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:
Transgender
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Let's Get This Straight: The Ultimate Handbook for Youth with LGBTQ Parents
Tina Fakhrid-Deen
Offers children, teens, and adults with one or more gay, bisexual, or transgender parents advice on how they can deal with the challenges they might face, build healthy relationships with their parents, address discrimination, build a strong sense of self-esteem, and reduce the isolation and shame they might feel.
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LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field: Striving for Equality
Kirstin Cronn-Mills
In 2015, the world watched as soccer star Abby Wambach kissed her wife after the US women's World Cup victory. Milwaukee Brewers' minor league first baseman David Denson came out as gay. And Caitlyn (born Bruce) Jenner, an Olympic decathlete, came out as transgender. It hasn't always been this way. Many great athletes have stayed in the closet their whole lives, or at least until retirement. Social attitudes, institutional policies, and laws are slow to change, but they are catching up. Together, athletes, families, educators, allies, and fans are pushing for competitive equity so that every athlete, regardless of identity, can have the opportunity to play at their very best.
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Lily and Dunkin
Donna Gephart
Lily Jo McGrother, born Timothy McGrother, is a girl. But being a girl is not so easy when you look like a boy. Especially when you’re in the eighth grade. Dunkin Dorfman, birth name Norbert Dorfman, is dealing with bipolar disorder and has just moved from the New Jersey town he’s called home for the past thirteen years. This would be hard enough, but the fact that he is also hiding from a painful secret makes it even worse. One summer morning, Lily Jo McGrother meets Dunkin Dorfman, and their lives forever change.
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Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Parents and their Families
Peggy Gillespie
This volume combines interviews and photographs to document the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered parents and their children. All of the family members speak candidly about their lives, their relationships and how they have dealt with the pressures of homophobia.
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Luna
Julie Anne Peters
Fifteen-year-old Regan's life, which has always revolved around keeping her older brother Liam's transsexuality a secret, changes when Liam decides to start the process of "transitioning" by first telling his family and friends that he is a girl who was born in a boy's body.
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Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Hammer of Thor
Rick Riordan
Thor's hammer is missing again. The thunder god has a disturbing habit of misplacing his weapon--the mightiest force in the Nine Worlds. But this time the hammer isn't just lost, it has fallen into enemy hands. If Magnus Chase and his friends can't retrieve the hammer quickly, the mortal worlds will be defenseless against an onslaught of giants. Ragnarok will begin. The Nine Worlds will burn. Unfortunately, the only person who can broker a deal for the hammer's return is the gods' worst enemy, Loki--and the price he wants is very high.
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Meet Polkadot
Talcott Broadhead
Meet Polkadot, big sister Gladiola, and best friend Norma Alicia, as they introduce young readers to the challenges and beauty that are experienced by Polkadot as a non-binary, transgender kid. Readers learn that gender identity is found "between the ears, not between the legs" and that biological sex and gender identity are not always the same.
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Michael and Me
Margaret Baker-Street
Michael and Me was written for parents, educators and children to start the conversation early as to what is meant by a transgender person. It is written for those who have not had the benefit of knowing a transgender person, to explain why it is important for one to affirm ones identity. It uses easy to understand terms and concepts, a valuable tool to increase tolerance and decrease discrimination.
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My Favorite Color is Pink!
Nina Benedetto
A child, born into a male body, finds the strength and courage to claim her full and authentic gender identity. This book is an affirmation for all people who are longing to claim their birthright to be themselves. It goes to the heart of teaching compassion.
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My Mommy Is a Boy
Jason Martinez
"My Mommy Is A Boy" is a short story of a little girl who is explaining to the reader why her female-to-male transgendered mommy looks like a boy. She explains the gender transition process in simple terms easy for a child to understand. The message she portrays is simply, that, no matter what her mommy looks like on the outside or how people perceive her family, her mommy loves her unconditionally.
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My New Gender Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity
Kate Bornstein
In My Gender Workbook, transgender activist Kate Bornstein brings theory down to Earth and provides a practical approach to living with or without a gender. Bornstein starts from the premise that there are not just two genders performed in today's world, but countless genders lumped under the two-gender framework. Using a unique, deceptively simple and always entertaining workbook format, complete with quizzes, exercises, and puzzles, Bornstein gently but firmly guides readers toward discovering their own unique gender identity. Since its first publication in 1997, My Gender Workbook has been challenging, encouraging, questionning, and handholding those trying to figure out how to become a "real man," a "real woman," or "something else entirely." In this updated edition of her classic text, Bornstein re-examines gender in light of issues like race and class. With new quizzes, new puzzles, new exercises, and plenty of Kate's over-the-top style, My Gender Workbook, 2e promises to help a new generation create their own unique place on the gender spectrum.
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OMGQueer
Radclyffe . and Katherine E. Lynch
This anthology of short stories gives voice to the rising generation as they define what it means to grow up queer in the twenty-first century. What is it like to grow up in a society that embraces you in certain ways but discriminates against you in others? How do you choose a label from the alphabet soup, and should you even have to? By turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, comical and caustic, these stories, imagined and told by youth across America, provide a snapshot of queerness at the dawn of the new millennium.
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Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents
Noelle Howey and Ellen Jean Samuels
"Out of the Ordinary" is a groundbreaking collection of essays by teen and adult children of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parents. The essays range from humorous to poignant and provide insight into numerous topics on dealing with a parent's sexuality while figuring out one's own.
