Books like Black on both sides by C. Riley Snorton

A groundbreaking memoir that blends personal narrative with rigorous theory, charting Maggie Nelson’s queer romance, pregnancy, and the politics of love and family.

A transgender middle‑school girl navigates her identity and friendship when she strives to play Charlotte in her class theater production, with help from her best friend to reveal her true self.

Judith Butler’s seminal text challenges essentialist views of sex and gender, proposing that identity is constructed through repeated social performances.

A groundbreaking history of gay life in New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s.

An anthology of pioneering scholarship that uncovers the histories of gay and lesbian lives across diverse cultures and eras—from ancient Athens to post–World War II San Francisco—examining identity, community, and resistance.

In Winnipeg, thirty‑year‑old trans woman Wendy Reimer discovers that her late Mennonite farmer grandfather may have been transgender as well, prompting a poignant family search into past identities.

In Victorian England, women forged rich friendships and lasting partnerships—often described as marriages—that shaped their identities, challenged norms, and influenced reforms in marriage law.

Tracing the arc of transsexuality in America, Joanne J. Meyerowitz chronicles individual stories, medical breakthroughs, and cultural shifts that redefined sex, gender, and rights throughout the twentieth century.

Robert Beachy chronicles how 1920s and 1930s Berlin became the world’s gay capital, pioneering gay journalism, rights organizations, sexual science, and gender‑affirming surgery, and how these developments shaped modern concepts of sex and gender.

One-man play by Doug Wright that dramatizes the life of transvestite antiques dealer Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived Nazi and Communist Germany while living openly as a gay drag queen.

Neil Miller’s investigative history uncovers how a 1954 child‑murder case in Sioux City, Iowa, triggered the arrest, institutionalization, and stigmatization of 20 gay men during a period of widespread anti‑homosexual hysteria.

A scholarly examination of gay Americans in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, tracing the dynamic power struggle between homosexual citizens and the military and its lasting impact on U.S. defense policy.

A photographic journey through late‑1980s America that captures the varied lives of gay and lesbian communities, illustrating their efforts to form families, reconcile faith, and confront both racism and homophobia.

An anthology of erotic stories that explore and celebrate the whole spectrum of transgender and genderqueer sexualities, from San Francisco to Israel, from heartache to lust, and from ballet to bondage.

What does it mean to be authentic? For many, the search for the authentic provides a powerful source of meaning in a secular age, allowing a person a unique personal identity in a world that seems alienating and conformist. This demand for authenticity—the honest or the real—is one of the most powerful movements in contemporary life, influencing our moral outlook, political views, and consumer behavior.Yet according to Andrew Potter, when examined closely, our fetish for "authentic" lifestyles or experiences—organic produce and ecotourism, bikram yoga and performance art, the cult of Oprah and the obsession with Obama—is actually a form of exclusionary status seeking. The result, he argues, is modernity's malaise: a competitive, self-absorbed individualism that creates a shallow consumerist society built on stratification and one-upmanship that ultimately erodes genuine relationships and true community.Weaving together threads of pop culture, history, and philosophy, The Authenticity Hoax reveals how our misguided pursuit of the authentic exacerbates the artificiality of contemporary life that we decry. Potter traces the origins of the authenticity ideal from its roots in the eighteenth century through its adoption by the 1960s counterculture to its centrality in twenty-first-century moral life. He shows how this ideal is manifested through our culture, from the political fates of Sarah Palin and John Edwards to Damien Hirst and his role in contemporary art, from the phenomenon of retirement as a second adolescence to the indignation over James Frey's memoir. From this defiant, brilliant critique, Potter offers a way forward to a meaningful individualism that makes peace with the modern world.

A groundbreaking history of gay male identity in the United States, from World War I to the AIDS era.

The Transgender Studies Reader compiles fifty key texts, introduced by Susan Stryker, charting the field’s development within queer theory, feminist studies, and the history of sexuality.

A biography of We'wha, a Zuni man who lived as a woman for 47 years and influenced history as a berdache.

Histories of the Transgender Child traces the hidden twentieth‑century legacy of transgender youth, revealing how medical, racial, and gender discourses shaped their lives long before the term "transgender" entered common usage.

A Chinese transgender man's journey to self-acceptance and understanding of gender identity through a series of harrowing experiences and revelations about his true self and the world around him.

A Syrian American trans teenager, grieving his mother's mysterious death, confronts his identity and art while haunted by her ghost, finding freedom in night‑time murals on New York’s historic Little Syria.

Memoir of a rural Philippine child with albinism who becomes a transgender woman in America, navigating race, class, sexuality, and LGBTQ identity.