[TDOV 2026] book recs

Continuing to make this an annual thing.

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March 2021, after my then-partner asked me, "I’m proofing a Transgender Day of Visibility doc for someone in [a Facebook group]. Do you have particular kid or adult books you’d recommend? (And how is it that I don’t actually have any?)" I pulled a bunch of book recs and made a post. I've continued to make a list each year, which you can check out on the trans tag.

I included the publication year (and publisher), since I know queer lit can often feel dated as Discourse, language, etc. changes. I also tried to flag the identities of the authors as far as I knew, since I want to mainly center trans voices.

I read a few trans/non-binary picturebooks last May/June, but still haven't found anything I would recommend the last couple of years, which is a bummer -- and I hope not indicative of trends (though it probably is; librarian Betsy Bird talks some specifically about Black kidlit authors in the preface to her Newbery/Caldecott predictions here).

I spent a chunk of the summer/fall of 2025 needing stuff to distract myself from Big Feelings, so I read a bunch of stuff that had been on my TBR/floating around -- largely thanks to Bethany (The Transfeminine Review, who I follow on Bluesky). Though apparently this is still a pretty short rec list.

Speaking of Bethany, in November 2025 she posted her new updated Trans-Fem "Start Here" Rec List. As with the one she posted in 2024 when she launched her website, it wouldn't be my list, but I respect the comprehensiveness.

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young adult

One of the Boys by Victoria Zeller (2025, Levine Querido) -- author is a trans woman

I have commented that I feel like this and Woodworking (discussed below) are part of a Trans 201 era.

We meet Grace after she has already started social and medical transition (we meet her at the end of the summer, and she came out at the end of the previous school year -- so a few months ago). People are generally supportive. She's not the first or the only trans person at her school. She still experiences transphobia -- mostly subtler, but also sometimes overt -- but it's not the primary thing she (or the book) is dealing with.

She was the kicker on the high school (American) football team and quit as part of her coming out -- but as we start the fall of her senior year, she's asked to help train the new kicker and is faced with the question of rejoining the team. Obviously her being trans is a big part of her journey navigating this question, but it's not just about being trans -- and in so far as it is, it feels like more of a 201 conversation about trans stuff.

She talks about ways her life might have been different if she had come out sooner -- in ways that feel to me a lot more nuanced than most of the glancing "if only"s that we get in many trans narratives for cis people.

There's a lot of football in the book, but I (who am not a sports) didn't feel like it detracted from my ability to follow/enjoy the book.

adult

[fiction] Woodworking by Emily St. James (2025, Crooked Media Reads) -- author is a trans woman

Our primary protagonist is a middle-aged trans woman just starting to come out (including to herself). I like what the author does to avoid ever indicating her old name -- it's literally grey-redacted, with the text explaining, "Since she had chosen the name Erica for herself on a baby-name website, Erica's old name had come to sound like it was enveloped in fog."

There's a teenage trans girl, Abigail, who knows a lot more about being trans than Erica does, but is still very much a teenager. She's our primary co-protagonist.

The book takes its title from an old trans community term. Abigail explains, "Back then, in the 1980s or whatever, they called it 'woodworking,' beacuse you disappear into the woodwork." Abigail learned about this from a Reddit post (of course) in which an older trans woman posts a Warning, saying, "It destroys you. You can't pretend you're not who you are." Abigail, however, would very much like to woodwork -- to be able to disappear from her current life and start over somewhere where being trans isn't the first thing people know about her. (The book is set in a small town in South Dakota shortly before the 2016 election, and Abigail is the only out trans person in the entire town.)

That question of how you navigate disclosure runs throughout the book, but it's not the only question of the book. And while Erica is definitely coming out -- both to herself and publicly -- the book is much more than Her Coming Out Story. Multiple characters are wrestling with various elements of trans life, and there's also largely-unrelated stuff like a local election going on.

[memoir] The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation by Raquel Willis (2023, St. Martin's Press) -- author is a Black trans woman from Georgia (the U.S. South, not the African country)

I ended up reading a bunch of memoirs in Q2 2025, though I wasn't blown away by a lot of them, but this one goes on my rec list.

[romance novel, historical fiction] A Shore Thing by Joanna Lowell (2024, Berkley)

Author is a cis queer woman, though in the author's note at the beginning of the book she says, in part, "As a cis-queer historical romance writer with a transmasculine partner, I have found myself wanting to read a story like mine set in the past. I wrote A Shore Thing in consultation with my partner, a gender and sexuality historian. The representations of queerness and trans identity came out of our lived experience, and our conversations with each other, and with our friends, as well as archival research."

My feeling is that we're much more in the head of the cis woman protagonist (Muriel) than the trans man protagonist (Kit) -- which I think is probably appropriate, given the author. But we get a lot about Kit's history and present -- in women's/sapphic spaces (including women's art spaces) and how his transition to male complicates that, his discomfort in cis male spaces, etc.

But this book isn't just about Kit's gender/sexuality, or just about the romance; there's also stuff about bicycles and botany (though less botany than one might expect from the beginning), the cis woman love interest has a complicated relationship with sexuality/relationships and some personal trauma... It's not a book that's "about" trans-ness, but we do get a bunch of period-appropriate discussion about what we would now call trans-ness -- thanks to Muriel's doctor friend who is what we would now call gay and who in addition to his lived experience in that community (including cross-dressing balls), also has exposure to the idea of female husbands, the writings of the German sexologists, etc. (The book is set in the Victorian UK, mostly in Cornwall.)

[memoir] Horse Barbie: A Memoir by Geena Rocero (2023, The Dial Press) -- author is a Filipina American trans woman

Geena was a trans pageant queen as an adolescent in the Philippines. Some of what I found most interesting from this book was the stuff about Filipino culture re: trans people.

Geena has a largely charmed life -- both in the Philippines and after she immigrates to the USA -- and the narrative perhaps intentionally elides some of the rougher patches. There is definitely struggle in the narrative, but it's overall a story of joy and triumph. I don't think the book particularly suggests that if you just have her level of drive then you, too, can will yourself into incredible success, but I want to caveat it for anyone who's sensitive to that. (At book club, people talked about how her hustle was only possible during a particular moment -- around the turn of the twenty-first century.)