
Book Club
The Shed has its own book club and we'd love you to come along! What you'll get:
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a super friendly and lovely group
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a space to share and explore deeper meanings, ideas & reflections on your gender journey
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exploring trans/non-binary culture and books with mates
Members decide the books and we link to free online readings and library holdings,
so it’s super accessible and cheap!
Everyone is really friendly and you don’t have to read the whole book to join in.
It’s a great chance to meet new people and explore our gender journeys together.
We meet on the 2nd Saturday of the month from 1-2:30pm. Details are shared via Facebook or our mailing list.
Accessibility information:
The venue is wheelchair accessible, and has two gendered and one ungendered bathroom in a discrete location. There is access to a kitchenette. If there's anything we can do to make participation in book club more accessible for you, please contact us.
Other local queer book clubs
Here are some other local queer book clubs you might like to check out:
Second Saturday Book Club
An umbrella-queer (LGBTQIA+) book club open to all, with focuses on different and varied queer experiences each reading
Second Saturday of every month, 11am–12.30pm
Lesbian Literature Book Club (not just for lesbians, new name pending)
Last Saturday of each month, 11am–1pm
Melbourne Gay Men's Book Club
Has a focus on gay males, or men who have sex with men
Third Saturday of each month, 11am–12.30pm
Maribyrnong Queer book group
Fourth Saturday of each month, 11am-12pm
West Footscray Library, 539 Barkly St, West Footscray
Previous book club books

We both laughed
in pleasure
- Lou Sullivan
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, was published in 2019. Sullivan was a community advocate, activist and writer, who lived in San Francisco. He founded FTM International, co-founded the GLBT Historical Society and was crucial to educating the medical community that it is most definitely possible to be a trans and gay man.

Detransition Baby
- Torrey Peters
From the New Yorker:
"At the beginning of Detransition, Baby, Reese receives a phone call from her ex, Ames, who has an unusual proposition for her. Their history is that Ames once lived as a trans woman, went by Amy, and lived with Reese in an apartment by Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, where they planned to raise a child. But their budding domestic life dissolved before they got that far, when Ames began to detransition—not because he had erred in his decision to exist openly as a woman, but because it was too difficult to do so."

Stone Butch Blues
- Leslie Feinberg
Though a novel, the narrative draws on Feinberg’s life and experiences coming of age in the 1960s, joining the union movement and getting involved in Marxist and anti-racist organising. It was published in 1993, one year after Transgender Liberation*, the pamphlet that trans historian Susan Stryker credits with articulating and popularising the term transgender as a flexible and coalition-building term for those outside the norms of binary gender (“De(Subjugated) Knowledges”, 2006).

Soft Borders,
Hard Edges
- Anthology
Our book club session welcomed editors, Sam Ardoa & Yves Rees plus authors Richo Richardson & Tiarn Edwards, to chat about their new Bent St. anthology of trans and gender diverse writers, Soft Borders, Hard Edges. The collection features poetry, images, comic strips, photography and prose from local and interstate authors.
It is a real celebration of our community!

As Beautiful
As Any Other
- Kaya Wilson
Kaya Wilson’s new autobiography takes its jump off point from the surfing accident that he had in spring 2016. On a break from work – Kaya is a tsunami scientist – he takes to the surf, jumps off a wave and ploughs head first into a sand bank, breaking his neck. Reflections on this traumatic event frame the inquiry into his gender as he learns to listen to his body differently. When Kaya shares his gender identity with family, he discovers a history of queerness and trauma that will become part of his own narrative.

Amateur
- Thomas Page McBee
In 2015 Thomas Page McBee enters amateur boxing with the goal of training for a charity fight in Madison Square Garden. He will be the first trans man to do so. Amateur is that story.
McBee weaves together the story of his gendering with a meditation on how a culture of violence shapes masculinity. He marks his own ambivalence around being a man in this way: “I like being a man but not what men often represent”. The title of the book flags his self-consciousness around learning the codes of his new embodiment. In the world of amateur boxing, he navigates a belonging articulated by the rule of the strongest and toughest.