Books on Gender Variance in 2025 - Part 1: (auto) biographies and histories

 

AutoBiography

• Jean-Sebastien Busque. Gender Bilingual: Translating Life for Men and Women. Editions RESONANCE Publisher, 2025.

• Edward-Jeanne Cerdan. L'indompté - Confidences tendres et authentiques d'un homme transgenre. Good Mood Dealer, 2024.

• Jay Defazio. You Only Live Twice: A Memoir in Two Genders. Pride & Joy, 2025.

• Tommy Dorfman. Maybe This Will Save Me: A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation. Hanover Square Press, 2025.

• 
  Ken Etherton. The Day My Life Made Sense: I am not what I appear to be. 2025.

• Mallery GenX. BECOMING HER: Transitioning After Forty. Kindle, 2025.

• Olivia Gosselin. Le Chemin: Parcours d’une femme autiste, musulmane et transgenre : récit d’une renaissance. 2025.

• Debra Hopkins. This Journey Called Life: A Transgender Woman’s Story of Faith, Survival, and Hope. 2025.

• G L. Lola, jeune femme transgenre. Kindle, 2025.

• Dylan Mulvaney. Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer. Sphere, 2025.

• Imogen Reid. Accept Yourself Or Die: From Mormon Missionary To Trans Punk. Sheer Spite, 2025.

• Oliver Radclyffe. Frighten the Horses: A Memoir of Transition. Grove Press, 2024.

• Daniela Requena. Mamá, soy mujer: Diario de una chica trans. Editorial Planeta, 2022.

• Kat Rogue. Crossdresser: Growing Up Trans In The 1990s And 2000s. Sheer Spite, 2025.

• Léon Salin. D'un monde à l'autre: Une histoire de transition de genre. Leduc Societe, 2025.

Essays

• Vivian Blaxell. Worthy of the Event: An Essay. LittlePuss Press, 2025.

• Jennifer Finney Boylan. Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us. Celadon, 2025.

Biographical sketches

• Sophia Aguilar. Queer Latine Heroes: 25 Changemakers from Latin America and the U.S. from History and Today. Jessica Kingsley, 2025.

• Ria Brodell. More Butch Heroes. MIT Press, 2025.

• Diamond Hester. Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Queer Histories. Pegasus Books, 2024.

• 
  Jim Wilke. Frontier Comrades: From the Fur Trade to the Ford Car. University of Nebraska Press, 2025.

Biography

• Juan Cadena. UNFOLDING: Stories of Queer Resilience, Faith, and the Work of Living. 2025,

• Deb Carson. Becoming FLO…A Mostly True Story. Pure Art Press, 2024.

• Jeff Copeland. Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn. Feral House, 2025.

• Shiro Deng. Julie Lemieux: Canada's First Transgender Mayor. LGBTQ Books Canada, 2025.

• 
  Patricia Heuston. La Maupin: Sword, Stage, and Scandal in the Court of Louis XIV. Silverback Books, 2025.

• Muhammad Nawaz Khan 7 Saima Muhammad Nawaz. Shadows of Destiny: The Transgender Voices. 2025, (the story of Zayn who rises to become a civil servant)

• David Marshall. Marsha P. Johnson: The Woman Who Sparked a Revolution, How One Brave Soul Lit the Fire at Stonewall. 2025.

• David Marshall. Laverne Cox: The Trans Actress Who Broke Barriers. The role that shattered stereotypes and forced Hollywood to change. 2025.

• David Marshall. Sylvia Rivera: The Street Fighter for Trans Rights. The fearless activist who refused silence, and ignited a movement for equality. 2025.

• Tom Roberts & Jacqueline Kent. Bonjour, Mademoiselle!: April Ashley and the pursuit of a lovely life. Scribe Publications, 2025.

• Tormaline. Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson. Tiny Reparations Books, 2025.

• Taylor Walsh. SYLVIA RIVERA: A Revolutionary Life in the Fight for Trans Equality. 2025.

