Like a lot of trans women of my generation, I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy novels to transport me away from a world where I wasn’t accepted for myself. I chose instead to inhabit worlds where clever downtrodden thieves could shake the foundations of empires, and where great heroes could ride dragons or catapult themselves to the stars. But what I never saw in all of those many alternate worlds of possibility was someone like me. So, I set out to write some.
Now, more years later than I’d care to admit, trans women’s representation in SFF is still in its most nascent stages. When I decided to write this article, listing five SFF books with trans women protagonists, I found that trans women’s representation is limited enough that compiling a list of five books was a challenge. We live in a world today where the gold standard for SFF representation is work that is in some form or fashion “own voices,” but trans women are as under-represented in the publishing industry as we are in literature. For that reason, I’ve included books by cis authors who have written trans women protagonists in their fiction. While I agree with the general principles of the own voices movement, as a trans woman who grew up desperate to see herself in fiction in some form, I owe a debt to those cis authors who took the time to portray trans women characters in a positive light. Many portrayals of transgender characters written by cis authors were extremely important to some of my dearest friends, inspiring them to take up the pen and craft new characters of their own. My hope is that in another ten years’ time, there will be far too many trans women protagonists in SFF for a five book list to even scratch the surface of the subject. Until then, I hope this list gives readers the chance to explore new worlds from our perspective.
Dreadnought and Sovereign (The Nemesis Series) by April Daniels
Okay, I admit it, I’m cheating, but compiling a list of five SFF books with trans women protagonists is HARD folks! So, not only am I counting Superhero fiction as SFF, I’m counting it twice. When I was making this list, I asked my friends if superhero fiction counted as SFF, specifically so I could include these books, and my favorite response was from a friend who said, “Punching TERFs with superpowers is my fantasy!” But there’s a lot more to Dreadnought and Sovereign than the pure cathartic glee of a trans woman with superman-esque powers giving TERFs and transphobes their well-deserved comeuppance. As a YA series, these books explore what it’s like to be a young trans woman through the eyes of the protagonist, Danny. She faces a lot of the struggles we all do—the fight for acceptance, dealing with unsupportive parents, facing hostility from a society that doesn’t even want to understand our perspective on the world. But it’s not all doom and gloom: The Nemesis series also explores the joys of queer romance, the complexities of community politics, and so much more. If you haven’t read these books yet, I highly recommend them, whatever age you are.
The Bone Palace by Amanda Downum
While Amanda Downum isn’t a trans woman, her protagonist in The Bone Palace, Savedra Severos, certainly is. Raised to be the crown prince’s rival, Savedra has instead become his mistress, and has to cope with her lover needing to marry a princess to produce a legitimate heir, leading to murder most foul, assassinations, missing persons, court politics, and even the odd underground vampire coven. Throughout it all Savedra protects those around her, displaying superlative talents with a sword. Published all the way back in 2010, this fantasy thriller was ahead of its time in providing positive portrayals of trans women in fiction, and deserves a look.
Full Fathom Five by Max Gladstone
Kai, the protagonist of Full Fathom Five, is a trans woman, and while her trans status is deftly interwoven throughout the story in subtle ways, her identity is nonetheless important to the book’s conclusion. A complex story of a trans woman who crafts gods in the form of idols, Full Fathom Five is a difficult work to summarize in a paragraph, but I think Kai’s arc is fundamentally about faith and belief as sources of heroic strength, something that lots of trans women can easily relate to. If you like fantasy that mixes religion and investment banking (and who doesn’t?), then Full Fathom Five is definitely one to check out.
Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane
I’m cheating again by including a book which doesn’t release until August of 2022, but sometimes a book comes along that is important enough that it’s worth waiting for. I’ve had the pleasure of reading this book early, and Wrath Goddess Sing is literary fantasy at its finest, a retelling of the Iliad in which Achilles is a trans woman demigoddess who is fighting a war presided over by terrifying, blood-thirsty gods who fuel themselves through human sacrifice. I won’t spoil the unique directions Deane takes the plot, but I was thrilled to see a novel which puts trans women back where we belong—at the very origins of epic fantasy as a genre. Look for this one next year, coming from William Morrow.
