The first story I ever let myself write about gender was about a shape-shifting super spy. It was the summer of 2018 during my third week at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop. I’d come out to my cohort as a trans woman at the end of the first week. I’d worn a dress to workshop in week two. Finally allowing myself to write about gender felt like the next logical step. This was all very new. I’d only just accepted my womanhood a few months prior and hardly anyone besides my partner knew the truth about my gender. Coming out and making art about transness with a group of people who were still essentially strangers might have felt daunting, but there was something about the environment at Clarion that made me feel this shift was safe and welcome. It wasn’t just the fact that I was in a cohort of people I trusted, including other queer writers, but the reality-bending work I was reading every day in my sparse UCSD dorm room.
I’ve always felt that there’s an inherent link between trans writing and science fiction/fantasy. Both are genres which aim to upend and challenge the norms of our reality by blending the impossible and the soon to be possible. Transness does the same. Rejecting a predetermined reality is at the core of accepting a non-cisgender life. By existing in an openly trans body, you challenge the invisible social laws that weigh heavy on our culture. You reject the nature of your body, willing it to mold and bend itself to your will, your image of self.
Our current reality is violently fighting the rebellion of trans bodies. Every day, trans people like me wake up to another deadly law, another broadcasted debate on our right to exist, another supposedly progressive celebrity claiming we are misguided souls or predators, another murder. Reading trans fiction this Pride, particularly when it rejects the nature of our flawed and oppressive reality, is a small but crucial way to celebrate and champion our voices and experiences at a moment when they need to be listened to. Also, you get to read some cool as hell stories about time travel, vampires, shapeshifting, spaceships, and all the other good stuff.
The stories I’ve included below don’t even come close to including the wide breadth of bizarre and beautiful fiction written by trans voices. They are ten beautiful, challenging, and easily accessible works of art, but please don’t make this the end. Check out the nominees for the annual Otherwise Awards for some of the best gender-focused speculative fiction published each year. Or purchase trans anthologies like the discontinued but wonderful Transcendent series or Little Puss Press’s newly reprinted Meanwhile, Elsewhere.
Charlie Jane Anders – “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue”
Charlie Jane Anders may be the most famous contemporary trans writer of speculative and fantastic fiction. While plenty of her work includes trans characters or thematically plays with gender identity, it’s her story “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” that I find myself thinking of most often. Written on the eve of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” imagines a dystopic form of anti-trans conversion therapy that crosses the line into moments of pure body horror. It’s a harrowing read and Anders herself has even said that this is a story that she has trouble revisiting for public events. I spent close to an hour after my first read lying down on my couch in a dark room. Despite the story’s genuinely traumatic narrative, I very much encourage readers, especially cis readers, to read it. Anders captures better than almost any other writer or story the unnatural and destructive nature of forced detransition, which in this current moment feels necessary.
Nino Cipri – “The Shape of My Name”
While Nino Cipri denies that this was their intention, it’s hard to read “The Shape of My Name” and not see it is as a needed trans reclamation of Robert Heinlein’s iconic time travel story “All You Zombies.” Like “Zombies,” Cipri’s story is a tightly structured time travel narrative that establishes a satisfying time loop that pays off more and more with each read. However, where Heinlein used his protagonist’s intersex identity as a means to a storytelling end, Cipri utilizes time travel as a method by which their narrator discovers and actualizes their gender. In the process, “The Shape of My Name” becomes not only a generation-hopping family saga but about a story about fighting for a self-determined future.
Calvin Gimpelevich – “Burned Location”
Last I checked, Calvin Gimpelevich’s fantastic collection of speculative short fiction, Invasions, is no longer in print. It’s a shame considering that he’s one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction, especially when it comes to trans identity. His 2022 story “Burned Location” is one of his best and is, thankfully, still available online through the Kenyon Review. Set in a reality where people are able to send custom-made dreams to others while they sleep, Gimpelevich naturally touches on how this invention offers an avenue to explore gender and transness, but expands it into a story of crossed boundaries in queer relationships and the way new technologies come with their own private invasions.
Innocent Chizaram Ilo – “Of Warps and Wefts”
Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s fantastical short story “Of Warps and Wefts,” a deserved finalist for the 2019 Otherwise Award, imagines a reality where marriage initiates a nightly transformation of sex for both partners. During the day, our narrator is Chime, wife to her husband Ding, but at night she transforms into Dime, husband to another woman named Felicity. The strained union between Chime and Ding, who undergoes his own daily transformation into Ping and is married to an unseen dragon-poacher, forms the emotional scaffolding of Ilo’s story as both spouses attempt to navigate the different roles they operate inside and outside their relationship. It’s one of the more delightfully strange works of trans SFF I’ve read, but mixed within a story that is bursting with disarming, surreal images is a very smart depiction of fluid gender identity and experience.
