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Celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility with these books
March 31 is Transgender Day of Visibility, which is a day dedicated to recognising the achievements and experiences of transgender and nonbinary people. Today, the Bracebridge Library celebrates the work of ten authors whose gender identities fall under the trans umbrella, who write everything from picture books to serious nonfiction.
The books selected by Bracebridge Library staff are available to borrow from the library. You can find more trans and nonbinary reads by visiting Beanstack.
Me and My Dysphoria Monster
Laura Kate Dale
Nisha’s monster follows her everywhere. It used to be small, but recently her monster has begun to grow. And as her monster gets bigger and bigger, Nisha feels more and more unlike herself.
When people refer to her as a boy, or when she tries to hide her true gender identity, Nisha’s dysphoria monster grows larger and larger. Until, one day, Nisha meets Jack–a trans man – who shows Nisha how she can shrink her dysphoria monster back down to size.
This touching story is the perfect book for discussing gender dysphoria with children, explaining what it is and how they and their families can deal with it. It also includes an accompanying guide for parents with further information about gender dysphoria, terminology, and first-hand examples of the author’s own experiences.
Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor
Xiran Jay Zhou
After his augmented reality gaming headset is possessed by the spirit of the First Emperor of China, twelve-year-old Chinese American Zack Ying is compelled to travel across China to steal an ancient artifact, fight figures from Chinese history and myth, and seal a portal to prevent malicious spirits from destroying the human realm.
The Sunbearer Trials
Aiden Thomas
Transgender demigod Teo is unexpectedly selected for the Sunbearer Trials, a fierce competition among demigod heroes where the winner sacrifices the loser to Sol, their blood fueling the Sun Stones that protect Reino del Sol.
When the Angels Left the Old Country
Sacha Lamb
Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn’t have a name other than Shtetl).
The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young people, Essie, goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America.
But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they’ve left behind.
Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, poverty. The streets are far from paved with gold.
Gender Queer: A Memoir
Maia Kobabe
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em.
‘Now, Gender Queer is here.
Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.
Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity – what it means and how to think about it – for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.
When We Were Sisters
Fatimah Asghar
In this heartrending debut, Fatimah Asghar traces the intense bond of three orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another.
The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of her parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her “crybaby” younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms. As Kausar grows up, she must contend with the collision of her private and public worlds and choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow, and codependency she’s known or carve out a new path for herself.
When We Were Sisters tenderly examines the bonds and fractures of sisterhood, names the perils of being three Muslim American girls alone against the world, and ultimately illustrates how those who’ve lost everything might still make homes in each other
Something Wild & Wonderful
Anita Kelly
When Alexei Lebedev finally comes out to his conservative community, it does not go well. That’s how he ended up on the rugged Pacific Crest Trail, hoping he can figure out a new life plan in the thousands of miles it’ll take to walk the famed hike.
He’s prepared for rattlesnakes, blisters, and months of solitude. What he’s not prepared for is the ray of sunshine named Ben Caravalho. Charismatic and outgoing, Ben’s personality and infectious laughter is a stark opposite to Alexei’s quiet, reserved demeanor. But no matter how determined Alexei is to hike the trail alone, it seems he and Ben can’t avoid being drawn to each other. Through snow crossings and close calls with coyotes, Alexei inches closer to letting Ben in.
As Alexei learns of Ben’s loving family and supportive friends, he begins to get a taste of what found family and belonging could truly feel like. But just as Alexei starts to let down his defenses, a sudden change in plans reawakens his fears-and he must discover if he has the courage to face something even scarier than the trail less traveled: letting himself fall in love.
The Cure for Drowning
Loghan Paylor
Born Kathleen to an immigrant Irish farming family in southern Ontario, Kit McNair has been a troublesome changeling since, at ten, they fell through the river ice and drowned – only to be nursed back to life by their mother’s Celtic magic.
A daredevil in boy’s clothes, Kit chafes at every aspect of a farmgirl’s life, driving that same mother to distraction with worry about where Kit will ever fit in. When Rebekah Kromer, an elegant German Canadian doctor’s daughter, moves to town with her parents in April 1939, Rebekah has no doubt as to who 19-year-old Kit is. Soon she and Kit, and Kit’s older brother, Landon, are drawn tight in a love triangle that will tear them and their families apart and send each of them off on a separate path to war. Landon signs up for the Navy.
Kit, now known as Christopher, joins the Royal Air Force, becoming a bomber navigator relied on for his luck and courage. Rebekah serves with naval intelligence in Halifax, until one more collision with Landon changes the course of her life and draws her back to the McNair farm–a place where she’d once known love. Fallen on even harder times, the McNairs welcome all the help she is able to give, and she believes she has found peace at last. Until, with the war over, Kit and Landon return home.
Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls
Kai Cheng Thom
A transformative collection of intimate and lyrical love letters that offer a path toward compassion, forgiveness, and self-acceptance. What happens when we imagine loving the people – and the parts of ourselves – that we do not believe are worthy of love?
Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, counselor, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she’s always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred.
But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the violence with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and dreams she’d built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing. Rather than succumb to despair and cynicism, she gathered all her rage and grief and took one last leap of faith: she wrote. She wrote letters that were prayers, or maybe poems, or perhaps magic spells. She wrote to the outcasts and runaways she calls her kin. She wrote to flawed but nonetheless lovable men, to people with good intentions who harm their own, to racists and transphobes seemingly beyond saving.
What emerged was a blueprint for falling back in love with being human.
The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
Masha Gessen
The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.
Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen’s understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own–as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.
Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today’s terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.