2020 novel The Vanishing Half, by cisgender author Brit Bennett.
In Spanish
Among the best known works trans literature in Spanish language are: Hell Has No Limits, a novel by Chilean José Donoso published in 1966 whose protagonist is Manuela, a trans woman who lives with her daughter in a deteriorated town called El Olivo; Cobra (1972), by Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, that uses an experimental narration to tell the story of a transvestite who wants to transform her body; and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), a novel by Manuel Puig in which a young revolutionary called Valentín shares a cell with Molina, who is presented as a gay man but who during their conversations implies that his identity might be of a transgender woman, as its shown in the next passage:
In recent years, many books in Spanish with transgender protagonists have garnered commercial and critical success. In Argentina, one of the most famous examples is Las malas (2019), by Camila Sosa Villada, which won the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. The novel, inspired by the youth of the author where she narrates the lives of a group of transgender prostitutes working in the city of Córdoba, became a critical and commercial sensation, with more than eight editions in Argentina alone and translations to many languages in the first year of publication.
From recent Ecuadorian literature, one example is Gabriel(a) (2019), by , a novel that won the Miguel Donoso Pareja Prize with the story of a transgender woman that falls in love with an executive and faces a discriminatory society in her attempt to become a journalist.
In children's literature According to a 2015 NPR story, hundreds of books featuring transgender characters have been published since 2000. Although a vast majority of them tend to be targeted to a teenage audience, these publications also consist of picture books for younger children.
Transgender teenage girl Jazz Jennings co-authored a 2014 children's book called I Am Jazz about her experience discovering her identity. Scholastic Books published Alex Gino's Melissa in 2015, about a transgender girl, Melissa, who everyone else knows as George. Unable to find books with transgender characters to explain her father's transition to her children, Australian author Jess Walton created the 2016 children's book Introducing Teddy with illustrator Dougal MacPherson to assist children in understanding gender fluidity. Additional books listed by The Horn Book Magazine include: Melissa (2015) by Alex Gino Red: A Crayon's Story (2015) by Michael Hall The Other Boy (2016) by M. G. Hennessey Lily and Dunkin (2016) by Donna Gephart Alex as Well (2015) by Alyssa Brugman