8 Books to Read Highlighting Gender Identity, Diversity and Coming of Age

In November, Transgender Awareness Month is observed and we are looking back at a few titles from transgender and nonbinary authors, the history of gender identity, as well as stories featuring unforgettable gender-bending characters that captured readers you can read at any point of the year.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“In these irreverent pages, a shapeshifter gets a crash course in gender and sexuality by inhabiting both sides of the binary and arriving precisely somewhere in the middle.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

 

 

Boys Weekend 

From the award-winning cartoonist and editor at The Nib, a hilarious trans-“final girl” horror graphic novel about a bachelor party gone wrong.

 

 

 

 

The Riddle of Gender
“Sympathetic and well-researched. . . . Lively enough to be a good introduction for the educated lay reader and documented enough for the scholar.” –Publishers Weekly

Informed by meticulous research, and the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, The Riddle of Gender is a thoughtful and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.

Read an Excerpt | Buy the book 

 

 

 

 

Orlando
A Contemporary Classics Everyman’s Library hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman.

With its blend of fantastical adventure and satirical wit, Orlando was an immediate popular and critical success, one whose status as a classic has only grown with time.

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Comedies, Volume 2
Shakespeare’s later comedies were written at the astonishing pace of about two plays a year. In them, he moves beyond the farce of his earlier comedies to richer and more varied dramas.

 

 

 

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“[This] might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime.” —The New York Times Book Review

 

 

Fit for the Gods

An anthology of gender-bent, queered, race-bent, and inclusive retellings from the enchanting and eternally popular world of Greek myth.

 

Gender Outlaw 
“I know I’m not a man … and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably not a woman, either…. The trouble is, we’re living in a world that insists we be one or the other.” With these words, Kate Bornstein ushers readers across the terrains of gender and identity.

Gender Outlaw was decades ahead of its time when it was first published in 1994. Now, some twenty-odd years later, this book stands as both a classic and a still-revolutionary work.

Read an Excerpt | Buy the book