A list of biographies for trans history month.
There are more trans memoirs out there than you can shake a stick at, but what about biographies? I went searching in the trans literature database and found some to share with you.
Jan Morris: a life by Sara Wheeler (2024)
Jan Morris was the author of over 40 books who transitioned in the early 1970's. Known as a travel writer, she also wrote history, biography, and fiction. Per the publisher's description: "Drawing on unprecedented access to Morris’s papers as well as interviews with family, friends and colleagues, Wheeler assembles a captivating portrait of her astonishing life—a story of longing, traveling and never reaching home."
Not your founding father : how a nonbinary minister became America's most radical revolutionary by Nina Sankovitch (2026)
"Early in the morning of October 9, 1776--in the small farming community of Cumberland, Rhode Island, in a house surrounded by cherry trees--twenty-three-year-old Jemima Wilkinson died, and the Public Universal Friend was born... riding about the countryside, claiming to be a genderless messenger of God. Yet something about the Public Universal Friend set war-ravaged New England ablaze. The young minister seemed to embody the possibilities offered by the new nation they were fighting for, especially the right to total self-determination."
Inside Out: The Extraordinary Legacy of April Ashley by Douglas Thompson (2024)
April Ashley was a model and cabaret performer who began her transition in the 1950's. She was outed in the press in 1961, destroying her successful modeling career. She was an advocate for trans rights throughout her life and was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2012 for services to transgender equality.
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg (2017)
Born in 1910, Pauli Murray was a legal scholar and theorist who championed civil rights. She was the first African American to receive a JSD from Yale Law School. She provided Ruth Bader Ginsburg with the argument Ginsburg used to persuade the Supreme Court that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution protects not only blacks but also women - and potentially other minority groups - from discrimination. If she had lived in more recent times she may have called herself a transgender man as she believed from childhood she was male and tried unsuccessfully to persuade doctors to give her testosterone.
Lou Sullivan: Daring To Be a Man Among Men by Dr. Brice D Smith (2017)
Lou Sullivan was a gay trans man at a time when trans people were expected to conform to rigid gender roles and never be anything but straight. He came of age in the Gay Liberation Movement, fought the medical establishment for better trans care, and founded FTM International in 1986. Sullivan died of AIDS in 1991.
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