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Gifting Fire
Alina Boyden is a cultural anthropologist focused on organized communities of transgender women in Pakistan, known as khwaja siras, or more popularly as hijras, focusing on how they use their unique community organization to advance the fight for their rights at home and abroad—something which has inspired her, as a transgender woman, in her own battles for civil rights in the U.S. as she fought for transgender care in a major court case with the ACLU.
Pardon for going off on a tangent, but I’m surprised there’d be any question whether superhero fiction counted as science fiction or fantasy. Superhero comics have always been grounded in both genres, starting with Superman’s origin as a refugee from a dying planet (with his powers on Earth being a conscious inversion of John Carter’s superpowers in the lower gravity of Mars) and Wonder Woman’s foundations in Greek mythology and heroic epics. Many Golden and Silver Age superhero comics were written by SF authors like Gardner Fox, Otto Binder, and Alfred Bester.
Indeed, part of what influenced my hard-SF superhero novel Only Superhuman (Tor, 2012) was that I realized a lot of the transhumanist SF novels and stories I was seeing around that time effectively were superhero fiction in all but name — stories about augmented law enforcers or vigilantes using extraordinary powers to fight bad guys. At the time, I’d been planning to do something similar with my heroine, since my goal was a more plausible take on superheroics; but when I saw how much SF was already telling superhero stories without admitting it, I realized that if I wanted to stand out from the pack, I should admit it and embrace the superhero aspect fully, coming up with credible justifications for the use of costumes, code names, and such.
Though not exactly on point with female trans protagonists, I would highly recommend Starless by Jacqueline Carey. Without giving too much away, it’s very much an epic fantasy novel that delves deep into gender identity. It may apply more of a nonbinary lense but I think it also depends on the readers perspective.
Would the anthology Star Trek: The Lives of Dax count? Dax was a genderless symbiont that blended personalities with a succession of humanoid (Trill) hosts, and the two hosts featured on Deep Space Nine, Jadzia and Ezri, were women who remembered their former identities as men. The anthology has one story for each of Dax’s nine hosts (four male, five female), framed by Ezri reminiscing in the present day. Trill aren’t quite trans characters, but I gather that they’re fairly popular with trans viewers, and the anthology’s the most Dax-centric book I can think of. (Though it’s not technically a novel.)
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi features a trans girl as the protagonist (it’s YA, so she’s a kid). Emezi is NB and all of their work deals with gender in interesting ways.
The Chorus of Dragons series has a number of trans characters, as well as some sequential hemaphrodites and a society built around transformation magic that treats bodies like temporary decorations.
Samuel Delany: Triton (has at least two, including – eventually – the very irritating lead character); John Varley: The Ophiuchi Hotline (and associated short stories). George Effinger: When Gravity Fails (OK – the protagonist’s girlfriend rather than the lead). Frederik Pohl: Day Million.
I’m just going to mention my 2006 novel Glasshouse here and tiptoe away. (It was shortlisted for the Hugo in 2007, which is an unexpected outcome for something that basically started out as John Varley Eight Worlds fanfic.)
I loved Glasshouse, but its protagonist is not a trans woman.
Four Profound Weaves by R B Lemberg is a secondary world fantasy with two trans main characters, one male, one female. I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard good things.
Quantum Teens Are Go is a fun YA scifi comic with a trans heroine.
The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan is a weird fantasy novel with a trans woman love interest, written by a trans woman. This book blew my mind in high school and I loved the trans character.
Girl Haven is a middle grade comic about a trans girl in a magical world of women.
Full Fathom Five is definitely my favorite!
