Keen to equip yourself with information and resources to support and affirm the idea that everyone has the right to feel safe and secure in their own skin? Here’s a list of resources to help self-educate and bolster your confidence when it comes to making a stand for trans rights.
The basics
Trans 101: an online glossary of trans words and how to use them
Gender Minorities Aotearoa has a bunch of online resources including this comprehensive list of words, what they mean, and how to apply them.
Supporting Transgender People: a free online course
Gender Minorities also offers a free, online, go-at-your-own-pace course (a mix of video, reading material, review documents, and audio resources) that takes you through language definitions, understanding transphobia and discrimination, and ways to protect and support whānau and our community at large.
Inside Out Kōaro: resources
Inside Out Kōaro is an Aotearoa charity that provides “education, resources, consultation and support for anything concerning rainbow and takatāpui communities.” Their website includes a resource section with both written and video formats. The information is designed for schools but is brilliantly insightful for everyone. For example, this video interview with Selina Piraka on te ao Takatāpui.
Out Loud Aotearoa
This beautifully illustrated report created by Out Loud Aotearoa is an insight into some of the experiences of Aotearoa’s LGBTQIA+ community in relation to mental health and addiction services. It is an insightful piece of work in that it shares the views and experiences of a breadth of the community affected by the discriminatory systems many are currently trying to live within.
Diving deeper: philosophy & history
ContraPoints
Natalie Wynn’s video essays – brilliant counter-arguments to right-wing extremist views – are a gift to humankind. Each episode takes an issue – be it trans rights, cancel culture, class inequality, consumerism, Jordan Peterson (who she calls “daddy”), or religion – and stylishly elucidates counterpoints to right-wing arguments. Wynn has a PhD in philosophy, is trans, and has a sublime knack for comedy and theatre, making her videos both entertaining and intellectually expansive. Here is a link to the episode called Gender Critical which is a discussion of trans rights. The ContraPoints website also publishes transcripts of the videos, too (where you can get a taste of the comedy as well as the clarity).
Gender: a graphic guide by Meg-John Barker, illustrated By Julia Scheele
An exploration of the history of gender across different times and cultures with a view to tackling the concept of intersectionality: how experiences of gender meet with people’s race, sexuality, class, disability and more. The graphic/comic format makes for easily digestible information but with enough depth to examine in more complexity a breadth of ideas that come in useful in conversations about the variety of gender experiences.
Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley
This recent book is a journey through the history of extremist groups in Aotearoa. It’s scholarly in tone but is nonetheless a timely and fascinating (if not sobering af) collection of research on how and why certain ideas take hold and grow in our own context. The chapter exploring the Christian Right by Dolores Janiewski takes a deep dive into the battle for so-called “family values” and how the contemporary evangelicals (e.g. Destiny Church) perpetuate fear of anything that isn’t heterosexual and cis-gendered.
Children’s books for edifying conversation
It feels good to be yourself: a book about gender identity by Theresa Thorn, illustrated by Noah Grigni
Children’s books are never just for children. They are terrific for elucidating ideas and imagining better futures at any age. As well as being essential tools for relaxed and joyful conversations between adults and children, you can whip them out for anyone needing a tl;dr version that comes with luminous illustrations designed to make you feel good. This picture book introduces concepts of gender fluidity in affirming and positive ways with images that convey, ease, joy and domestic as well as public spaces.
Books by Promised Land
Promised Land books are the brainchild of Chaz Harris and Adam Reynolds (Aotearoa). Their fantasy adventure stories starred LGBTQIA+ characters and at the time of initial publication (Trump’s reign) they radically shifted the possibilities of fairytale. While the imprint is not currently operating, you can still find the books in libraries and in second-hand bookshops. Read Harris’ piece for The Spinoff about why he writes children’s books here.
Biographies
Change for the Better: the story of Georgina Beyer, as told to Cathy Casey
“People still regard the gender thing as being relatively recent in our modern history, but we’ve been around for millennia. Fa’afafine. Takatāpui. When you have words in languages to include us, that should send a message that this didn’t happen last week.”
Our own late, great Georgina Beyer’s story of transition and what she had to go through before and after. Beyer’s story is remarkable, often painful, and always astonishing in terms of what she achieved in her lifetime.
See also: this piece by our own Alex Casey who spoke with Georgina Beyer in 2018.
Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More by Janet Mock
“I believed I was, and knew myself as, a young woman, even when I had a penis. It wasn’t as if I needed the surgery to confirm that for me.”
Janet Mock is a writer, TV producer and director (in 2018 became the first transgender woman of colour to write and direct for TV, for Ryan Murphy’s series Pose), journalist, and activist. Her memoir Redefining Realness (published in 2014) became an international bestseller and made Mock into one of the world’s foremost voices for trans rights. Mock grew up in the US and in Hawai’i where, she says, gender fluidity was more normalised than in the states and enabled her to be Janet (rather than Charles). She started hormone treatment as a teenager and went through a period of being a sex worker to pay for surgery. A few years post-surgery, Mock moved to New York to go to University but didn’t come out as trans right away, instead became a journalist (for People magazine) before deciding that her story needed to be told: “I’d never seen a young trans woman who was living and thriving in the world, and I was looking for that.”
‘I am a transgender man: here’s what you need to know’ by George Fowler
“So. Being transgender means that you relate to your body in a way that’s different to that of the gender you were assigned at birth.”
This Stuff article by beloved artist and entertainer George Fowler (drag king Hugo Grrrl) is a clear, straight-up insight into what it means to be a transgender man and we highly recommend it to anyone who is in need of a first-hand account but who might not have time to tackle a whole book.
Sidenote: later this year the memoir Pageboy by actor and trans activist Elliot Page while be published and will no doubt provide a widely read insight into what it was like to come out in the midst of Hollywood stardom.
Art
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
Described as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” (by Nigel Sackville-West) this is a novel inspired by the relationship between Woolf and her lover Vita Sackville-West. The word trans doesn’t exist in this electrifying classic published in 1928, but the fictional biography is a life affirming vision of freedom with its central character – Orlando – living for 400 years and as a man in one life and a woman in another. Also one of the characters is called Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine (a gender non-conforming sea captain) which has to be one of the best names in all of literature.
Out Here: Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Chris Tse and Emma Barnes
A bold, beautiful hardback anthology of writing from across Aotearoa’s LGBTQIA+ community. With writers like Sam Duckor-Jones, Ruby Solly, Cadence Chung, Gina Cole, Ngahuia te Awekotuku, Rose Lu, essa may ranapiri, Witi Ihimaera and many, many more, this collection is a dawn chorus: a book that calls to a new era of literary freedom and recognition for queer writers.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
“There was a beautiful sort of flourishing around the Women’s prize that I’m profoundly grateful for – and to some degree, I guess I’m grateful to the bigots.”
This debut novel was a huge hit in 2021 when it was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. Peters’ inclusion initially roused an ugly transphobic backlash which Peters’ (who is from the US) described as scary and destabilising. However, as more and more writers and readers supported the novel the acclaim for Peters’ story grew until it became an international success.
In the book, Reese, a trans woman is approached by her ex Ames, who has detransitioned and, believing he is infertile, accidentally impregnates his boss during an affair. On writing the book, Peters said, “At the time, when I was writing, I didn’t know it would have this kind of response. I was just thinking about what was going to be funny for my friends and what was pertinent to our lives.”
RuPaul’s Drag Race (Season 14)
Season 14 of beloved drag competition show RuPaul’s Drag Race was won by Willow Pill, the first transgender queen to win the show (and one of five transgender contestants overall in the season). This season of Drag Race is talked about as the one that shifted trans representation and visibility (which had been through rough waters when in 2018 RuPaul commented that he probably wouldn’t let trans women on the show and ignited a big debate about the boundaries of drag) and revealed drag as the beautiful, inclusive space that it is.
Pose
This is the TV series that Janet Mock (above) worked on and that has the largest trans cast of any TV show to date. It’s a three-season show about the underground ballroom culture in New York in the late 80s and 90s (and so features a deliriously nostalgic soundtrack) which were set up in opposition to the mainstream drag pageants which almost always had all-white judges. Of the show, Mock said: “our show is centring on trans women of colour in a way they’ve not been centred on ever. What’s so radical to me is that, unlike Transparent, where there is one main character who is trans and played by a man, we have five main characters who are trans played by trans women. That five black and brown trans women will be the centre of a show on a network drama in primetime is huge. And they’re going to be on billboards. It’s amazing this is going to exist in the world.” (Season three, and season three only, is available to stream on Neon.)