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.

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."

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).

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!

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.

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.