By Gayatri Patnaik

Beacon Press sides with the trans and nonbinary community always—and especially in these times. As a book publisher, we speak through our books and want to lift up authors we have had the privilege of publishing over the last thirty years who affirm trans and nonbinary lives and identities.

Beacon Press will continue to show our love and support for trans and nonbinary folx and affirm that we will still make their voices heard.

Read Our Trans and Nonbinary Authors

antes que isla es volcán/before island is volcano: poemas/poems

me raptaste de mi hogar,
castigándome por no llamarte míster.
aprendí tus malas palabras,
y te maldije en tu idioma
para que entendieras.

nunca entendiste.
decías que mi acento era muy fuerte.

//

you stole me from my home,
punished me for not calling you mister.
i learned your bad words,
cursed you in your language
so you would understand.

you never understood.
you told me my accent was too thick.
—Raquel Salas Rivera, de/from “calibán a próspero”/“caliban to prospero”

At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces

“My decision to pursue a hysterectomy my senior year of college was personal, based on my individual relationship with my body, my organs, and our future together. I had been out as trans for almost four years, maintained hormone treatment, and in 2013, the year prior, I processed a legal name change and underwent top surgery. I had come a long way to understanding what being male meant to me. For the first time, I truly grasped that there is no right way to be trans, that there is no right way to “feel” any gender.”
—Donald Collins, “Who Wears the Pants?” 

Just Add Hormones: An Insider’s Guide to the Transsexual Experience

“Comfort with one’s body and a congruity between body and mind are the goals of transition, and these concepts mean different things to different people. For some, a mixture of the masculine and feminine body types, behaviors, and though processes is sufficient. For others, only a complete and all-inclusive transition to the ‘opposite’ gender will do. For all the problems that transsexual people have in transitioning to the ‘opposite’ gender, it seems to me that the use of the term opposite in this context might signal a societal misconception that affects not just transpeople but everyone. When we use the term, we’re automatically setting up a strict binary gender system (a two-gendered system) that leaves no room for anyone who doesn’t specifically conform, physically and emotionally, to what our society considers either ‘male’ or ‘female.’”
—Matt Kailey

Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender

“Lately, it seemed like these trans guys, as most people referred to them, were everywhere—bars, bookstores, parks, my house, my street—their very presence refuting what I’d always taken as fact, that those with an F on their birth certificates were automatically women. Before moving to the Castro, I’d thought becoming a man was as realistic as growing wings. Asking whether a woman would be happier as a guy was one of those dumb questions, like what would you do if a genie emerged from a bottle and granted you three wishes, or what super power would you most like to have.”
—Nick Krieger

Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us

“Researching this book meant being invited into some of the fanciest, most expensive houses and offices I’ve ever seen, just as it brought me into fairly humble, jumbled working campaign offices. Most political professionals I met had extremely good social skills. I almost always had good conversations with people from both parties, despite personally being on the opposite side of nearly every political issue from the Republicans I interviewed, and to the left of most of the Democrats as well. Whatever I felt about the views of the people I interviewed, I focused on my research goal: understanding the campaign industry and how such professionals view their jobs, the candidates, and the electorate. Maybe they assumed I shared their views, since I did request the interviews, and although I am trans, they probably just saw me as a fellow straight White guy. Or maybe they simply didn’t mind explaining their work to a geeky grad student (when I started this project) or assistant professor (when I finished).”
—Daniel Laurison 

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today

“It was a dozen years after my gender change, and I’d never gone blonde. All my life, blonde had called to me, like some people are called into the service of the Lord. I wanted to be a kickass blonde, like Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight. I wanted hair like hers—I wanted eyes like hers and a mouth like hers. But I’d spent most of my life as a ruggedly handsome Jewish guy of Russian heritage, and I was afraid that too much of the rugged guy-ness would leak through the blonde and I’d be a yellow-haired guy in a dress. I’d be a towheaded freak, a platinum clown.”
—Kate Bornstein 

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“Trans people are still literally social outlaws. And that’s why I am willing at times, publicly, to reduce the totality of my self-expression to descriptions like masculine female, butch, bulldagger, drag king, cross-dresser. These terms describe outlaw status. And I hold my head up proudly in that police lineup. The word outlaw is not hyperbolic. I have been locked up in jail by cops because I was wearing a suit and tie. Was my clothing really a crime? Is it a ‘man’s’ suit if I am wearing it? At what point—from field to rack—is fiber assigned a sex?”
—Leslie Feinberg 

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond

“For trans people, winning progressive legislation and repealing bigoted laws are important stepping stones in our larger struggle for justice. But the experience of this century has shown that the organic make-up of the profit system inevitably drives it into a cataclysm of economic and social crises that can wipe out the progressive gains of a lifetime. That’s the lesson I learned from the triumph of fascism in Germany.”
—Leslie Feinberg 

