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Her Majesty's Royal Coven
"Superb and almost unbearably charming, Her Majesty's Royal Coven... expertly launches an exciting new trilogy." --The New York Times Book Review "Talk about a gut punch of a novel. ...A provocative exploration of intersectional feminism, loyalty, gender and transphobia [that] invites readers into an intricately woven web of magic, friendship and power." --The Nerd Daily A Discovery of Witches meets The Craft in this epic fantasy about a group of childhood friends who are also witches. If you look hard enough at old photographs, we're there in the background: healers in the trenches; Suffragettes; Bletchley Park oracles; land girls and resistance fighters. Why is it we help in times of crisis? We have a gift. We are stronger than Mundanes, plain and simple.
At the dawn of their adolescence, on the eve of the summer solstice, four young girls--Helena, Leonie, Niamh and Elle--took the oath to join Her Majesty's Royal Coven, established by Queen Elizabeth I as a covert government department. Now, decades later, the witch community is still reeling from a civil war and Helena is the reigning High Priestess of the organization. Yet Helena is the only one of her friend group still enmeshed in the stale bureaucracy of HMRC. Elle is trying to pretend she's a normal housewife, and Niamh has become a country vet, using her powers to heal sick animals. In what Helena perceives as the deepest betrayal, Leonie has defected to start her own more inclusive and intersectional coven, Diaspora. And now Helena has a bigger problem. A young warlock of extraordinary capabilities has been captured by authorities and seems to threaten the very existence of HMRC. With conflicting beliefs over the best course of action, the four friends must decide where their loyalties lie: with preserving tradition, or doing what is right. Juno Dawson explores gender and the corrupting nature of power in a delightful and provocative story of magic and matriarchy, friendship and feminism. Dealing with all the aspects of contemporary womanhood, as well as being phenomenally powerful witches, Niamh, Helena, Leonie and Elle may have grown apart but they will always be bound by the sisterhood of the coven. -
Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism: Voices from Across the Spectrum
Bringing together a collection of narratives from those who are on the autism spectrum whilst also identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and/or asexual (LGBTQIA), this book explores the intersection of the two spectrums as well as the diverse experiences that come with it.
By providing knowledge and advice based on in-depth research and personal accounts, the narratives will be immensely valuable to teenagers, adults, partners and families. The authors round these stories with a discussion of themes across narratives, and implications for the issues discussed. In the final chapter, the authors reflect on commonly asked questions from a clinical perspective, bringing in relevant research, as well as sharing best-practice tips and considerations that may be helpful for LGBTQIA and ASD teenagers and adults. These may also be used by family members and clinicians when counselling teenagers and adults on the dual spectrum. With each chapter structured around LGBTQIA and autism spectrum identities, Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism highlights the fluidity of gender identity, sexual orientation and neurodiversity and provides a space for people to share their individual experiences.Sold out -
Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising That Changed America
The definitive account of the Stonewall Riots, the first gay rights march, and the LGBTQ activists at the center of the movement.
"Martin Duberman is a national treasure."--Masha Gessen, The New Yorker On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village, was raided by police. But instead of responding with the typical compliance the NYPD expected, patrons and a growing crowd decided to fight back. The five days of rioting that ensued changed forever the face of gay and lesbian life. In Stonewall, renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman tells the full story of this pivotal moment in history. With riveting narrative skill, he re-creates those revolutionary, sweltering nights in vivid detail through the lives of six people who were drawn into the struggle for LGBTQ rights. Their stories combine to form an unforgettable portrait of the repression that led up to the riots, which culminates when they triumphantly participate in the first gay rights march of 1970, the roots of today's pride marches. Fifty years after the riots, Stonewall remains a rare work that evokes with a human touch an event in history that still profoundly affects life today. -
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
Newly revised and updated, this classic manifesto is "a foundational text for anyone hoping to understand transgender politics and culture in the U.S. today" (NPR) *Named as one of 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time by Ms. Magazine* A landmark of trans and feminist nonfiction, Whipping Girl is Julia Serano's indispensable account of what it means to be a transgender woman in a world that consistently derides and belittles anything feminine. In a series of incisive essays, Serano draws on gender theory, her training as a biologist, her career in queer activism, and her own experiences before and after her gender transition to examine the deep connections between sexism and transphobia. She coins the term transmisogyny to describe the specific discrimination trans women face--and she shows how, in a world where masculinity is seen as unquestionably superior to femininity, transgender women's very existence becomes a threat to the established gender hierarchy. Now updated with a new afterword on the contemporary anti-trans backlash, Whipping Girl makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activists must work to embrace and empower femininity--in all of its wondrous forms--and to make the world safe and just for people of all genders and sexualities. -
Some Strange Music Draws Me in
It's the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel's dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia's presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships--between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation. -
Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body
Featuring critical essays, erotica, and stitched-up memories, Gender/Fucking explores sexual arousal as a site of knowledge about the self and world.Taking the idea of intellectual masturbation a bit too literally, Florence Ashley draws on their experiences as a transfeminine activist, academic, and slut to interrogate what it means to live in a gendered body in our difficult yet occasionally loving world. With personal essays about the fetishization of trans bodies, recovering from surgery, and losing hope, Florence's collection celebrates the queer messiness of sex and identity.Through the embrace of its raw and lyrical prose, Gender/Fucking invites the reader into the intimate world of academic smut to ask what it means to be horny on main in a sex-negative world-and what power it might hold.