• Brenda Bradford Ward. Forty Years to Life: A Case Study. Genre Library, 2025.

• 
  Pan Wendt. Erica Rutherford: Her Lives and Works. Goose Lane Editions, 2025

• Paul Wise. Marsha P. Johnson Biography: Pay It No Mind and Keep Walking. 2015.

Changeback

• Rene Jax, Memoirs of the First Transgender Cop. Kindle, 2025.

• Sandra Mercado Rodríguez. La estafa del transgenerismo: Memorias de una destransición. Tierra de Nadie Editores. 2022.

Doctor & Allies Biography

• $£¥ € Daniel Brook. The Einstein of sex : Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, visionary of Weimar Berlin. W W Norton, 2025.

• $£¥ € Rainer Hernn. Der Liebe und dem Leid: Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft 1919-1933. Suhrkamp, 2022.

• $£¥ € Brandy Schillace. The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story. W W Norton, 2025.

Spouse & Parent Autobiography

• Amber Donnelly. The Woman in My Husband's Place: A memoir of trauma, survival, and a life-altering choice. Kindle, 20205.

• Caroline Litman. Her Name is Alice. Mudlark, 2025.

• Cristina Olivetti. About Bliss: Fighting for My Trans Son's Life, Joy, and Fertility. Jessica Kingsley, 2025.

• Gemma Telford. Between: A Memoir on Gender Transition by a Mother and Her Trans Son. Trigger Publishing, 2025.

Trans/GLBT history

• Feras Alkabani. Richard Burton, T.E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire: Orientalist Depictions of Arab Sexuality. I B Tauris, 2024.

• Lucy Cohen. A Transgender History: Discrimination, Movement, and Cultural Enrichment. 2025.

• 
  Pete Cossaboon. Beyond Binary: The Global Spectrum of Gender Through Time and Faith. 2025.

• Pete Cossaboom. We Were Always Here: Unsung Queer Heroes and the History They Made. 2025.

• Eli Erlick. Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History. Beacon Press, 2025.

• Jonah I Garde. Trans Geschichten der Moderne: »Geschlechtsumwandlung« im 20. Jahrhundert und ihre kolonialen Geister. transcript, 2025.

• Phaedra J Kelly. The Naked Gender Transient: An Origin and History of Intersex and Transgender . Austin Macauley, 2025.

• Amara Moira, João W. Nery, Márcia Rocha and Tarso Brant. Vidas Trans: A luta de transgêneros brasileiros em busca de seu espaço social. Idioma, 2022.

• $£¥ € Marina Montesano. Cross-dressing in the Middle Ages. Routledge, 2025.

• Caro De Robertis. So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. Algonquin Books. 2025.

• Alicia Spencer-Hall & Blake Gutt (eds). Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography. Routledge, 2023.

• James Thompson. Unbound Trans Voices: Cultural Reflections on Transgender Lives Around the World. 2025.

• Lucy Violet. HISTORY OF THE LGBT MOVEMENT: All the obstacles and struggles of the lgbt movement for the recognition of the fundamental rights of homosexuality. 2025.

Country Histories

• Julian Rhys Carter. Gay Today, Gone Tomorrow How We Fought for Our Rights—And Why We’re Still Not Safe: A History of LGBTQ+ Civil Rights Battles, Backlashes, and the Ongoing Fight for Freedom. 2025. (US)

• Tamara Chaplin. Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France. University of Chicago Press, 2024.

• Richard Fleishman. Queering the Ton: The Hidden Rules of Queer Survival in Polite Society. 2025. (19th-century England)

• Anthony Delaney. Queer Enlightenments: A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers, and Homemakers. Doubleday, 2025.

• Anthony Delaney. Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers. Doubleday, 2025.

• Andrew Donnelly. Confederate Sympathies: Same-Sex Romance, Disunion, and Reunion in the Civil War Era. University of North Carolina Press, 2025.