“You’re in the Wrong Bathroom!”: And 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions About Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People

“Every third day, a transgender person is reported murdered, and this is likely an underestimate, as many murders of trans people are never brought to the attention of authorities. Heterosexual cisgender men are, by far, the majority of perpetrators in these crimes, and there is social acceptability in some circles to claim ‘trans panic’ as a defense—the idea that learning someone is trans can cause a temporary inability to prevent yourself from killing them. In 2014, California became the first state to ban ‘gay panic’ or ‘trans panic’ as defenses in court, but elsewhere in the United States these arguments are still permitted.”
—Laura Erickson-Schroth and Laura A. Jacobs

Read Our Titles that Affirm Trans and Nonbinary Lives and Identities

And the Category Is . . . : Inside New York’s Vogue, House, and Ballroom Community

“[B]eyond the four walls of a ball, in the outside world, the ability to blend and not be clocked is an utter necessity, again especially in the case of Black trans women who navigate day-to-day life in the brutal streets of all four carnal, cardinal corners of the United States. For them, being noticeably trans in public has always been answered with violence, sometimes verbal, often physical, always psychological. While at a Ballroom function, you might win a trophy, scoring tens across the board for convincingly resembling a soldier, a pampered housewife, or a young hunk, whereas in the streets of Harlem, the Bronx, Brownsville, or any other urban center, being or not being “clocked” as trans means the difference between peace and trauma or death.”
—Ricky Tucker 

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“These racially gendered and sexualized myths conjured to justify the brutal social control used to maintain racially gendered hierarchies persist to this day, having transformed, solidified, and mutated over time to fit shifting realities. They pervade daily law enforcement interactions with women and transgender people of color, structuring police and public perceptions of women’s appearance and behavior, and dictating the terms of policing and police violence against women’s bodies in the context of present-day policing paradigms.”
—Andrea J. Ritchie 

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

“Justice for [Black transwoman] Duanna Johnson and countless other LGBT people requires that efforts to eradicate discrimination go beyond Fortune 500 companies to shelters, welfare offices, and drug treatment programs, and ensure that public and private institutions are held accountable. It also demands critical examination of the role played by the criminal legal system in queer lives. It requires that we envision and nurture approaches to safety that do not rely on and strengthen a system that is built on and perpetuates systemic violence against queer people—particularly the most marginalized among us.”
—Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock

Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity

“It is common for Christians to approach Christian ethics as a series of rules, and to assume that God condemns us when we violate those rules. This is the same problematic misinterpretation we saw operating in the story of Abraham nearly sacrificing Isaac: God sets up rules and demands compliance with them. If we break the rules, this thinking goes, we are wrong and worthy of punishment. This is a flawed but powerful notion that has done immeasurable harm to queer people. Many of us are forced to confront again and again the internalized homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and plain old sexphobia that this thinking breeds within us.”
—The Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman

Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America

“‘Two-Spirit’ denotes the existence of feminine and masculine qualities in a single person. This English translation was never meant to limit gender and sexual expression, or the connections people make to tradition and community. LGBTQ Native Americans adopted Two-Spirit in the 1990s to provide people with a sense of Pan-Indian unity, to give greater visibility to people made almost invisible by settler colonialism, and to reclaim tribally specific roles and identities.”
—Gregory D. Smithers

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“Black radical feminism should be considered basic, not something advanced or optional. If organizers and educators are committed enough to dig into complex theories on racial capitalism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, then they can also commit to digging into patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia.”
—Charlene A. Carruthers

“You Can Tell Just By Looking”: And 20 Other Myths About LGBT Life and People

“Transgender adults and children in the United States are not asking to be given a special role; they want to be allowed to live their lives and have access to the trans-specific medical care they need—all without being told they are a problem to be solved.”
—Michael Bronski, Ann Pellegrini, Michael Amico

About the Author 

Gayatri Patnaik is the director of Beacon Press. Previously an editor at both Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, she has been at Beacon Press over twenty years and has published authors including Imani Perry, Cornel West, Kate Bornstein, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Jeanne Theoharis. She acquires in US History, with a focus on African American History and race/ethnicity/immigration, and began Beacon’s award-winning “ReVisioning History” series. Gayatri occasionally signs memoir, began Beacon’s LGBTQ series, “Queer Action/Queer Ideas,” (edited with Michael Bronski) and developed books in “The King Legacy,” with Joanna Green, in a series about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Follow her on Twitter at @gpatnaik1. and on Bluesky at @gayatripat.bsky.social.