A new resource guide aims to improve the lives of transgender and gender-nonconforming people through education and outreach.
Due out later this year from Oxford University Press, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves looks to be the most comprehensive trans resource ever published. The book features more than 200 contributors, and covers topics like the gender spectrum, trans history, health, cultural and social topics, and gender theory.
Weighing in at 672-pages, the Associated Press describes the book as, "Encyclopedic in scope, conversational in tone, and candid about complex sexual issues." After nearly five years in the making, the text hopes to impact a much-maligned and misunderstood community at a critical point in its history.
"Trans Bodies, Trans Selves will be written by and for transgender and gender-variant people at a high school reading level so that it is accessible to older youth," the book's editor, Dr. Laura Erickson-Schroth said in a 2010 New York Times interview while discussing the book's target audience. "It will contain a chapter specifically about children and adolescents, but I think that young people will want to read the rest as well. I'd especially love for adolescents to read the section on transgender history, because all too often generations of people are cut off from each other and prevented from coming together around common social and political goals."
GLAAD cochair and author Jennifer Finney Boylan provides the book's introduction, writing, "Our community is still conversing among itself about what the important issues are, what it means to be trans. Is it social, is it medical? Something very private, or something very public?"
More info on the book can be found at theTrans Bodies, Trans Selves website.
