Feature: TransRightsReadAThon: We Read. Now What?
The Trans Rights Readathon runs through Trans Day of Visibility, and we are coming out the other side of it with full reading logs, a lot of feelings, and a longer TBR than we started with.
We have been doing this long enough to remember when trans stories in YA were rare. A book here, an anthology there, authors writing characters into existence with one eye on the market and one eye on survival. Trans people in this country are facing coordinated legislative attacks on their healthcare, their schools, their legal recognition, their ability to exist in public life. This is not a moment of political disagreement. It is a sustained effort to make trans people disappear. So we read. And we buy books. And we shout about them.
This year we each picked two books and finished all of them (pls clap…we made a TBR AND we made it through the TBR). Kelly read One of the Boys by Victoria Zeller, a New York Times bestseller about a trans girl who was a star kicker with a Division I future before she came out, written by a trans woman from Buffalo who used to play football herself, and Transmogrify!, the anthology edited by g. haron davis that collects fourteen fantasy stories by trans and nonbinary authors using magic to survive, resist, and claim space. I read A Wild Radiance by Maria Ingrande Mora, which is anti-capitalist and abundantly queer and radically hopeful in the way that feels genuinely hard to pull off right now, and This Wretched Beauty by Elle Grenier, a transfeminine retelling of The Picture of Dorian Gray set in 1867 London by a trans author writing the books she wished she had. And then I kept going and blew through all three current volumes of I Wanna Be Your Girl by Umi Takase, which follows Hime and her best friend Akira as Akira starts high school as herself, and is exactly the kind of tender, grounded story that belongs in the hands of queer kids right now. I am already waiting impatiently for the next volume.
During the readathon we also shared a few things on the blog worth circling back to if you missed them. We reviewed Trans History: A Graphic Novel and Angelica and the Bear Prince, two very different books that both do the work of making space on the shelf for trans and queer readers. And we kicked off our post-Project Hail Mary reading list, which started with The Disasters by nonbinary author M.K. England, a queer sci-fi found family story with a bisexual narrator and a trans girl on the crew who gets to just be brilliant and save the day without her identity being the conflict.
We also have two upcoming releases by queer authors that are very much on our radar. They Want Us Dead by C.L. Montblanc, which sends a gender nonconforming true crime content creator and their internet nemesis to a Victorian mansion where someone ends up dead and everyone is a suspect. And The Last Best Quest Ever by F.T. Lukens, out May 26th from the New York Times bestselling nonbinary author of So This Is Ever After, follows a teen quester whose entire legendary career is a lie, forced back into the spotlight to save her brother’s life. Cozy romantasy with a brooding royal rival.
This year we donated to Trans Meals through megemikoart, which is mutual aid at its most direct. Fifteen dollars covers one meal for a trans person in need. You can donate at megemikoart.com.
If you want to show up for trans people beyond the readathon, the most meaningful things are also the most concrete. Donate directly to trans mutual aid funds where money reaches people immediately. Contact your representatives about healthcare bans and book challenges, because local fights are where these policies live or die. When you see a trans book being challenged in your school district or library, show up to the meeting. Support trans authors and trans artists. And when a trans person in your life tells you what they need, listen to them.
