* NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A 2025 STONEWALL BOOK AWARD HONOREE *

From an award-winning journalist comes a vivid and moving portrait of eight trans and nonbinary teenagers across the country, following their daily triumphs, struggles, and all that encompasses growing up trans in America today

A master class in journalism as a force for change.
--SAMANTHA ALLEN, author of Real Queer America

With humor and compassion, Lang shows trans teenagers as they really are: kids trying their best.
--MAIA KOBABE, author of Gender Queer: A Memoir

Lang proves how rich the discourse is when trans youth take their rightful place at the center of their narratives.
--RAQUEL WILLIS, activist, and author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom: On Life and Liberation

An incredibly important, humane account.
--GARRARD CONLEY, New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased: A Memoir

Media coverage tends to sensationalize the fight over how trans kids should be allowed to live, but what is incredibly rare are the voices of the people at the heart of this debate: transgender and gender nonconforming kids themselves.

For their groundbreaking new book, journalist Nico Lang spent a year traveling the country to document the lives of transgender, nonbinary, and genderfluid teens and their families. Drawing on hundreds of hours of on-the-ground interviews with them and the people in their communities, American Teenager paints a vivid portrait of what it's actually like to grow up trans today.

From the tip of Florida's conservative panhandle to vibrant queer communities in California, and from Texas churches to mosques in Illinois, American Teenager gives readers a window into the lives of Wyatt, Rhydian, Mykah, Clint, Ruby, Augie, Jack, and Kylie, eight teens who, despite what some lawmakers might want us to believe, are truly just kids looking for a brighter future.

With heartfelt empathy, Nico Lang uncovers the human stories overshadowed by political rhetoric, showcasing the struggles and resilience of transgender youth amidst adversity while simultaneously amplifying their voices, which are all too often silenced.
--JAZZ JENNINGS, author of Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen and I Am Jazz

An urgently necessary book. By allowing trans teens to tell their stories themselves, Lang has given them--and by extension, all of us--a great gift.
--HUGH RYAN, award-winning author of When Brooklyn Was Queer

Lang weaves this broad bleak terrain with warm insights and a clear immediacy of message. Expansive and compassionate.
―GABE DUNN, New York Times bestselling author of I Hate Everyone But You

Lang's excellent reporting reminds us all of our shared humanity.
--BRIAN K. BOND, CEO, PFLAG National

An absolute must-read. An evocative and authentic story that is intimate and illuminating.
--RODRIGO HENG-LEHTINEN, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equity

Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives.

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam chronicles expressions of trans experience that are often left out of the historical record. Drawing on their own experience of transition and gender nonbinarism, Heyam reveals that what constitutes a man, a woman, or gender itself has continually been defined, contested, and redefined.

A groundbreaking, radically inclusive trans history, Before We Were Trans reflects the richness of modern trans reality more closely than any previously written--and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.

Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

The most comprehensive history of transgender medicine to date, as told by more than forty scholars, physicians, psychologists, and activists from trans, gender-diverse, and allied medical communities.

Arriving at a critical moment in the struggle for transgender rights, A History of Transgender Medicine in the United States takes an empathic approach to an embattled subject. Sweeping in scope and deeply personal in nature, this groundbreaking volume traces the development of transgender medicine across three centuries-centering the voices of transgender individuals, debunking myths about gender-affirming care, and empowering readers to grasp the complexities of this evolving field. More than forty contributors-including patients, advocates, physicians, psychologists, and scholars-weave an illuminating, sometimes surprising narrative of collaboration and conflict between trans people and the scientists who have studied and worked with them. An indispensable guide to understanding the current tumult surrounding trans health-care access in the United States, the volume underscores a crucial message: gender diversity is not a new phenomenon but an integral part of our shared human history.

When Harry Became Sally provides thoughtful answers to questions arising from our transgender moment. Drawing on the best insights from biology, psychology, and philosophy, Ryan Anderson offers a nuanced view of human embodiment, a balanced approach to public policy on gender identity, and a sober assessment of the human costs of getting human nature wrong.

This book exposes the contrast between the media's sunny depiction of gender fluidity and the often sad reality of living with gender dysphoria. It gives a voice to people who tried to transition by changing their bodies, and found themselves no better off. Especially troubling are the stories told by adults who were encouraged to transition as children but later regretted subjecting themselves to those drastic procedures.

As Anderson shows, the most beneficial therapies focus on helping people accept themselves and live in harmony with their bodies. This understanding is vital for parents with children in schools where counselors may steer a child toward transitioning behind their backs.

Everyone has something at stake in the controversies over transgender ideology, when misguided antidiscrimination policies allow biological men into women's restrooms and penalize Americans who hold to the truth about human nature. Anderson offers a strategy for pushing back with principle and prudence, compassion and grace.

A beautifully written and argued book. - Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

There is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one frighteningly basic question seems never to be answered: why does it happen? If men are not inherently evil and trans women do not intrinsically invite reprisal--which would make violence unstoppable--then the psychology of that violence had to arise at a certain place and time. The trans panic had to be invented.

Award-winning historian Jules Gill-Peterson takes us from the bustling port cities of New York and New Orleans to the streets of London and Paris in search of the emergence of modern trans misogyny. She connects the colonial and military districts of the British Raj, the Philippines, and Hawai'i to the lively travesti communities of Latin America, where state violence has stamped a trans label on vastly different ways of life. Weaving together the stories of historical figures in a richly detailed narrative, the book shows how trans femininity emerged under colonial governments, the sex work industry, the policing of urban public spaces, and the area between the formal and informal economy.