I’d never heard of those. I’ve read fantasy with trans men in major roles (including but not limited to three sets of Seanan McGuire novels), and a few non-binary characters, but am having much more trouble recalling fantasy with trans women. There’s one in a Tamora Pierce novel, and one or maybe two in the Crimson Empire trilogy by Alex Marshall, but they’re largely peripheral.
As someone who was lucky enough to be a beta reader for Wrath Goddess Sing, I cannot stress highly enough how incredible it is. It will absolutely be worth the wait.
Also, while the protagonist of Charlie Jane Anders’s Victories Greater Than Death isn’t a trans woman, her love interest is, and said love interest becomes a viewpoint character in the sequel (which is also due out next year, if I’m not mistaken)
Someone ought to compile a Top Ten list of trans-themed, trans-written SFF short stories , graphic novels, SFnal-adjacent works.
@8 & @9
I was going to mention Glasshouse too, but I wasn’t exactly sure if Reeve counts as a trans woman (or Sam a trans man).
As Charlie is part of this discussion, I’ll ask directly. Was this part of Glasshouse intended as an exploration of trans experience?
Ryka Aoki, who I believe is a trans woman, has a new book coming out called Light from Uncommon Stars. It is wonderful! Music, donuts, hell, aliens and more.
For the YA crowd, Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series (related to Percy Jackson but with Norse gods) has a major- meaning top 5 in importance – character who is trans. I can’t even recall the birth sex of the character, who spends parts of the books with both gender aspects featured .
There’s a trans man in Becky Chambers’ novella “To Be Taught, If Fortunate”, although that book isn’t about gender — the character is just incidentally trans.
It looks like The Bone Palace is second in a series. Does anyone know if reading the first is a requirement? Or are the books more like romance series where each installment is mostly standalone?
It looks like The Bone Palace is the second book in a series. Does anyone know if reading the first book is a requirement to understanding the second? Or is the series more like a romance one, where each book is mostly standalone?
(I guess this also applies to Full Fathom Five.)
Thanks so much for this Alina. I loved Dreadnaught. It’s deeply witty and heart-breaking – from Danny having to rescue her unaccepting dad without him knowing it’s her, to the reaction of her erstwhile best friend when she rejects his advances. I will definitely check out the others, some of which I hadn’t heard of.
I also wanted to mention my own Luna Press epic fantasy novella (yep you read that right), Dread & the Broken Witch. It features an awesome trans woman protagonist, although I should make clear her ‘brokenness’ is not to do with her gender identify. There’s more about it here.
First Sister has a major non binary character
The Confluence saga by Jennifer Foehner Wells is fun SFF, IMO, and features characters from across the gender identity spectrum. Currently at 5 books, I think, maybe more as I’ve lost track and think I’ll pick it back up when I finish my current read.
Sufficiently Advanced Magic (and currently 2 sequels) by Andrew Rowe falls under the Progression Fantasy subgenre but has a NB character in it and does a pretty good job of not only introducing them but showing acceptance as mainstream. Plus, MC is relatively Asexual because he shows some potential romantic interest in both sexes but doesn’t seem sexually interested, so maybe Aro.
@21/Andi: “although that book isn’t about gender — the character is just incidentally trans.”
Isn’t that the ideal, though? To treat trans identity as matter-of-factly and casually as cis identity has always been treated? To get to the point where trans people aren’t seen only as an “issue” but are just included in everyday life with everyone else?
I believe representation is critical. As a girl, none of the things I was forced to read in school had any female characters who were protagonists. And the few side characters were either evil (if they weren’t following an acceptable female role) or there just for eye candy, or so minor as to be simple background. In my reading for fun, there were very few good female characters and the few there were also tended to follow female roles of wanting to be wives and mothers if they hadn’t already achieved that. I was in my 30s before discovering woman characters who were not in the least interested in marriage or children and smart but not evil.
