The Diverse Families bookshelf was created and funded through numerous grants. Due to lack of additional grants and the loss of key personnel, the project has come to an end. We have tremendously enjoyed creating this database and hope that it can help bring readers and books together.
Browse by LGBTQ:
Intersex
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Alex As Well
Alyssa Brugman
Alex has turned vegetarian, changed schools, stopped taking her medications, and created a new identity. An identity that shakes her world. And Alex - the other Alex - has a lot to say about it.
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Annabel
Kathleen Winter
Born a boy and a girl but raised as a boy, Wayne or "Annabel" struggles with his identity growing up in a small Canadian town and seeks freedom by moving to the city.
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As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl
John Colapinto
In 1967, after a baby boy suffered a botched circumcision, his family agreed to a radical treatment. On the advice of a renowned expert in gender identity and sexual reassignment, the boy was surgically altered to live as a girl. This book is the human drama of one man's - and one family's - amazing survival in the face of odds.
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Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out
Susan Kuklin
Author and photographer Susan Kuklin met and interviewed six transgender or gender-neutral young adults and used her considerable skills to represent them thoughtfully and respectfully before, during, and after their personal acknowledgment of gender preference. Portraits, family photographs, and candid images grace the pages, augmenting the emotional and physical journey each youth has taken. Each honest discussion and disclosure, whether joyful or heartbreaking, is completely different from the other because of family dynamics, living situations, gender, and the transition these teens make in recognition of their true selves.
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Born Both: An Intersex Life
Hida Viloria
From Hida Viloria, writer and intersex activist, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of life, love, and gender identity as an intact intersex person, as well as a call to action for justice for intersex people. Hida Viloria was raised as a girl but discovered early on that he/r body was different. Unlike most people who are born intersex in the first world--meaning they have genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, and/or chromosomal patterns that do not fit standard definitions of male or female--Hida had the freedom to explore the person s/he was born to be because he/r parents did not agree to have he/r sex characteristics surgically altered at birth. It wasn't until s/he was 26 and encountered the term "intersex" in a San Francisco newspaper that s/he finally had a name for he/r difference. That's when s/he began to explore what it means to live in the space between genders--to be both and neither. As s/he began to reach out to others like he/r, however, Hida discovered that most intersex people had been scarred, both physically and psychologically, by infant surgeries and hormone treatments meant to "correct" their bodies. Eager to help end this practice, Hida came out as intersex at a national and then international level. By answering the question "Are you a boy or a girl?" with "I'm both," Hida's helped blaze a trail for people--particularly intersex and genderqueer/non-binary people--to celebrate the middle space where male and female are not separate and opposite but entwined. Born Both is an intimate and powerful account of Hida's search for authentic identity and love in a world that insists on categorizing people into either/or.
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Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite
Lianne Simon
Jamie was born with a testis, an ovary, and a pixie face. After minor surgery and a few years on testosterone, his parents say he can be a boy, but he sees an elfin princess in the mirror. To become the man his parents expect, Jamie must leave behind a girl's hopes and dreams. At sixteen, the four-foot-eleven soprano moves from a sheltered home school to a boys' dorm at college. The elfin princess can live in the books Jameson reads and nobody has to find out he isn't like other boys. When a medical student tells Jamie he should have been raised female, Jamie sets out on a perilous journey to adulthood. The elfin princess can thrive, but will she risk losing her family and her education for a boy who may desert her, or a toddler she may never be allowed to adopt?
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Dear Herculine
Aaron Apps
A book- length epistolary collection of hybrid-, trans-, and inter-genre prose, DEAR HERCULINE is an intertextual project that recalls portions of the 19th-century French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin's memoirs, discovered and re- published by Michel Foucault. The medical reassignment of Herculine's gender eventually led to his/her death in February of 1868. Herculine's experiences are set against and interwoven into the author's experiences as an intersexed body through the epistolary form.
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Double Exposure
Bridget Birdsall
Fifteen-year-old Alyx Atlas starts school in a new state with a new identity--as a girl--but a bully on the basketball court threatens to reveal that Alyx is an intersex person, which could disqualify Alyx and the team from playing in the state championship game.
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Golden Boy
Abigail Tarttelin
The Walker family is good at keeping secrets from the world. They are even better at keeping them from each other. Max Walker is a golden boy. Attractive, intelligent, and athletic, he's the perfect son, the perfect friend, and the perfect crush for the girls in his school. He's even really nice to his little brother. Karen, Max's mother, is a highly successful criminal lawyer, determined to maintain the fac̦ade of effortless excellence she has constructed through the years. Now that the boys are getting older, now that she won't have as much control, she worries that the fac̦ade might soon begin to crumble. Adding to the tension, her husband, Steve, has chosen this moment to stand for election to Parliament. The spotlight of the media is about to encircle their lives. The Walkers are hiding something, you see. Max is special. Max is different. Max is intersex. When an enigmatic childhood friend named Hunter steps out of his past and abuses his trust in the worst possible way, Max is forced to consider the nature of his well-kept secret. Why won't his parents talk about it? What else are they hiding from Max about his condition and from each other? The deeper Max goes, the more questions emerge about where it all leaves him and what his future holds, especially now that he's starting to fall head over heels for someone for the first time in his life. Will his friends accept him if he is no longer the Golden Boy? Will anyone ever want him--desire him--once they know? And the biggest one of all, the question he has to look inside himself to answer: Who is Max Walker, really?"
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Ilario: The Lion's Eye
Mary Gentle
Abandoned and alone, the fosterling Ilario grows up as the King's Freak, surrounded by all the pomp, intrigue, and danger of the Iberian court. Fleeing a failed treacherous attack, Ilario crosses the sea to Carthage, where the mysterious Penitence shrouds the sky in darkness. There, a strange and awful destiny awaits the would-be painter, one that spans continents and kingdoms.
