Transgender Lives: Complex Stories, Complex Voices

by Kirstin Cronn-Mills

Overview

"I didn't hear the word transgender until I was eighteen, when a person I was dating came out as trans. My boyfriend came out as my girlfriend, and I thought, 'What . . . is that?' She said, 'I just don't think I'm a man.' And I said, 'Guess what? Neither do I.' And then the skies parted, and I understood who I was."—Katie Burgess, nonprofit director and community activist/organizer

Meet Katie, Hayden, Dean, Brooke, David, Julia, and Natasha. Each is transgender, and in this book, they share their personal stories. Through their narratives, you'll get to know and love each person for their humor, intelligence, perseverance, and passion. You'll learn how they each came to better understand, accept, and express their gender identities, and you'll follow them through the sorrows and successes of their personal journeys.

Transgender Lives helps you understand what it means to be transgender in America while learning more about transgender history, the broad spectrum of transgender identities, and the transition process. You'll explore the challenges transgender Americans face, including discrimination, prejudice, bullying and violence, unequal access to medical care, and limited legal protections. For transgender readers, these stories offer support and encouragement. Transgender Lives is a space for trans* voices to be heard and to express the complexities of gender while focusing on what it means to be human.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541557505
Publisher:	Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	88
File size:	8 MB
Age Range:	12 - 13 Years

About the Author

Kirstin Cronn-Mills, PhD, teaches writing, literature, and critical thinking at South Central College in North Mankato, Minnesota. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction books and articles. Her young adult fiction and nonfiction have been honored several times, including a Minnesota Book Award nomination for LGBTQ+ Athletes Claim the Field in 2017. LGBTQ+ Athletes was also a 2016 Junior Library Guild selection, a 2017 American Library Association Rainbow List selection, and a 2017 Best Children's Books of the Year selection from Bank Street College.

Editorial Reviews

"Cronn-Mills has written an admirably informative and respectful book....This book should be on the shelf in all middle, high school, and public libraries where patrons could be seeking understanding and/or affirmation of the complexities of gender....Highly Recommended."―starred, Library Media Connection

From the Publisher

07/01/2014
Gr 9 Up—This ambitious book combines interviews from self-identified transgender people with sections on trans-related information. It includes medical transition, historical information, and profiles of major figures, in ways both basic and more complex. Unfortunately, Cronn-Mills uses language that subtly alienates trans readers. For example, she states that trans people are "just like any individual you know," thereby assuming that readers are cisgender; the introduction relates a situation common to most trans people and then inquires, "Does this story seem strange to you?" The term "trans*" is often incorrectly used throughout the book. Cronn-Mills accurately defines the use of the asterisk as "a way to include all individuals who identify in some way with a 'trans' identity"; however, she also uses it when an individual is discussing their specific, discrete gender, rather than the whole spectrum. There are a lot of positives here, like her coverage of the CeCe MacDonald case and definitions of terms such as "transmisogyny" (albeit incompletely). But Cronn-Mills attempts to cover too much deeply complex information in a slim volume. Her resource list relies on Wikipedia and generic websites, and her bibliography is woefully limited. This title will provide a broad perspective, especially if presented alongside materials written by or with trans people about their lives and communities, such as Kate Bornstein's anthology Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (Avalon, 2010), Susan Kuklin's Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (Candlewick, 2014), and books published by Topside Press.—Kyle Lukoff, Corlears School, New York City

School Library Journal

2014-07-16
An outsiders' guide to the experiences of transgender individuals. Portraying a marginalized group for the consumption of the majority is always a dicey proposition, and Cronn-Mills' (whose Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, 2012, won a 2014 Stonewall Award) effort here illustrates many of the pitfalls. Short, third-person narrative portraits of transgender individuals—all adults and all but one apparently white—are interleaved with dry, overgeneralized informational segments about identities, health care, and historical and cross-cultural examples of gender nonconformity. Despite the title's promise of complexity, the portraits are too brief to give anything more than an impression of their subjects, and stories focus heavily on coming out and physical transition. Similarly, informational chapters give readers little to hold onto. A typically uninformative sentence begins, "Terms for individuals who have flexible gender identities may include…" and then goes on to list 10 terms without attempting to explain or contextualize any of them. Entries in an erratically selected "Who's Who" unnecessarily and inappropriately include transgender public figures' birth names, and accounts of violence against transgender people are slotted jarringly among neutral or positive informational segments. Susan Kuklin's Beyond Magenta (2014), which documents the lives of transgender teens in their own words, is a superior title in every way. (timeline, glossary, notes, bibliography, further information, index) (Nonfiction. 12-18)

Kirkus Reviews