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Tell Me I'm Worthless
Alison Rumfitt's Tell Me I'm Worthless is a dark, unflinching haunted house story that confronts both supernatural and real-world horrors through the lens of the modern-day trans experience.
"Alison is like the twisted daughter of Clive Barker and Shirley Jackson. Tell Me I'm Worthless is an intense read full of shocks and buckets of gore. It's brilliant." --Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author
A Best Horror Book of the Year (Esquire, Book Riot, ) - A Most Anticipated Book of the Year (CrimeReads, Vulture, Goodreads, Paste) "A triumph of transgressive queer horror." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED review Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice's life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to sleep. Memories of that night torment Alice, but when Ila asks her to return to the House, to go past the KEEP OUT sign and over the sick earth where teenagers dare each other to venture, Alice knows she must go. Together, Alice and Ila must face the horrors that happened there, must pull themselves apart from the inside out, put their differences aside, and try to rescue Hannah, whom the House has chosen to make its own. Cutting, disruptive, and darkly funny, Tell Me I'm Worthless is a vital work of trans fiction that examines the devastating effects of trauma and how fascism makes us destroy ourselves and each other. "Easily one of the strongest horror debuts in recent memory." --Booklist, STARRED review Also by Alison Rumfitt:
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Trans Anthology Project: Reflections of Self-Discovery and Acceptance
A must-read book for gender diverse teens and their parents, this expertly curated collection will open hearts and minds to the myriad ways people explore, identify, disclose, and express gender identity.
Providing access to the lived experience of over 200 gender-diverse teens, young adults, and their parents, Trans Anthology Project highlights the complexities of navigating gender identity within oneself, one's family, and one's community. This powerful collection contains 30+ stories and poems from people all around the country, as well as the voices of an additional 150 people who participated via anonymous surveys.
Part guidebook, part anthology, stories are supplemented by education insights from a therapist without a decade of experience working with trans youth and their families. Topics include:
- Gender vs. Gender Identity vs. Gender Expression
- Gender Dysphoria
- The History and Biology of Gender Diversity
- The various nuances and dynamics involved in "Coming Out"
- The Spectrum of Transitioning-Social, Legal, and Medical
The Trans Anthology Project is a vital resource for gender-diverse youth and parents looking for direction, understanding, friends and family committed to supporting their loved ones by educating themselves, and anyone seeking to deepen their of gender diversity.
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Never Silent: ACT Up and My Life in Activism
"Never Silent is a gorgeous book . . . Peter Staley has written an electrifying primer for anyone who's thinking/worrying/wondering about how to change/save the world." --Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America 2022 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST The previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject in David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuing activism. In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power--ACT UP--in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made. ACT UP would change the course of AIDS, pressuring the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and three administrations to finally respond with research that ultimately saved millions of lives. Staley, a shrewd strategist with nerves of steel, organized some of the group's most spectacular actions, from shutting down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to putting a giant condom over the house of Senator Jesse Helms. Never Silent is the inside story of what brought Staley to ACT UP and the explosive and sometimes painful years to follow--years filled with triumph, humiliation, joy, loss, and persistence. Never Silent is guaranteed to inspire the activist within all of us.Sold out -
Melissa (Previously Published as George)
BE WHO YOU ARE.
When people look at Melissa, they think they see a boy named George. But she knows she's not a boy. She knows she's a girl.
Melissa thinks she'll have to keep this a secret forever. Then her teacher announces that their class play is going to be Charlotte's Web. Melissa really, really, REALLY wants to play Charlotte. But the teacher says she can't even try out for the part... because she's a boy.
With the help of her best friend, Kelly, Melissa comes up with a plan. Not just so she can be Charlotte -- but so everyone can know who she is, once and for all.
