7 books about transmasculinity to read now (2024)

19February 2024

In the not-so-distant past, if you could get hold of a book about a trans person at all, you were generally presented with stereotypes and clichés. Stories about trans men tended to focus on teenagers coming out: the poor t-boy would face an uphill battle for acceptance, fall in love with his girl best friend, and ultimately go on testosterone or have top surgery. Roll credits. End of tape.

But like the rest of human experience, transmasculinity is variable. From twinks to bears, transmasc lesbians to ‘just some guy’, we gather under the banner of a broad church. There are few constants. And these days, if you know where to look, the literature tends to reflect that.

Unlike Pride – which depending on who you ask is for protest, partying or complaining about gay-themed sandwich packaging – LGBT History Month is a time for reflection and expanding our understanding. So what better time to get stuck into a transmasc reading list? Here are our top 7 books on transmasculinity.

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TESTOSTEROTICA BY JACKSON KING

Like comic books and pre-internet p*rn, many of the great works of trans literature never found their way through mainstream publishing houses, but were passed around in battered zines and small print run, underground novels. No doubt some of the most groundbreaking, gender-defying pieces of writing of the 20th and 21st centuries are archived under someone’s bed in Glasgow.

Today, we have Substack. Writer and professional dom Jackson King is the editor of the transmasc magazine and newsletter Irresistible Damage, and the author of Testosterotica, a self-described ‘hobby project’ of transmasc filth. A lowbrow, deeply dirty little number, Testosterotica puts Black gay and bisexual trans men front and centre. Exploring kink, intimacy, revenge sex and release, Testosterotica shows a side of the transmasc experience that’s often overlooked.

BLACK ON BOTH SIDES: A RADICAL HISTORY OF TRANS IDENTITY BY C RILEY SNORTON

A lot of the time, transness is depicted as an overwhelmingly white phenomenon. Flying in the face of historical fact, this ignores the experiences of Black trans people whose bodies are doubly policed.

Black on Both Sides underlines the intersections between blackness and transness, travelling from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation. It takes on the double discrimination Black trans people continue to face, while also highlighting the lives of Black trans historical figures like James McHarris.

STONE BUTCH BLUES BY LESLIE FEINBERG

No transmasc reading list is complete without Stone Butch Blues. A landmark piece of literature, the book follows stone butch Jess Goldberg through the latter half of the 20th century. Taking in gay bars, union organisation and evolving identities, Stone Butch Blues captures the mess of trauma and hope that marked queer and trans lives in a century of massive social change.

Leslie Feinberg identified holistically as a butch lesbian, as transgender, as female, and Stone Butch Blues describes the merging of all these categories, and the ways people can be all of them at once.

NEVER WAS BY H GARETH GAVIN

Shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize in 2024, Never Was is a formally inventive coming of age novel set partly in a Northern salt mining town and partly in a disintegrating lost landscape called Never Was. In the dreamscape, Daniel wanders off from a party and meets Fin at the edge of a cliff. A stricken cruise ship is sinking out in the trash-filled ocean and a pterodactyl circles overhead. As Daniel tells Fin everything that has led to this moment on the clifftop, the two wander through a story of grief, strange bonds, working class masculinity, and the inheritance of identity.

Part hallucination, part memory, Never Was is an otherworldly novel about the marks we carry with us and the people who leave them.

FUTURE FEELING BY JOSS LAKE

In the simplified trans narrative, things are solved with medical transition. The story stops. There’s no bitterness, no jealousy. Only a flat chest and smooth sailing. Enter Joss Lake’s Future Feeling.

In a slightly wonky timeline where the year is 20, Pen harbours a deep reservoir of resentment for transfluencer Aiden Chase. While Aiden documents his picture-perfect slide into ideal masculinity on hologram app the Gram, Pen walks dogs for cash and drops everything at a moment’s notice for his B-list celebrity hookup. When a real-life encounter with Aiden pushes Pen over the edge, he enlists the help of his witchy flatmate to hex Aiden into oblivion. But the spell misfires and instead afflicts innocent Blithe, sending him drifting into the Shadowlands between his past and future selves. Paired up by an ever-watchful trans agency called the Rhiz, Pen and Aiden are ordered to clean up their mess, and head into the wasteland to save Blithe from himself.

CAN THE MONSTER SPEAK? BY PAUL B PRECIADO

In 2019, Paul B Preciado was asked to give a talk to 3,500 psychoanalysts at their annual conference. Fully aware that to the gathered masses he is a mentally ill person suffering from the affliction of ‘gender dysphoria’, Paul took the opportunity to speak the language of psychoanalysis back to the audience, setting out the discipline’s complicity with colonialist and patriarchal ideas of sexual difference. He was heckled and booed offstage, his address unfinished. The complete lecture is exactingly set out in Can the Monster Speak?, presenting a searing critique and a radical possibility for new thought.

THE THIRTY NAMES OF NIGHT BY ZEYN JOUKHADAR

The winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction, The Thirty Names of Night is a lyrical exploration of art, grief and queer histories. Five years on from his mother’s mysterious death, a closeted Syrian American trans boy goes looking for a new name. In the process he stumbles across the journals of fellow Syrian American artist Laila Z, who spent her career painting the birds of North America. Before her death, Laila Z had an encounter with the same rare bird as the narrator’s late ornithologist mother. In following the threads that inextricably link the two women, the narrator takes the name Nadir – meaning rare – and uncovers the histories of queer and trans people within his own community.

Richly imagined, The Thirty Names of Night offers up the possibility that we are never as alone as we think we are.