FranticVampireReads

a world without trans people has never existed and never will

Book Club - June 2026 Read

For Pride month 🏳️‍🌈, my unhinged family is reading a queer, whodunnit mystery with Timothee Chameleon looking Victorian emancipated child Zebedee and his cadaverous looking Owen Wilson ex-boyfriend, Gideon.

This exquisite imagery is brought to you by the beautiful mind of our youngest child @mangoslixes 🙌🏻

Apparently I can't be trusted to make just one rainbow stack. It's not my fault I have more queer books than not, and I feel bad leaving any of them out of the picture. Even still, there are about half a dozen that didn't make the cut, like the rest of a series etc.

Some sources for those who may not know:

Steve Dain, whose public transition led to him being fired from his job as a teacher. Trans men in the Bay Area would go on a pilgrimage to meet when when they started their transition.

Jamison Green, who took over FTM International and it's newsletter after Lou's death

Reed Erickson, who used his inherited wealth to bankroll early LGBT movements (and also did other wild rich people shit). His foundation "helped to support, both through direct financial contributions and through contributions of human and material resources, almost every aspect of work being done in the 1960s and 1970s in the field of transsexualism in the US and, to a lesser degree, in other countries."

Alexander John Goodrum, who founded TGNet Arizona and helped pass Tuscon's nondiscrimination ordinance. In 2001 he wrote "Gender, Identity Politics, and Eating Our Own," an essay on infighting in the trans community.

Rupert Raj, who started some of Canada's earliest trans advocacy organizations

Kylar Broadus, the first openly trans person to testify before the Senate

Pauli Murray also deserves more recognition; he was a Black feminist legal scholar who did invaluable work for the Civil Rights Movement. He never transitioned, having lived much of his life before trans (and especially FTM) treatment was standardized and accessible. He was labeled schizophrenic by doctors for seeking testosterone and testing to see if he was intersex, to explain his gender identity.

He was a sweet man and raised in the Midwest so interrupting people hurt his very soul, that's how dangerous he felt the idea of losing the line of fiction was.