• Ariane Fortin. Histoire des Personnes Transgenres: Chroniques Transgenres à Travers les Âges. 2023. (France)

• Michelle H S Ho. Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies. Duke University Press, 2025.

• $£¥ € Wikke Jansen. Queer Mobilities in Indonesia: Religion, Activism, and Everyday Life. Liverpool University Press, 2025.

• Ximena Salazar Lostaunau. Mujeres trans en el Perú: historias de vida e identidad. Fondo Editorial Cayetano, 2023.

• J Daniel Luther. Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.

• $£¥ € James Martin. Sexual and Gender Minority History: A Counter-Narrative. Oxford University Press, 2025. (US centric)

• John Moliah. Silent Voices: Living as LGBT in Bangladesh. 2025.

• $£¥ € Liz Mount. 'New' Women: Trans Women, Hijras and the Remaking of Inequality in India. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

• Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira, Letícia Carolina Nascimento and Jaqueline Gomes de Jesu (eds). Epistemic Dissonance: The (R)existence of Black Travestis and Trans Women in Brazil. Amefrica Press, 2025.

• $£¥ € Dhishna Pannikot. Navigating Gender Identity in India: Social and Cultural Perspectives on Gender Sustainability. Emerald Publishing Limited, 2025.

• Justin Perez. Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru. Duke University Press, 2025.

• S K Raghuvanshi. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 (Bare Acts by Allahabad Law Agency Book 18). Allahabad Law Agency, 2025, (Pakistan)

• Aaron B Retish. Gender in Modern Russia: 1850 to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

• Skriuwer. The Other Side of the Rainbow: A Critical History of the LGBT Movement. 2025. (US)

• Lilith Carol Romeiro da Silva. Ainda assim, eu Floresci: A historia real de uma mulher trans brasileira. 2025.

• $£¥ € Ahonaa Roy & Vasu Reddy. Transnational Contact Zones: Rethinking Gender and Sexuality in Africa and India. Routledge, 2025.

• $£¥ € Sheba Saeed. Transgender Identities: The Evolving Identity of Transwomen in Pakistan. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.

• Yulia Yu Sakurazawa. People Loved by Gods, Despised by Humans: The Unknown World of Hijra, the Third Gender of India. 2025

• Mickaël Studnicki. Droites nationalistes et homosexualités en France. SUP, 2025.

• Gregory Williams. Love is the law: Cuba’s queer rights’ revolution. 2025.

• Alvin K Womg. Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong and the Sinophone. Duke University Press, 2025.

• $£¥ € Mirjam Zadoff & Karolina Kühn (eds). To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900–1950. Hirmer Publishers, 2023. (queer lives in early twentieth-century Germany)

City and Province Histories

• Ivano Azzellino & Valentina Giacchetti. I ragazzi di Monte Caprino. Storie di identità di genere e orientamento sessuale. Tab edizioni, 2025. (Rome)

• Robert Fieseler. American Scare: Florida's Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives. Dutton, 2025.

• $£¥ € Mathais Foit. Queer Urbanisms in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany: Of Towns and Villages. Palgrave, 2023.

• $£¥ € Charles H Ford & Jeffrey L Littlejohn. Queer Virginia: New Stories in the Old Dominion. University of Virginia Press, 2025.

• Rae Garringer. Country Queers: A Love Letter. Haymarket Books, 2024,

• Rae Garringer. To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers. University Press of Kentucky, 2025.

• Simon Goldhill. Queer Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

• Magnus Hirschfeld translated by Michael Lombardi-Nash. Annual of Sexual Intermediaries 23 Volumes (1916) Urania, 2025. (Berlin)

• John Van Hoesen. Insist That They Love You: Craig Rodwell and the Fight for Gay Pride. Aevo UTP, 2025. (New York)

• Peter Parker (ed). Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59. Penguin, 2024.

• Peter Parker (ed). Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67. Penguin, 2024.

• Julie Peakman. Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis. Reaktion Books, 2024.