So I try to put a wide variety of characters in my own writing who are not commonly seen in books. In my book, To the Bitter End, several of the subplots involve trans characters or the families of trans characters. It’s the second book of a science fiction trilogy about a war. Book one, A Line in the Sand, is about the leading to the war. To the Bitter End is about the war. And the soon to be released final volume is about the aftermath. Book one only mentions the trans character in passing as the yeoman to the Captain of a large military vessel. Book three has a larger subplot for the trans character, but not as large as Book Two.
The books are epic in scope so there is not really any one character you can point to as the protagonist. But they are varied and some of my favorites are the trans couple separated by the war (only one is in the military), the teenage boy whose prank takes a disastrous turn who has to learn how to rebuild his life, the middle-aged female starship engineer who finds love, but doesn’t want to have children, the exiled alien who is not neurotypical for his species.
I suppose you can see, these are not typical military science fiction. I’m interested in how people of all kinds deal with the events of a civil war. I grew up under the shadow of the aftermath of WWII. As a child my father and the fathers of most of my classmates were in that war or Korea. Some were physically permanently damaged, some were emotionally damaged, some seemed relatively ok. Our mothers told stories of coping on the home front during the war. It affected everyone around me no matter the economic class, the race, the religion, the sexual orientation (although that was generally kept secret if it wasn’t the norm). And I grew up on the grounds of a VA hospital, so I saw the long-term impact of the war in the patients with what we now call PTSD, who were warehouses because they had no effective treatment. They loved interacting with the kids who lived there because having a family and children was something denied them.
I am surprised that Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignotta series was not included. They look at gender more as a reflection of personality rather than physical traits.
Most of these books seem fairly recent; I wish for your sake you had known of Jean Marie Stine, a trans-woman who has been publishing Science Fiction since the 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Marie_Stine
The title of 2 recent anthologies of her work tells it all, I think: “Herstory & Other Science Fictions” and “Trans-Sexual: Tales for Gender Queers”.
Not sure if you consider it trans, but all of the stories in John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” milieu have people changing their sex as frequently and easily as we would have dental procedures. Anna Bach & Hildy Johnson, main protagonists, were both born male but are female for most of the stories. The series is comprised of 4 novels and 18 short stories; one of the short stories, ‘Options’ is focused on the social impact of the easy sex changes and transsexualism.
Recognition to Stephen Clark for previously bringing John Varley into this discussion.
As a matter of personal opinion, my favorite author is Robert Heinlein, and I consider Varley’s work some of the most Heinleinesque out there.
I’m non-binary myself, and always look for those who are ‘outside’ the gender binary in fiction and authors.
@30 – Really nice point and well said.
I was reminded of similar representation issues when reading Marko Kloos’ Frontlines series, which has a minor gay male character and…it makes no plot difference except for hopeful discussions of the main character and his wife, and this male character and his husband, getting together for drinks and good times after the war is over.
This is a great line up! I will be passing this along to a friend. I do want to know if you have any recommendations for Trans men protagonist books?
There are the classic Sam Delany novels.
@29/ChristopherLBennett: Nothing wrong with stories that integrate trans people as just another character.
But a lot of really good queer SFF doesn’t take cis identity or everyday life for granted. If we can imagine warp drives, time travel, dragons, and magic systems, why not imagine how fluid, plural, or elective gender would change things like kinship, class, and generational wealth? Why assume that an AI, clone, or alien would be gendered according to 20th-century values?
Beyond that, there’s a rich history of using SFF to explore current social concerns. So I really don’t mind it when SFF uses unobtanium or handwavium as a metaphor for saying things about anti-trans prejudice, trans culture, or trans identity formation if it’s done well. One of my current faves is A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential,which nicely hits the parallels between gender and cloned soldier identity crisis stories.
@36/KaeS: Of course there’s no need to pick one or the other. They’re both worth doing, which is why I didn’t think it was necessary to include a disclaimer that a book treated trans identity incidentally. I figure stories like that are part and parcel of what we’re looking for here, rather than an exception to it.