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Intersex
Catherine Harper
Intersex is the condition whereby an individual is born with biological features that are simultaneously perceived as male and female. This book draws on the personal testimony of intersexed individuals, their loved ones and medical carers. It deepens our understanding of a condition that has itself only been medically understood.
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Intersex
Thea Hillman
Intersex (For Lack of a Better Word) chronicles one person’s search for self in a world obsessed with normal. What is “intersex”? According to the Intersex Society of North America, the word describes someone born with sex chromosomes, genitalia, or an internal reproductive system that are neither clearly male nor clearly female. In first-person prose as intimate as a diary, Thea Hillman redefines memoir in a series of compelling stories that take a no-holds-barred look at sex, gender, family, and community. Whether she’s pondering quirky family tendencies (“Drag”), reflecting on “queerness” (“Another”), or recounting scintillating adventures in San Francisco’s sex clubs, Hillman’s brave and fierce vision for cultural and societal change shines through.
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Lum
Libby Ware
Lum has always been on the outside. At eight, she was diagnosed with what we now call an intersex condition and is told she can't expect to marry. Now, at thirty-three, she has no home of her own but is shuttled from one relative's house to another -- valued for her skills, but never treated like a true member of the family. Everything is turned upside down, however, when the Blue Ridge Parkway is slated to come through her family's farmland. As people take sides in the fight, the community begins to tear apart -- culminating in an act of violence and subsequent betrayal by opponents of the new road. However, the Parkway brings opportunities as well as loss.
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Masquerade (Micah Grey, #3)
Laura Lam
Micah and his friends have won the magician duel against Maske’s age-old rival—yet despite this glory, trouble still looms. Imachara is under attack by either the anti-monarchy Foresters, or a group even more dangerous. One blast damages the Kymri Theatre, forcing Micah and the others to flee to dingy rooms in a bad part of town and perform street magic to keep their skills sharp. Micah has a vision of the end of the world, and strange dreams of a grave robber stealing bodies. He that discovers many people in his life are lying to him, and he has no idea who he can trust. The Chimaera and the Alder’s powers have returned, and it’s up to Micah to stop the storm of the past from breaking.
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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
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Nico and Tucker
Rachel Gold
The decision can't be put off any longer. A medical crisis turns Nico's body into a battleground, crushing Nico under conflicting family pressures. Having lived genderqueer for years, Nico is used to getting strong reactions (and uninvited opinions!) from everyone, but it is Tucker's reaction that hurts the most. Jess Tucker didn't mean to hurt Nico, but she panicked. And after the worst year of her life, she's hanging on by a thread. Forget recovery time and therapy, she needs to put the past behind her and be normal again. But when her relationship with Nico becomes more than she can handle, she cuts and runs.
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None of the Above
I.W. Gregorio
A groundbreaking story about a teenage girl who discovers she's intersex...and what happens when her secret is revealed to the entire school. Incredibly compelling and sensitively told, None of the Above is a thought-provoking novel that explores what it means to be a boy, a girl, or something in between.
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Pantomime (Micah Grey, #1)
Laura Lam
Gene's life resembles a debutante's dream. Yet she hides a secret that would see her shunned by the nobility. Gene is both male and female. Then she displays unwanted magical abilities last seen in mysterious beings from an almost-forgotten age. Matters escalate further when her parents plan a devastating betrayal, so she flees home, dressed as a boy. The city beyond contains glowing glass relics from a lost civilization. They call to her, but she wants freedom not mysteries. So, reinvented as 'Micah Grey', Gene joins the circus. As an aerialist, she discovers the joy of flight, but she's plagued by visions foretelling danger. A storm is howling in from the past, will she heed its roar?
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Princess Knight, Part 1
Osamu Tezuka
Set in a medieval fairy-tale backdrop, Princess Knight is the tale of a young princess named Sapphire who must pretend to be a male prince so she can inherit the throne. Women have long been prevented from taking the throne, but Sapphire is not discouraged and instead she fully accepts the role, becoming a dashing hero(ine) that the populous is proud of.
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Princess Knight, Part 2
Osamu Tezuka
A young princess must pretend to be a boy so she can inherit her father's throne. At night she fights crime, disguised as the Phantom Knight. Always she must avoid the efforts of an evil duke who would unmask her.
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Rainbow: A First Book of Pride
Michael Genhart
Children from different kinds of families demonstrate the original meanings of the colors in the rainbow flag, and then come together at a Pride parade.
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Shadowplay (Micah Grey, #2)
Laura Lam
Old magics are waking. But will the world survive their return?Micah Grey almost died when he fled the circus with Drystan - now he and the ex-clown seek to outrun disaster. Drystan persuades his old friend Jasper Maske, a once-renowned magician, to take them in. But when he agrees to teach them his trade, Maske is challenged to the ultimate high-stakes duel by his embittered arch-nemesis. Micah must perfect his skills of illusion, while navigating a tender new love. An investigator is also hunting the person he once seemed to be - a noble family's runaway daughter. As the duel draws near, Micah increasingly suffers from visions showing him real magic and future terrors. Events that broke the ancient world are being replayed. But can Micah's latent powers influence this deadly pattern?
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That Inevitable Victorian Thing
E.K. Johnston
In a near-future Toronto where the British Empire never fell, Helena, August, and Margaret are caught off-guard by the discovery of a love so intense they are willing to change the course of the monarchy to keep it.
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The ABC’s of LGBT+
Ashley Mardell
Shares in-depth definitions of LGBT+ terms, and offers personal anecdotes from LGBT+ people.
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the GENDER book
Mel Reiff Hill, Jay Mays, and Robin Mack
A fun and colorful resource that illustrates the beautiful diversity of gender.