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#transbooks

1 post1 participant0 posts today
Hari
Public

This week is the release of TJ Alexander’s extremely fun new trans regency romance A Gentleman’s Gentleman (The Earl Meets his Match in the UK) which I just really enjoyed reading. I was so pleased to be hired to draw the characters for this art they used on promotional postcards ✨ Dream job tbh, and really rec if you want an upbeat queer romance read to bolster you through grim times #bookrecs #books #transbooks

Jaelyn 🏳️‍🌈
Public

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart (Izzy Wasserstein) – This is a cyberpunk noir novella about a trans woman who returns to her anarchist commune in the decaying remnants of Kansas City. Dora is as unwelcome as her parting shots were when she stormed out years ago, but now she's the only one who can solve the murder of her ex. Caught between two warring pharmaceutical companies, Dora faces shadows of her past.

I thought this was a lot of fun and really had a good noir vibe to Dora's perspective. Given it's quite short, I think there was an opportunity to add a little more to make her a little more well-rounded, flesh out the supporting characters a bit and add more dynamics to the commune (as much as I feel this with every novella, I'm starting to like the simplicity that comes with brevity). I did nevertheless enjoy it and it was paced well for its length. Avoiding spoilers here, but I also liked the trans take on a particular old sci-fi trope and how it played into a good discussion about the nature of identity. 

Jaelyn 🏳️‍🌈
Public

Bad Girls (Camila Sosa Villada) – In a park in Córdoba, Argentina, a group of travesti sex workers under the leadership of 178-year-old Auntie Encara, discovers an abandoned child left amongst the bushes. The group of travesti begin to care for the child together, offering a reprieve from their lives of violent customers, transphobic cops, poverty and AIDS. Woven into their tales of friendship, romance and squabbles are fantastical elements such as a mute girl’s transformation into a bird, a girl who is a werewolf, and the headless men fleeing the wars in the east.

This is a very moving and painful portrait of trans community for better and worse. It’s quite bleak in many ways with how much trans sex workers are dehumanised; but there is a thread of togetherness and solidarity between the characters even when they are at odds.

Jaelyn 🏳️‍🌈
Public

He Who Drowned the World (Shelley Parker-Chan) – The sequel to She Who Became The Sun continues the saga of Zhu Yuanzhang, the peasant girl turned monk turned king who now marches on the throne to become emperor. Surrounded by enemies, Zhu gambles on an alliance with the eunuch general Ouyang (who happens to hate Zhu’s guts and cut off her hand) and help him to avenge his father’s killer.

It’s certainly a worthy sequel to this blend of real history and transmasc Mulan and the fraught relationship between Zhu and Ouyang takes centre stage for me. Zhu as always brings intelligence and brash confidence to every confrontation while in the background the court politics of the Great Khan begin to overtake events.

Jaelyn 🏳️‍🌈
Public

Who's Afraid of Gender? (Judith Butler) – Butler does a great job here mapping out and dissecting the global networks of transphobia and its intersection with broader far-right and patriarchal systems. She slowly dismantles transphobic talking points through a feminist lens and looks at how the phantasm operates globally to serve the interests of anti-abortion groups, racists and authoritarian governments.