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Pet
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER - ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by The New York Times - Time - Buzzfeed - NPR - New York Public Library - Publishers Weekly - School Library Journal A genre-defying novel from the award-winning author NPR describes as "like [Madeline] L'Engle...glorious." A singular book that explores themes of identity and justice. Pet is here to hunt a monster. Are you brave enough to look? There are no monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. Jam and her best friend, Redemption, have grown up with this lesson all their life. But when Jam meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colors and claws, who emerges from one of her mother's paintings and a drop of Jam's blood, she must reconsider what she's been told. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption's house. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question--How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist? A riveting and timely young adult debut novel that asks difficult questions about what choices you can make when the society around you is in denial. "[A] beautiful, genre-expanding debut" -The New York Times "The word hype was invented to describe books like this." -Refinery29 -
Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out
A 2015 Stonewall Honor Book
A groundbreaking work of LGBT literature takes an honest look at the life, love, and struggles of transgender teens. Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages, augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender, and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves. -
Gender Rebels: 30 Trans, Nonbinary, and Gender Expansive Heroes Past and Present
This fully illustrated book celebrates the history of thirty trans, gender expansive, and nonbinary heroes throughout the world. Explore the history of trans and nonbinary people throughout the world in this gorgeously illustrated nonfiction book for young teens. Readers will be educated and enlightened about gender-expansive people who have made a difference in our history and who continue to help raise awareness of diversity and inclusion in current society. Introductory materials give readers an insight into pronoun usage, the history of the word "transgender," and more before providing engaging and fascinating information about thirty trans, gender expansive, and nonbinary people who have helped shape our world. From Callon of Epidaurus (the first intersex individual to receive surgery) to Elliot Page (a trans actor) to Tomoya Hosoda (the first trans politician in Japan), this book will open up dialogue and help educate young adults on the history, legacy, and future of trans, gender expansive, and nonbinary people and their rights at a time when protecting those rights is needed more than ever. The book is complete with sidebars about trans topics, a reference guide, and a glossary of terminology. -
Heckin' Lewd: Trans and Nonbinary Erotica
If you've been searching for smutty, fearless, gender diverse erotica written by affirming own-voices folks who get it, then this is the book you've been looking for! Packed with explicit stories from trans, nonbinary, and gender diverse writers, Heckin' Lewd celebrates sexual nonconformity, queerness, nontraditional relationship structures, and unrestrained lust, pleasure, and kink.
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Bad Habit
"I urge you, read Alana S. Portero's Bad Habit to fully grasp the degree of adversity, pain, and danger endured by those growing up trans." -Pedro Almodóvar
Combining the raw realism and vulnerability of Shuggie Bain and Detransition, Baby with the poignant sensibility of Pedro Almodóvar, a staggering coming-of-age novel deeply rooted in the struggles of a trans woman growing up in Madrid.
Anchored by the voice of its sweet and defiant narrator, Bad Habit casts a trans woman's trying youth as a heartfelt odyssey. Raised in an animated yet impoverished blue-collar neighborhood, Alana S. Portero's protagonist struggles to find her place. As the city around her changes-the heroin epidemic that ravages Madrid through the '80s and '90s, rallying calls of worker solidarity and the pulsing beat of the city's night scene- she becomes increasingly detached from the world and, most crucially, herself.
Yet through her eyes, the streets and people of Madrid are illuminated by a poetry absent from everyday life. And by this guiding light she begins to plot her own course, from Margarita, the local trans woman whose unspoken kinship both captivates and frightens her, to Jay, her first love and source of an inevitable heartbreak, to the irrepressible diva Caramel. As she forges ahead, she sets her compass to a personal north star: endeavoring to find herself. But with each step forward, she is confronted by a violence she doesn't yet know how to counter; in this exciting, often terrifying, world each choice is truly a matter of life and death.
With her first novel, Alana S. Portero strikingly underscores the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of sisterhood and community. Gentle but blistering, Bad Habit is a mesmerizing story of self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us.
Translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem
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Queering the Tarot
Tarot is best used as a tool for self-discovery, healing, growth, empowerment, and liberation. Tarot archetypes provide the reader with a window into present circumstances and future potential. But what if that window only opened up on a world that was white, European, and heterosexual? The interpretations of the tarot that have been passed down through tradition presuppose a commonality and normalcy among humanity. At the root of card meanings are archetypes that we accept without questioning. But at what point do archetypes become stereotypes?
Humanity is diverse--culturally, spiritually, sexually. Tarot has the power to serve a greater population, with the right keys to unlock the tarot's deeper meanings. In Queering the Tarot, Cassandra Snow deconstructs the meanings of the 78 cards explaining the ways in which each card might be interpreted against the norm. Queering the Tarot explores themes of sexuality, coming out, gender and gender-queering, sources of oppression and empowerment, and many other topics especially familiar to not-straight folks. Cassandra's identity-based approach speaks directly to those whose identity is either up in the air or consuming the forefront of their consciousness. It also speaks to those struggling with mental illness or the effects of trauma, all seekers looking for personal affirmation that who they are is okay.