Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to…
Starting in the 1990’s, feminist and queer scholars frequently cited Woolf’s Orlando as an example of the potential of modernist experimentation to open up a space for the elliptical articulation of fluid genders and desires. This reading finds its best evidence in Orlando’s cross-dressed erotic pursuits. However, the text’s popularity has been on the wane…
This is the first introductory textbook intended for transgender/trans studies at the undergraduate level. The book can also be used for related courses in LGBTQ, queer, and gender/feminist studies. It encompasses and connects global contexts, intersecting identities, historic and contemporary issues, literature, history, politics, art, and culture. Ardel Haefele-Thomas embraces the richness of intersecting identities—how…
Update: unfortunately we had a takedown request from Oxford University Press and can no longer host this book. You can still read it on The Internet Archive. The second edition is available on Anna’s Archive. There is no one way to be transgender. Transgender and gender non-conforming people have many different ways of understanding their…
(Note: This is the original Danish language edition written by Lili Elbe and Niels Hoyer in 1931) This riveting account of the transformation of the Danish painter Einar Wegener into Lili Elbe is a remarkable journey from man to woman. Einar Wegener was a leading artist in late 1920’s Paris. One day his wife Grete…
In 1967, after a twin baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment that would alter his gender. The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine—and a total failure. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his…
In this “canonical” anthology of Butch-Femme identities, Joan Nestle traces 200 years of lesbian history, from letters to memoirs to short stories. Nestle surveys a decade of the attempt to reconstruct and understand the meaning and value of butch-femme relations for the contemporary lesbian, drawing on oral history, fiction, poetry, and fantasy.
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and…
Our call for papers read: “Trans: -gender, -national, -racial, -generational, -genie, -species. The list could (and does) go on. This special issue of WSQ invites feminist work that explores categorical crossings, leakages, and slips of all sorts, around and through the concept ‘trans-‘.” While gender certainly?perhaps inevitably?remains a primary analytical category for the work we…
“There is something all too obvious about the concept “female masculinity.” When people have asked me over the last few years what I am working on, I have explained quickly to them the concept of this book. Usually I can do it in one or two sentences. I will say, perhaps, “I am writing about…