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Parrotfish
Ellen Wittlinger
Grady, a transgendered high school student, yearns for acceptance by his classmates and family as he struggles to adjust to his new identity as a male.
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Perfect Peace
Daniel Black
After Perfect Peace's mother reveals that Perfect was born a boy, made into a girl and now must learn to be a boy again, his life goes out of control and his family is forced to question everything they thought they knew.
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Prinsesa: The Boy Who Dreamed of Being a Princess
Emmanual Romero and Drew Stephens
In an age of hateful bullying and advances for LGBT and gender nonconforming people, there's no easy way to understand what these struggles mean unless you put a face to them. What better face is there to look at than that of an innocent child who is full of wonder at the world? In the end, the story shows that whatever issues children need to deal with, they'll be okay as long as they have loving and supportive adults in their corner.
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Queer, There, and Everywhere: 23 People Who Changed the World
Sarah Prager
World history has been made by countless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals?and you?ve never heard of many of them. Queer author and activist Sarah Prager delves deep into the lives of 23 people who fought, created, and loved on their own terms. From high-profile figures like Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt to the trailblazing gender-ambiguous Queen of Sweden and a bisexual blues singer who didn?t make it into your history books, these astonishing true stories uncover a rich queer heritage that encompasses every culture, in every era. By turns hilarious and inspiring, the beautifully illustrated Queer, There, and Everywhere is for anyone who wants the real story of the queer rights movement.
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Quiver
Julia Watts
Libby is the oldest child of six, going on seven, in a family that adheres to the "quiverfull" lifestyle: strict evangelical Christians who believe that they should have as many children as God allows because children are like arrows in the quiver of "God's righteous warriors." Meanwhile, her new neighbor, Zo is a gender fluid teen whose feminist, socialist, vegetarian family recently relocated from the city in search of a less stressful life because her family are as far to the left ideologically as Libby's family is to the right, and yet Libby and Zo, who are the same age, feel a connection that leads them to friendship - a friendship that seems doomed from the start because of their families' differences.
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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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Rainbow Road
Alex Sanchez
While driving across the United States during the summer after high school graduation, three young gay men encounter various bisexual and homosexual people and make some decisions about their own relationships and lives.
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Red: A Crayon's Story
Michael Hall
Red's factory-applied label clearly says that he is red, but despite the best efforts of his teacher, fellow crayons and art supplies, and family members, he cannot seem to do anything right until a new friend offers a fresh perspective.
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Refuse
Elliott DeLine
Dean, a 22-year old female-to-male-transsexual, is no LGBT poster boy. Unemployed, depressed, mid-transition, friendless, and still living in the upstairs bedroom of his parents’ house in a conservative suburb, he can think of little to do but write his memoir. In the third person, he tells the tale of his would-be love affair with his college roommate, Colin, another trans man with a girlfriend and a successful indie rock band. The plot is interrupted intermittently by Dean’s first person commentary, often criticizing middle-class conformity—but also the queer counterculture from which he feels equally alienated. He is obsessed with Morrissey of The Smiths and wants nothing in life other than the same level of fame. As his far-fetched dreams become a foreseeable reality, he must decide between honesty and belonging, conformity or isolation, community or self.
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Rethinking Normal: A Memoir in Transition
Kaite Rain Hill
In her unique, generous, and affecting voice, nineteen-year-old Katie Hill shares her personal journey of undergoing gender reassignment. Have you ever worried that you'd never be able to live up to your parents' expectations? Have you ever imagined that life would be better if you were just invisible? Have you ever thought you would do anything--anything--to make the teasing stop? Katie Hill had and it nearly tore her apart. Katie never felt comfortable in her own skin. She realized very young that a serious mistake had been made; she was a girl who had been born in the body of a boy. Suffocating under her peers' bullying and the mounting pressure to be "normal," Katie tried to take her life at the age of eight years old. After several other failed attempts, she finally understood that "Katie"--The girl trapped within her--was determined to live. In this first-person account, Katie reflects on her pain-filled childhood and the events leading up to the life-changing decision to undergo gender reassignment as a teenager. She reveals the unique challenges she faced while unlearning how to be a boy and shares what it was like to navigate the dating world and experience heartbreak for the first time in a body that matched her gender identity. Told in an unwaveringly honest voice, Rethinking Normal is a coming-of-age story about transcending physical appearances and redefining the parameters of "normalcy" to embody one's true self.
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Roving Pack
Sassafras Lowrey
Click, a straight-edge transgender kid, is searching for hir place within a pack of newly sober gender rebels in the dilapidated punk houses of Portland, Oregon circa 2002. Ze embarks on a dizzying whirlwind of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests until hir gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn and the pack is sent reeling.
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Run, Clarissa, Run
Rachel Eliason
Life in a small town can be tough when you're a little different, but for a fifteen year old transgender kid it can truly be hell. Clark is harassed daily at school for his effeminate behavior and appearance. He has no friends and a brother that is as likely to be on the teasing as to prevent it. When Clark is offered a job babysitting for the Pirella family, it seems like a godsend. The money is good. He bonds with the girls almost instantly. The father, Tony, works in computer security. Tony and Clark strike up a friendship based on a mutal love of computers and hacking. As Tony becomes aware of Clark's transsexuality and his growing feminine alter ego, Clarissa, things become incredibly complicated. Will Tony be Clarissa's salvation, or her undoing?