Gender Questioning | LGBTQ Reads

“Under the Gaydar” features books you might not realize have queer content but do! And definitely belong on your radar.

This edition is dedication to YA with trans and/or nonbinary main characters, with the aim of helping readers find books that explore gender identity and can more safely be read in unsafe spaces. Please note that most of these have some potentially triggering content, including transphobia and abuse, so I do encourage reading reviews, if that’s helpful to you. (And please do read the notes below as well.)

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore – This absolutely lovely m/f romance steeped in magical realism includes trans boy Sam as one half of the couple.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi – This was a Backlist Book of the Month on the site in 2021, so you can read a lot more about it here. For the sake of this post, I’ll just mention that the protagonist is a trans girl and that’s not in the copy.

I Was Born for This by Alice Oseman – Note: this is only under the gaydar with the British copy; the copy on the version coming out in the US in October 2022 does state that Jimmy is trans. You can get the UK version via Book Depository, Waterstones, or Blackwell’s.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall – Note: This blurb can be read as Sapphic, so do read it carefully and consider your environment, but there’s no visible nod to the fact that the main character is either genderfluid or bigender.

Even if We Break by Marieke Nijkamp – In this gaming-themed thriller, there are five POVs, one of which belongs to a trans boy and another of which belongs to a nonbinary kid. The copy is 100% thriller-centric with no descriptions of the POVs to be found. (You can also find hidden nonbinary rep in one of the three POVs of Nijkamp’s newest YA thriller, At the End of Everything.)

For a books with gender questioning as a non-central element, check out This is How We Fly by Anna Meriano. (This is also true of And They Lived… by Steven Salvatore, though obviously that book is not under the gaydar. Feels like I should mention it, though, in case this is a thing someone is looking for where it’s not mentioned on the cover.)

Non-queer-specific anthologies are also great resources for hidden trans and/or nonbinary rep. You can find trans stories in:

His Hideous Heart ed. by Dahlia Adler (“The Murders at the Rue Apartelle, Boracay” by Rin Chupeco)
That Way Madness Lies ed. by Dahlia Adler (“Some Other Metal” by AR Capetta and Cory McCarthy, “King of the Fairies” by Anna-Marie McLemore, “Shipwrecked” by Mark Oshiro)
*At Midnight ed. by Dahlia Adler (“Mother’s Mirror” by H.E. Edgmon, “The Littlest Mermaid” by Meredith Russo)
Meet Cute ed. by Jennifer Armentrout (“Somewhere That’s Green” by Meredith Russo)
Fools in Love ed. by Ashley Herring Blake and Rebecca Podos (“Boys Noise” by Mason Deaver)
Take the Mic ed. by Bethany C. Morrow (“Parker Outside the Box” by Ray Stoeve)

Today on the site, we’re revealing the gorgeous cover for the brilliant Ana Mardoll’s No Man of Woman Born, a collection of fantasy stories featuring transgender and nonbinary characters, releasing on July 10! (See tags for more details on rep!)

No Man of Woman Born Text

Destiny sees what others don’t.

A quiet fisher mourning the loss of xer sister to a cruel dragon. A clever hedge-witch gathering knowledge in a hostile land. A son seeking vengeance for his father’s death. A daughter claiming the legacy denied her. A princess laboring under an unbreakable curse. A young resistance fighter questioning everything he’s ever known. A little girl willing to battle a dragon for the sake of a wish. These heroes and heroines emerge from adversity into triumph, recognizing they can be more than they ever imagined: chosen ones of destiny.

From the author of the Earthside series and the Rewoven Tales novels, No Man of Woman Born is a collection of seven fantasy stories in which transgender and nonbinary characters subvert and fulfill gendered prophecies. These prophecies recognize and acknowledge each character’s gender, even when others do not. Note: No trans or nonbinary characters were killed in the making of this book. Trigger warnings and neopronoun pronunciation guides are provided for each story.

And now the cover with a note from the author!

No Man of Woman Born Text — Cover Art by Anna Dittmann

I’m so excited to reveal the cover for this short story collection, which I feel I’ve been gushing about for actual years now! No Man of Woman Born is a collection of seven stories told from the point of view of trans, nonbinary, and gender-questioning characters each going about their epic fantasy lives mostly unaware that they are fated to fulfill seemingly impossible prophecies. If you enjoyed Éowyn’s helmet-pull, hair-tumble, I-am-no-man reveal to the Witch-King, you’ll love these stories as much as I do.

[That, but with 1000% more transness.]

I’ve loved epic fantasy since I was a child, but never felt represented in the old canon despite loving the classic elements–particularly prophecy, which is so often like a riddle you can only appreciate after the answer is in front of you. It’s been amazing and affirming to allow myself to really explore gender in a fantastical setting and build worlds that accept my complex, messy, never neat-and-tidy genderfeels.

So many characters in this collection are transgender, and all of them carry a piece of myself. Wren is an agender fisherperson who uses my pronouns and carries my autism with xer through the story. Caran is a bigender witch with magic that isn’t flashy, but is useful all the same. Nocien is a boy, period. Even when others struggle to accept his gender, the magic surrounding him never falters. Every character is accepted by the rules of magic that govern their lives, which is something I needed: affirmation so deeply interwoven into a world that even the laws of nature recognizes trans and nonbinary genders. We didn’t blink when cis authors gave us feminine moon magic, so why shouldn’t magical forces recognize a genderfluid princess?

At its heart, No Man of Woman Born is a work of love: a combination of my passion for epic fantasy and a deep-seated need to turn characters trans and set them free to shine on the page. For the cover, I wanted something that could capture their vibrancy and I was fortunate to work with the phenomenal Anna Dittmann. She beautifully brought to life the character of Finndís, a trans woman we meet in the story “Daughter of Kings”. Finndís’ rightful legacy has been denied to her, and she must now find and retrieve a magical sword stuck in stone and left in the heart of a dark forest. Anna perfectly captured the look and feel of this setting and produced a cover which I could not love more.

I hope you’ll love this collection as much as I do. All gushing aside, I think it’s an important addition to the fantasy genre: a glimpse into how normal and normalized transness and nonbinary genders can be in a setting. We can have these characters and have them not be unusual or weird. Each of these characters is special and they’re trans, as opposed to being special because they’re trans.

No Man Of Woman Born is available for preorder on Amazon! The book will be released on July 10th (the Tuesday before International Nonbinary Day, July 14!)

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Ana Mardoll is a writer and activist who lives in the dusty Texas wilderness with two spoiled cats. Xer favorite employment is weaving new tellings of old fairy tales, fashioning beautiful creations to bring comfort on cold nights. Xie is the author of the Earthside series, the Rewoven Tales novels, and several short stories. Aside from reading and writing, Ana enjoys games of almost every flavor and frequently posts videos of gaming sessions on YouTube. After coming out as genderqueer in 2015, Ana answers to xie/xer pronouns.