A Short History of Trans Misogyny is the first book to explain why trans women are burdened by such a weight of injustice and hatred.

GENDER EUPHORIA: a powerful feeling of happiness experienced as a result of moving away from one's birth-assigned gender. So often the stories shared by trans people about their transition center on gender dysphoria: a feeling of deep discomfort with their birth-assigned gender, and a powerful catalyst for coming out or transitioning. But for many non-cisgender people, it's gender euphoria that pushes forward their transition: the joy the first time a parent calls them by their new chosen name, the first time they have the confidence to cut their hair short, the first time they truly embrace themself.

In this groundbreaking anthology, nineteen trans, non-binary, agender, gender-fluid, and intersex writers share their experiences of gender euphoria: an agender dominatrix being called Daddy, an Arab trans man getting his first tattoos, a trans woman embracing her inner fighter. What they have in common are their feelings of elation, pride, confidence, freedom and ecstasy as a direct result of coming out as non-cisgender, and how coming to terms with their gender has brought unimaginable joy into their lives.

Am I Trans Enough? The answer is undoubtably yes. You are.

Alo Johnston has been where you are. From watching every transition story on YouTube and navigating online message boards for answers to finally starting testosterone and transitioning himself, he now walks alongside you every step of the way to guide you towards acceptance of who you truly are.

Born out of thousands of hours of research and conversations with hundreds of trans people, Am I Trans Enough? digs deep into internalized transphobia and the historical narratives that fuel it. It unveils what happens after you come out, or begin questioning living as a trans person, in a world that works against you.

Use this book as a space to engage with your fears and explore your doubts without the pressure of needing to be a perfect trans representative. If you are just beginning your trans journey, are twenty years into transition or have no idea if you are even trans at all, this book will help you to become your most authentic self.

Surviving the Future is a collection of the most current ideas in radical queer movement work and revolutionary queer theory. Beset by a new pandemic, fanning the flames of global uprising, these queers cast off progressive narratives of liberal hope while building mutual networks of rebellion and care. These essays propose a militant strategy of queer survival in an ever precarious future. Starting from a position of abolition--of prisons, police, the State, identity, and racist cisheteronormative society--this collection refuses the bribes of inclusion in a system built on our expendability. Though the mainstream media saturates us with the boring norms of queer representation (with a recent focus on trans visibility), the writers in this book ditch false hope to imagine collective visions of liberation that tell different stories, build alternate worlds, and refuse the legacies of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism. The work curated in this book spans Black queer life in the time of COVID-19 and uprising, assimilation and pinkwashing settler colonial projects, subversive and deviant forms of representation, building anarchist trans/queer infrastructures, and more. Contributors include Che Gossett, Yasmin Nair, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Adrian Shanker, Kitty Stryker, Toshio Meronek, and more.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times'--Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

'Astute and hopeful ... Offering up an abolitionist transfeminist love-politics as a practical antidote to the suffocating neoliberal world order, the book is a breath of fresh air'--H.L.T. Quan, author of Become Ungovernable

'What we need at this moment is a powerful, steadfast commitment to liberation. And this book is it'--Marquis Bey, author of Black Trans Feminism

'Beautiful and necessary'--Trish Salah

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging, and harm, this book offers transfeminist contributions to movements for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionize our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives rather than institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

Nat Raha is a poet and lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. She contributed to the collection Transgender Marxism. She has authored four books of poetry numerous journal articles, and her writing has been translated into eight languages. Mijke van der Drift is a tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. Mijke's work on ethics has appeared in various formats in journals, performances, and sound pieces. Together, Nat and Mijke co-edit Radical Transfeminism zine.

How the bad feelings of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing

Some days--or weeks, or months, or even years--being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening.

In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the wrong body. Posttransition, trans individuals--especially trans people of color--are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair.

By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing--and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.

To be trans and disabled means to have experienced harassment, discrimination, loneliness, often poverty, to have struggled with feeling unworthy of love.

To be trans and disabled means experiencing ableism within our trans communities and transphobia within our disabled communities.

To be trans and disabled means to love our fellow trans and disabled people harder than we could ever love ourselves.

This anthology brings together vulnerable stories, poems, plays, drawings, and personal essays. They explore how we make sense of ourselves, our intersections of identities and experiences, of how we are treated, and how much love we are capable of, sometimes even for ourselves.

Today's narratives about trans people tend to feature individuals with stable gender identities that fit neatly into the categories of male or female. Those stories, while important, fail to account for the complex realities of many trans people's lives.

Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Before We Were Trans transports us from Renaissance Venice to seventeenth-century Angola, from Edo Japan to early America, and looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures. 

'A must-read!' FINLAY GAMES

This essential survival guide gives autistic trans and/or non-binary adults all the tools and strategies they need to live as their very best self.

Blending personal accounts with evidence-based insights and up-to-date information, and written from a perspective of empowerment and self-acceptance, the book promotes pride, strength and authenticity, covering topics including self-advocacy, mental health and camouflaging and masking as well as key moments in life such as coming out or transitioning socially and/or physically.

Written by two leading autistic trans activists, this book honestly charts what life is like as an autistic trans person and is vital, life-affirming reading.