THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER and a Times, Spectator and Observer Book of the Year 2021 ‘In the first decade of this century, it was unthinkable that a gender-critical book could even be published by a prominent publishing house, let alone become a bestseller.’ Louise Perry, New Statesman ‘Thank goodness for Helen Joyce.’ Christina Patterson, Sunday Times ‘Reasonable, methodical, sane, and utterly unintimidated by extremist orthodoxy, Trans is a riveting read.’ Lionel Shriver ‘A tour de force.’ Evening Standard Biological sex is no longer accepted as a basic fact of life. It is forbidden to admit that female people sometimes need protection and privacy from male ones. In an analysis that is at once expert, sympathetic and urgent, Helen Joyce offers an antidote to the chaos and cancelling.

A groundbreaking global history of gender nonconformity Today’s narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people’s lives. Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

Goes beyond transgender to question the need for gender classification. Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters. He examines four areas where we need to re-think our sex-classification systems: sex-marked identity documents such as birth certificates, driver’s licenses and passports; sex-segregated public restrooms; single-sex colleges; and sex-segregated sports. Speaking from his own experience and drawing upon major cases of sex discrimination in the news and in the courts, Davis presents a persuasive case for challenging how individuals are classified according to sex and offers concrete recommendations for alleviating sex identity discrimination and sex-based disadvantage. For anyone in search of pragmatic ways to make our world more inclusive, Davis’ recommendations provide much-needed practical guidance about how to work through this complex issue. A provocative call to action, Beyond Trans pushes us to think how we can work to make America truly inclusive of all people.

What does it mean for someone to be ‘trans’? What are the implications of this for healthcare provision? Drawing on the findings of an extensive research project, this book addresses urgent challenges and debates in trans health. It interweaves patient voices with social theory and autobiography, offering an innovative look at how shifting language, patient mistrust, waiting lists and professional power shape clinical encounters, and exploring what a better future might look like for trans patients.

How the transgender experience opens up new possibilities for thinking about gender and race In the summer of 2015, shortly after Caitlyn Jenner came out as transgender, the NAACP official and political activist Rachel Dolezal was "outed" by her parents as white, touching off a heated debate in the media about the fluidity of gender and race. If Jenner could legitimately identify as a woman, could Dolezal legitimately identify as black? Taking the controversial pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” as his starting point, Rogers Brubaker shows how gender and race, long understood as stable, inborn, and unambiguous, have in the past few decades opened up—in different ways and to different degrees—to the forces of change and choice. Transgender identities have moved from the margins to the mainstream with dizzying speed, and ethnoracial boundaries have blurred. Paradoxically, while sex has a much deeper biological basis than race, choosing or changing one's sex or gender is more widely accepted than choosing or changing one’s race. Yet while few accepted Dolezal’s claim to be black, racial identities are becoming more fluid as ancestry—increasingly understood as mixed—loses its authority over identity, and as race and ethnicity, like gender, come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have. By rethinking race and ethnicity through the multifaceted lens of the transgender experience—encompassing not just a movement from one category to another but positions between and beyond existing categories—Brubaker underscores the malleability, contingency, and arbitrariness of racial categories. At a critical time when gender and race are being reimagined and reconstructed, Trans explores fruitful new paths for thinking about identity.

There are trans people here in the past, the present, and the future. H. Melt’s writing centers the deep care, love, and joy within trans communities. This poetry collection describes moments of resistance in queer and trans history as catalysts for movements today. It honors trans ancestors and contemporary activists, artists, and writers fighting for trans liberation. There Are Trans People Here is a testament to the healing power of community and the beauty of trans people, history, and culture.

WINNER of 2017 AERA DIVISION J OUTSTANDING PUBLICATION AWARDCHOICE 2017 Outstanding Academic TitleThis is both a personal book that offers an account of the author’s own trans* identity and a deeply engaged study of trans* collegians that reveals the complexities of trans* identities, and how these students navigate the trans* oppression present throughout society and their institutions, create community and resilience, and establish meaning and control in a world that assumes binary genders. This book is addressed as much to trans* students themselves – offering them a frame to understand the genders that mark them as different and to address the feelings brought on by the weight of that difference – as it is to faculty, student affairs professionals, and college administrators, opening up the implications for the classroom and the wider campus.This book not only remedies the paucity of literature on trans* college students, but does so from a perspective of resiliency and agency. Rather than situating trans* students as problems requiring accommodation, this book problematizes the college environment and frames trans* students as resilient individuals capable of participating in supportive communities and kinship networks, and of developing strategies to promote their own success. Z Nicolazzo provides the reader with a nuanced and illuminating review of the literature on gender and sexuality that sheds light on the multiplicity of potential expressions and outward representations of trans* identity as a prelude to the ethnography ze conducted with nine trans* collegians that richly documents their interactions with, and responses to, environments ranging from the unwittingly offensive to explicitly antagonistic.The book concludes by giving space to the study’s participants to themselves share what they want college faculty, staff, and students to know about their lived experiences. Two appendices respectively provide a glossary of vocabulary and terms to address commonly asked questions, and a description of the study design, offered as guide for others considering working alongside marginalized population in a manner that foregrounds ethics, care, and reciprocity.