While science fiction has always been a good vehicle for allegory about contemporary problems, I’ve always liked to focus on its more optimistic potential to inspire by example, to show what a better world would look like so we know what to work toward. It’s valuable to point out the problems that exist, but it’s also important to suggest solutions. Fiction set in the future can inspire hope by showing a world where the fights for equality being waged today have been won.
I have to mention John Varley’s “Steel Beach” in this list. It’s a trans paradise in Luna, when you can just go down to Change Alley, pay your shekels, sit down with the stylist and plan out your dream body. Every jot and tittle, down to the cute little dimples on your rump, exactly as you want it. Then the nanos are programmed, and you step into a tank and take a nap. You step out of the tank later, everything all replaced and reshaped to your specification. You aren’t even cosmetically changed, organs have been cloned, with some haploid/diploid jiggery-pokery so you get XX girl bits or XY boy bits when your body doesn’t have ’em. You can even have your old bits stored, frozen, in case you want to switch back some weekend, but the protagonist, Hildebrandt/Hildegarde “Hildy” Johnson gets them freshly cloned. In this book, Hildy was born as Maria, but became Mario, then Hildebrandt for professional reasons…then Hildebrandt decides to go back and becomes Hildegarde in one of the most lovingly wonderful scenes.
The reasons WHY Hildy comes to these decisions, and what’s up with the Lunar Central Computer I leave for others to read. Oddly enough, this has not been the central plot of the book. Important, but not primary. Other stuff happens, too, and if you haven’t read it, read it. I also recommend “The Golden Globe”, another 8 Worlds book that connects back to Steel Beach. The protagonist of Globe isn’t trans, but he does change his outward appearance several times over the course of the book, as he’s an actor and sometimes plays an ingenue role, as he puts it.
There’s a fair bit of sort-of trans themes in some of Jack Chalker’s books, enough so that I corresponded with him about it before he passed away. He just liked stories about the mutability of living things and liked transformation stories. They sorta come across as “forced feminization” in some of them, but the Well World saga was less so than, say, the Spirits of Flux and Anchor, which made forced feminization by transformation a part of a totalitarian takeover.
I suppose it might be a novella instead of a novel, but The City of a Thousand Feelings by Anya Johanna DeNiro is fantasy centered on two trans women (and the author identifies as a trans woman): http://www.aqueductpress.com/books/978-1-61976-177-3.php
Also worth noting is Trans Wizard Harriet Porber and the Bad Boy Parasaurolophus: An Adult Romance Novel by Chuck Tingle, centered on a trans woman human wizard and her trans man dinosaur boyfriend (while a parody of the YA series I won’t name, this is definitely adult-content spec-fic. Also, metafiction).
@10 I’d like to second the recommendation of The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg (now a Nebula finalist!). Lemberg’s Birdverse stories feature a lot of trans and nonbinary characters as well as positive representation for aging, autistic, and asexual characters. One ruler is genderfluid and hosts an annual festival for people who want to transition physically with the aid of magic. Most of the Birdverse stories are online, and “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” is chronologically prior to The Four Profound Weaves – http://www.birdverse.net/where-to-find-more-birdverse-stories-and-poems/
To throw a recent (just published this week, although it was serialized over the past year or so on his Patreon) novel, The Hungry Dreaming by Craig Schaefer (excellent contemporary/urban fantasy, one of the protagonists is trans).
@23 Full Fathom Five can be read on its own. Some of the characters from the other books show up, but the plots in the other books aren’t relevant to the story. They’re all amazing though.
Seven Devils is another one. It has 2 authors… I wanna day Elizabeth Lam is one author but I’ve forgotten! I think this will be a duology
@34 TLOU15: Others will probably have more recommendations, but The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie is a great book I’ve read with a trans man protagonist. His being trans doesn’t affect the plot in any way, but it informs the character, and some of his interactions with other characters.
