Jessica's Transgender Library

Some interesting works of fiction involving characters who change their gender include:

• Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" about a long-lived person who starts out as an Elizabethan nobleman and ends up as a modern (well, 1928) woman. This one is Literature.

• Alan Friedman's 1974 "Hermaphrodeity" (yep, I've been reading about/ avoiding acting upon this for over 35 years) about the complicated life of a hermaphroditic Harvard student/anthropologist/activist, with lots of interesting history of sex and Cambridge scenery woven into it.

• John Varley's science fiction short stories and novels starting with the 1976 short story "Picnic on Nearside" about a future where people change back and forth between genders. I read that story when it first came out and thought, "Wow! That's the future where I want to live!" The short stories have been collected in "The John Varley Reader." "Steel Beach" is a novel in the series which deals at length with a lot of gender change issues.

• Edward Swift's 1978 novel "Splendora" is about a person who has left a small town as a man and returned as a woman (in stealth mode) to be the town's librarian. It's an interesting novel of small town characters with some interesting gender-related twists.

• Chris Bohjalian's 2000 novel "Trans-sister Radio" takes place in Vermont and does a pretty good job of laying out the complications which ensue when someone in a social network changes their gender. This is a good entry book for people without much experience of people changing their gender.

• Joanne Herman's "Transgender Explained For Those Who Are Not" is a good starting place in print. I bought several copies to loan to friends.

• The first transexual autobiography I read was Canary Conn's 1974 "Canary," which I re-read several times. It came out in paperback in 1977 after my first wife moved out, at a time when, looking back, I maybe should have transitioned.

  And then there is a 25-year gap living as a person who was referred to in my presence by some of my best friends as one of the least self-aware people they knew...

• Dierdre McCloskey's 2000 "Crossing," is an interesting story by a well-known economist of her transition at the University of Chicago. It is written in a somewhat strange style, with maybe a few too many details of the changes in her life, though I can identify with some of them.

• Jenny Boylan's "She's Not There" came out in the fall of 2003 between my first and second gender therapy appointments and simultaneously scared me and reassured me that I was not alone. Jenny, a professor at Colby College in Maine and rock musician, has been a role model for me as she transitioned within her existing life the way I am, instead of starting fresh, which has in the past been what people did when they transitioned. Her second memoir, "Im Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted", came out in 2008 and conveys more awareness of her social and family context.

• Helen Boyd's 2003 book "My Husband Betty" helped keep my marriage intact for a while. Her second book in 2007, "She's Not the Man I Married" hit pretty close to home as my spouse and I drifted apart.

• "Crossing Sexual Boundaries," published in 2005 and edited by Ari Kane-DeMaios and Vern Bullough, collects brief autobiographies which show both the range and similarity of the transgender experience.

• Alice Novic's 2005 "Alice in Genderland" was the first TG book I read after I met its author. Parts of her life were very close to mine and parts quite different. She's definitely not a model of who I want to be, but her life is interesting.

-Jessica Mink