Naomi Kanakia – “Everquest”
If you are a trans gamer, it’s practically a guarantee that some of your first experiments with gender were digital. I absolutely created more than a few female Night Elves on my friend’s World of Warcraft account when I was a deep-in-the-closet preteen. Naomi Kanakia’s “Everquest” dives deep into this relationship between avatar and self. By literalizing the fantasy of this transformation, Kanakia captures a uniquely trans feeling of escape that gaming allows and ends in a space that is both melancholy but also undeniably hopeful and at peace.
K.M. Szpara – “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time”
Vampires already straddle the extreme binaries of life and death, so it seems only natural that there would be some stellar trans fiction that explores the iconic creatures of the night. My personal favorite tranpire tale is K.M. Sparza’s phenomenal novelette “Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time.” After Finley is bitten during a hookup with a vampire named Andreas, he is forced to navigate the publicly uncharted space of being an undead trans man. In Finley’s reality both vampires and trans people are known commodities to the medical establishment, but there is little to no scientific literature about the intersection between the two. Through this premise, Sparza conducts a wonderfully smart exploration of the self-medication that is all too common in the trans community while still telling a compelling and emotional vampire story.
An Owomoyela – “Three Points Masculine”
Whereas Charlie Jane Anders imagined a dystopian future where trans people are hunted down and suppressed by the state, An Owomoyela crafts a parallel reality where gender identity is tested and enforced by a fascist algorithm. At first glance, the social structure we witness in “Three Points Masculine” may seem somewhat preferable to our current culture. Gender identity is determined not by birth sex but by a complex test that evaluates multiple different aspects of a person before assigning societally dictated gender roles, but the military-police state still enforces a clearly dictated gender binary of masculinity and femininity. Using this premise, Owomoyela offers a pointed critique of queer assimilationism. Sure, there may be some trans people that benefit from there being an official test that provides them with government recognition and resources, but it instead sets up another standard by which gender can be judged and enforced by the holders of power and allows little to no room for identities that don’t fit neatly into a binary.
R.B. Lemberg – “To Balance the Weight of Khalem”
While there are many powerful trans narratives included throughout R.B. Lemberg’s lyrical and vividly imagined shared fantasy world, “the Birdverse,” I find myself revisiting “To Balance the Weight of Khelem” most often. Lemberg introduces us to an initially unnamed narrator who finds themselves trying to flee one wartorn country for another while also encountering other, sometimes magical, displaced people seeking refuge. Our world faces a similar moment of crisis as trans people and their families flee various US states to escape from oppressive laws that aim to separate trans children from their parents or strip away necessary medical care. A Ukranian immigrant themselves, Lemberg writes a heartfelt examination of migration and the complications it creates for one’s identity, including gender.
Theodora Ward – “Want Itself is a Treasure in Heaven”
Theodora Ward’s “Want Itself is a Treasure in Heaven” is only weeks old and it has already become one of my favorite works of trans sci-fi. Its central conceit involves a neurological link that allows two users to enter one another’s minds and bodies as a passive observer. Our trans woman narrator quickly becomes fixated on linking with her cis woman partner and in turn develops an addiction to the disassociating drug used to acclimate someone post-link. Ward’s narrator goes through a spiraling rabbit hole of dysphoria, obsession, and grief that is all too familiar to the experiences of myself and many other trans women. Like so much of the best science fiction, Ward uses her premise to touch on an underdiscussed human truth but also, thankfully, offers a lifeline out of despair.
Violet Allen – “The Venus Effect”
While Violet Allen’s “The Venus Effect” deals more directly with race than gender, there is still something inherently trans about her rightfully praised work of metafiction. Hopping between genres and perspectives, Allen writes iteration after iteration of the same story that is unable to escape the same violent end: the murder of the story’s unarmed, innocent Black protagonist by the police. The narrative structure of “The Venus Effect” inherently transes the formula of storytelling but also calls into question the role that empathy plays in the part of the reader. Fiction may be a tool for the writer to connect emotionally with the reader, but real societal change comes from internalizing those connections and using them to inform how you interact with the world around you. At a certain point, you need to take that empathy and act. I hope you do so.
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Note: The original version of this list included Vajra Chandrasekera’s “Rhizomatic Diplomacy,” a high-concept story that explores shattered identity and dysphoria against the backdrop of interspecies warfare. Although Chandrasekera is not a trans author, the story remains well worth seeking out, and I highly recommend it.
Nic Anstett, a writer from Baltimore, MD, loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, University of Oregon’s MFA program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop where she was a 2021 Scholar. Her published and forthcoming fiction can be found in Witness Magazine, Passages North, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, Lightspeed, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. Nic has also written essays and articles for publications such as Autostraddle and Tor.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