@22:
The Bone Palace stands alone, and was a quantum leap forward in quality from the first (The Drowning City), which was fine, but not overwhelming. The Bone Palace blew me away when it was first published; I nominated it in vain for the Hugo. Sadly, I suspect that as a December release and middle book of a trilogy it was disadvantaged in the awards process. From my contemporaneous review notes on it, with language updated a bit:
The general premise is CSI: Necromancy.
– LGBT and poly characters in quantity, no tokenism, mix of relationships includes cisM/cisM, cisM/transF, cisF/transF, cisF/cisF, and cisM/cisF; multiple bisexual characters; one minor trans character in addition to one major
– vampires, but not sparkly or stupid; add in F/vampM, M/vampM, M/vampF
– everything human treated as fairly routine; some mild prejudice, but overall people are much more shocked by (1) vampire sex and (2) sex with a member of a rival family than by any combinations of bits
There don’t even seem to be terms for sexual orientation in this milieu.
This all makes it sound like it’s all about Teh Secks. Not at all. It’s just amazing to see this many alt-elements incorporated seamlessly into one novel without it becoming Look, It’s Gay|Poly|TG Fiction! This is one of those “we won!” books in this regard.
I haven’t reread it or read the third in the trilogy, but I obviously should…
Great list! THE BONE PALACE and WRATH GODDESS SING are both must-reads!
I’d add SONGS OF SEFATE by Sarah Chorn (fantasy, transgender protagonist), NO MAN OF WOMAN BORN by Ana Mardoll (fantasy, transgender protagonist), PRINCESS HOLY AURA by Ryk E Spoor (superheroes, transgenderprotagonist), PRINCE(SS) by Sara Gravatt-Wimsatt (fantasy, transgender protagonist), & THE TAMIR TRIAD by Lynn Flewelling (fantasy, fantastic exploration of gender identity).
Looking deeper into the shelves, there are a few intersex fantasies I’ve had to add as well, including THE BOOK OF SHADOWS by James Reese, FIRST HISTORY by Mary Gentle, and RAPTOR by Gary Jennings.
I come to sing the praises of Queen of Iron Years by Lyn McConchie (NZ) and Sharman Horwood (Canada), first published in 2011. It won the 2013 Sir Julius Vogel award for Best Novel (read about the award here). I love this book. The writing is lyrical and solid, the story deeply fascinating (Boadicea! Time travel! An STD linked to nonbinary folk [ooh, the evil is strong in the mass populace against these folk, reminiscent of mainstream attitudes during the first decade of AIDS], too) (and more!) The main character is a man who wants to transition into being a woman and has already started changing some of his(her) physical characteristics. (Apologies if pronoun use here is not in line with current usage; not sure how else to word it.) Themes of fighting oppression, finding acceptance, and self-sacrifice for the “common” good are woven through the novel. It makes me cry every time I’ve read it, because it makes me care about the characters and the story just has such a big heart. I’m cis female, Lyn and Sharman are friends of mine (long-distance), just for a disclaimer, but this book is well worth any reader’s time. Copies are still available in various places. :-)
Merely trans-adjacent, but the inciting incident of Seanan McGuire’s latest Wayward Children book, “Across The Green Grass Fields”, is a girl learning that she is chromosomally XY (androgen insensitive) and telling the wrong person.
@31 I thought the society as a whole didn’t put much emphasis on gender at all and used gender neutral pronouns exclusively, and it was only the unreliable narrator who insisted on gendering people.
The excellent literary SF novel and Lambda Award finalist, The Seep by Chana Porter, is an alien invasion novel with a middle-aged biracial trans lesbian protagonist. Depending on how you look at it, Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka’s trans identity may be viewed as incidental to the plot or central to the theme. The alien invasion gets a quite imaginative spin, and I found Trina’s skeptical, curmudgeonly voice quite congenial.
A science fiction thriller called The Jellyfish Device was just released and it features a trans woman as one of the main characters. It’s a dark world where fanatics persecute LGBTQ people and many have gone back in the closet. There is more to it than that and its also a cautionary tale about political religious and technological changes.