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Transgender History Month: Books for Adults

11 Aug
Cover of Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History 1850-1950 by Eli Erlick. Cover features torn images of black and white photographs of various historical trans people surrounded by multicolored strips.
Cover of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton. Features a photograph of a black couple one in a dress holding a top hat and the other in a tuxedo holding a fan.
Cover of Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam. Features an abstract image of colors forming the shape of people against a black background.

August is Transgender History Month! Take a look at these non-fiction selections from our BCCLS catalog that tell the long, rich history of transgender pioneers. 

Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
by Eli Erlick (physical)
Eli Erlick shares the stories of 30 trans trailblazers, organized into four deliberate parts: activists, workers, kids, and athletes. 

The Other Olympians: Facism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
by Michael Waters (physical)
In the mid-1930s, two of European track and field’s most celebrated athletes announced that they were both men despite being assigned female at birth. Waters recounts how because of their transitions, Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston influenced the fixation with gender in sports we see nearly a century later.

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender
by Kit Heyam PhD (physical) 
Before We Were Trans highlights the histories of trans and gender nonconforming people across West Africa, Asia, and the Americas, showcasing how the category of gender has been redefined and altered throughout history. 

Female Husbands
by Jen Manion (physical)
This text explores historical material from the American colonial period through 1910, highlighting British and American people assigned female at birth who moved through society as men. The title refers to shifting understandings of gender politics and women’s rights shortly before World War I, labeling such people as “female husbands.” 

Histories of the Transgender Child
by Julian Gill-Peterson (physical)
Before today’s terminology to describe them, transgender children existed. This text explores accounts from the early-twentieth century onward how children and their parents navigated the medical system and other institutions, playing close attention to how race impacted their experiences. 

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
by C. Riley Snorton (physical, eBook) 
Snorton explores the interconnection between Black and trans identities from slavery, through emancipation up until internet culture of the 1990s using fugitive slave narratives, sensationalist journalism and Hollywood films. 

Living Queer History: Remembrance and Belonging in a Southern City
by Gregory Samantha Rosenthal (Hoopla eBook) 
Combining historical analysis, theory, and memoir, Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, PhD documents her story of coming out as a trans woman alongside the history of the LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia. 

Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern
edited by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowka (Hoopla eBook)
This text’s contributors consider how social experiences of gender functioned as distinct from sex assigned at birth in the medieval and early modern periods. 

The Risk It Take to Bloom: On Life and Liberation
by Raquel Willis (physical, eBook, e-audiobook)
Situated between the Obama and first Trump administrations, journalist and activist Raquel Willis shares her experiences of coming out, influenced by the epidemic of violence against trans women of color, and how that led her to become one of the most formidable Black trans activists in history.

Written by:
Allison Woodley
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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Stranger in the Woods (2017) by Michael Finkel

19 Mar

The Stranger in the Woods is the true account of Christopher Knight’s 27 year hermit journey in the Maine woods. No human contact, no conversation, no care for the outside world, just survival, and his own heartbeat against nature. He stole to survive, but took only what he needed. What’s remarkable about this book, besides its subject, is it achieves something consistent in its truth and a consistent question: Why?

Book cover showing a dense and shadowy forest in tinted greens. Handwritten white chalk text reads “The Stranger in the Woods” and “The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit.” In the background, a truck is hidden in the trees. The author's name, “Michael Finkel" is at the bottom.

Why do we need people and contact? Why do we succumb to society’s expectations? Why don’t we push harder to connect with universal truths? Why do we not pull away more from assumptions of who we should be. 

Knight’s story is not a sensationalized spew of intrigue, mystery, and crime, but an honest and connective account of someone who escaped authority and accountability for almost three decades. In a way, I came to respect Knight and his commitment to something he truly believed in, even if he knew it was wrong (if you think of it in terms of fiction, he’s a flawed antagonist, doing what he believes is right). 

What worked so well for me, is that Finkel lets the silence between Knight’s actions breath, giving us time to process both the magnificence of Finkel’s journey along with its mistakes. 

Finkel interviewed Knight extensively (though Knight was always reluctant and evasive), and he contextualizes Knight’s words with a blend of philosophy, psychology, and history. The book asks: Is solitude an illness, a spiritual awakening, a radical rejection, or just a preference?

A makeshift campsite in a wooded forest. Tarps are strung between trees to form a shelter, with clothing hanging from lines. Buckets, plastic bins, a propane tank, pots, and other survival gear are scattered on the ground and tied to trees, showing Christopher Knight's living setup deep in the woods.

Above is a photo of Knight’s camp. I felt the weight of being alone with Knight throughout the book, and I sympathized with him. At a certain point, I perhaps even wanted to follow in his footsteps (just an interesting thing to think about). 

And why did my mind go there? Because Knight’s mind simply switched, as all of ours has at some point (even if to this extreme.) There was no traumatic event or dramatic falling out. He just walked into the forest.

There is a powerful detail Finkel shares in Knight’s memory that haunts and fascinates me: Knight never felt lonely in the woods and simply forgot what it felt like to need people.

Have you read The Stranger in the Woods? What did you think? Comment below.

If you haven’t read it, you can reserve it in the BCCLS system here. 

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Written by:
Sean Willey
Information and Digital Services Assistant

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