• Megan Rohrer. San Francisco's Transgender District. Arcadia, 2025.

• Alexander Zinn. Maintöchter: Schwule, Lesben, Trans- und Intersexuelle in Frankfurt am Main 1933-1994. Wallstein Verlag, 2025.

Jae Stevens (1947-1974) performer, murdered

Stevens was born in Fort Worth, Texas, but raised in Concord in the East Bay across from San Francisco. He came out as gay when he was called to the draft board.

In 1966 Jae started a professional career in San Francisco as a female impersonator and comedian, dancer and singer at THE FAN-TASY on Mason Street as part of "Jack & The Giants". He continued to work in the showroom of the P.S. Lounge, appeared on The Cabaret circuit in San Francisco and Los Angeles as one-half of the team of Stevens & [Steve] Miller. Jae also performed in a trio act with his sister, Melissa Stevens, and Miller. They were known as the "Wonder Sisters”.

In 1970, Jae was performing with The New Faces, and appeared at a charity premiere of the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, IMDB, as Jean Harlow and, taken as a cis woman, was acclaimed best female by audience applause. She then revealed that she was an impersonator – which was to the chagrin of the socially prominent judges.

Jae in The Laughing Policeman

Jae had an uncredited cameo in the 1973 film The Laughing Policeman. IMDB.

June 1974 Jae, age 27, had been performing at Finocchio’s night club. He (in mufti) was seen later on the night of the 24^th in the Cabaret Club in the North Beach, but it was not noticed that he left with anybody. He was feeling good as the next morning the Wonder Sisters were to fly to Boston for a gig. However, on the morning of June 25 Jae's body was found near Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park having been stabbed five times, three directly in the heart. It so happened that at 5 am the same morning the police had attempted to pull over a suspicious car in the Hayward area, but the driver raced away, was chased and crashed. The young driver, described as blond with shoulder-length hair, ran and escaped. The car was later identified as that of Jae Stevens.

The crime scene was a secluded area of the park sometimes used for gay encounters. The police assumed that Jae and his killer had gone there together after meeting in a bar.

There had been a similar murder of a gay man five months earlier, and then another on July 7. All were stabbed multiple times. Based on this modus apparandi, mainly the multiple stabbing and secluded locations, the SFPD assumed that they were looking for a homophobic serial killer.

Jae’s murder was, of course, a shock to the family. The youngest sister, Alma, 18, who had a history of instability, sought psychiatric help in late September, but was turned away. In October, she and her mother Mary Stevens, visited family in Texas. They returned late on Thursday 10 October. The father, a real estate agent, was not there as, while they were away, he had been sleeping at his office. After arriving home, Alma attacked and killed her mother with a hammer, dismembered the body and partially destroyed it by burning in the fireplace. The older sister, Melissa, the family member who had also performed as a Wonder Sister, and who had identified Jae’s body for the police, arrived, and was also attacked. She survived and went immediately to the local police, who arrested Alma. 

At her trial in February 1975, Alma was found innocent by reason of insanity, based on psychiatric reports, and she was committed to Napa State Hospital for an indefinite period.

Shortly afterwards, the father died in fire at his office. Melissa trained as a nurse and left the Bay Area. She returned only after Alma’s death in 2004.

We should also mention that San Francisco police at that time recently had dealt with the Zodiac (1968-9) and the Zebra (also 1971-4) serial killings of straight persons, and the overall homicide rate in San Francisco was more than double what it is today. Despite this there were apparently only four San Francisco murders in 1974 that can be designated as homophobic, the three later attributed to what became called the Doodler, and another killed in his apartment. In 1975 there was a surge in the number of such murders, including that of two trans women, Barbella and Yancy both killed in their own apartments. There was a gay community meeting in April concerned about the murders, but they continued. 

Three men, including a well-known entertainer and a diplomat, had survived a stabbing encounter in Fox Plaza and described the suspect, a black man, who was mentioned as making contact by sketching his mark. The police suspected that this ‘doodler’ could be the person who did the stabbing murders the year before. They put out a police sketch based on the three witness statements. The police listed five murders, 1974-5, as done by the Doodler, and suggested that the black man wanted for the Fox Plaza stabbing might be the Doodler.

A few months later there was a gruesome murder, again at the Fox Plaza, and in December-January two murders on Turk Street including one of a trans woman, Demott.

In late 1975, a psychiatrist phoned the police and claimed that one of his patients had confessed to the murderers during therapy. The police did not get the name of the psychiatrist straight, and never called him back. The therapy patient named was brought in for questioning in 1976, several times. The three men who had survived being stabbed identified the suspect. However, as homosexuality was still illegal at that time and San Francisco, like most US cities, had a police unit whose sole pupose was to entrap and arrest gay men, and to be outed as gay would destroy their lives and careers, the three survivors refused to testify against him. The suspect did not confess, charges were not pressed, and he was released. Murders of gay men in San Francisco continued, but no further murders were said to be done by the Doodler.

A rumor was put about that the Doodler had fled to New Orleans.

• Bill Kane & Jerry Carpenter. “Show Bars” California Scene, October 1971: 12. Online.
• “News”, Drag Magazine, 1,1, 1971: 16, 31. Online.
• Donald McLean. “Entertainer Jae Stevens Slain!”. Bay Area Reporter, 4, 13, 6/26/1974. Reprinted as “In Memoriam: Jay Stevens 1947-1974”. Drag Magazine, 4, 16, 1974: 34. Online.
• Wendy Heard. “The Doodler”. com. Online.
• Kevin Fagan. “The Doodler”. Com, March 16, 2021. Online.
• Gian J Quaser. “The DOODLER Serial Killer Theory”. Questersite, August 30, 2021. Online.
• Gian J Quaser. “Murder By Forgotten: The Gay Murders of San Francisco 1968-1982”. Questersite, February 6, 2022. Online.
• The Doodler: Unsolved, But Not Forgotten”. The Bloody Truth, December 17, 2023. Online.

Alma Stevens:

• “Body found in Concord fireplace: Mother missing, daughter held”. Concord Transcript, Oct 11, 1974:1.
• “A tragic psychiatric rejection”. The San Francisco Examiner, Oct 16, 1974:46.
• “Alma Stevens committed to a hospital”, Concord Transcript, Feb 26, 1975:1.

En.Wikipedia(Doodler) Find a Grave

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Jian J Quaser questions whether there was indeed a Doodler. The murders, of course were real, and significantly more than the five or six attributed to the Doodler. One of the Doodler victims was not stabbed, but beaten with a rock. Also, the man who stole Jae’s car and then ran off was described as ‘blond’ not black. 

Quaser:

The DOODLER concept then goes public in 1976, but the concept was presented to us vaguely. I have repeated it a number of times on here. To belabor the point, we are basically told there possibly had been some black guy known now as The DOODLER who might be connected with 14 other murders, names unspecified, over 1974-1975. In retrospect we are given five names of potential victims: they are, of course, Gerald Cavanaugh (January 1974), Jae Stevens (June 1974), Klaus Christmann (July 1974), Fred Capin (May 1975), and Harald Gullberg (May/June 1975). After this, The DOODLER concept rather fizzles away.

From our point of view today, however, there is a problem. A closer look at these cases, for the most part, doesn’t reveal much of a connection except they occurred out-of-doors and in the western districts of San Francisco. In retrospect there seems little reason these 5 were made tokens. Poor Harald Gullberg probably wasn’t even murdered. He certainly wasn’t knifed, and the coroner wasn’t sure if his death was an accident. Why then were these 5 names presented to the public in 1976 and strung to a black guy who had attacked in Mid Market and whose known victims had survived?

Quaser is almost alone in questioning the Doodler as a police construction. I am however inclined to go with his interpretation. The search for a mythical Doodler resulted in the murders not being properly investigated, and the real murderers not being apprehended.