Kate Bornstein's Reading List

"Esther Newton looked at drag queens, and an underground gay phenomenon that had been going on for an awful long time. It’s called camp. Let me tell you what a camp is. Camp is laughing to the point where we don’t have to cry about it. If you could imagine Stephen Colbert , instead of skewering politics by pretending to be a right-wing fanatic, skewering gender by pretending to be a femme fatale. It’s a self-reflective sense of humour – look what I can’t be, but look what I can make fabulous. Esther exposed camp and for the first time gave some dignity to drag. I think she should be forever thanked for that. I read it in 1979 when the feminists of the day were accusing drag queens of hating women and making fun of them. Early feminists were down on drag queens, and that’s the point of it. That went on for a long time. What changed and what stayed the same? Everything changed but the heart stayed the same. You ask what’s relevant about Mother Camp ? My answer is: The heart of it. It’s the whole concept of pro choice applied to gender."

"Stone Butch Blues is the trans classic. Everybody who reads it takes away something different. It’s one of those magical books that has an entrance point for every queer person. And that’s an amazing accomplishment for a book. It’s something I aspire to. This is a loosely autobiographical tale. Some parts of it are based on Les Feinberg’s life. It’s about a character named Jess Goldberg, a working class Jew who doesn’t understand why she has to be a womanly woman. She’s not attracted to men. This is the early days, in the sixties. That was a scary ass time. It’s the queer book of Job, a heart-wrenching book. There are scenes where Jess gets her head pushed into a toilet. Bring the Kleenex. It’s an intense emotional journey of a young woman who has no idea how to express herself as a strong stone butch. I’ll define the terms for you. Stone is someone who loves sex but doesn’t want to be touched – they want to be the one that gets you off. Butch is the radical representation of masculinity without the patriarchal trimmings. It ranges the scale from dandy through overalls and t-shirts to drag king, so there’s a whole spectrum of butch. You don’t know? Drag kings now outnumber drag queens. Drag kings are women who get up on stage, the way drag queens do, to lip synch for their lives in satirical, political, smart, sexy numbers. After the AIDS epidemic wiped out so many of the queens, the kings kind of took their place on stage and people started watching them. Queens are just now beginning to blossom again. As RuPaul’s Drag Race – one of my favourite shows on television – attests there have always been wonderful queens, but kings are an important part now of drag culture. Kings, like queens, are royalty in queer culture – they’re the bravest ones. Transgender Warriors goes back to Joan of Arc and shows how we’ve been on the frontlines of the intersection of sexuality, gender, class, race and religion forever. The import of Transgender Warriors is that it shows how integrated gender crossing has been with other aspects of the margins of the culture. That you’re not a freak for wanting to be one. Period. Why else do we remember heroes from our past? It gives you strength, it gives you the courage to face another day and to walk with the always present fear of somebody pointing and laughing, or worse. One of the most recent examples of the worst is the case of CC McDonald in Washington State, a trans woman of colour who was brutally attacked and in self defence ended up killing one of her attackers. She was sentenced and found guilty of second degree murder. It seems that the justice system turned aside her plea of self-defence, when it obviously was. It can get that bad. In my own case I’ve been raped twice. Walking through the streets of Paris in the 1990s, which was an extremely bi-gender city, people threw things out of cars at me, like bottles. I was refused a hotel room, even though I had made a reservation – the guy took one look at me and said I’m not going to rent you a room. It’s pretty hard."

"Crossing gender is not phenomenal in Neil Gaiman’s universe – it just happens. In his cosmology desire has no gender, which is a profound statement in and of itself. There are trans characters in the books, including one based on a common friend of ours, Roz Kaveney, a poet and trans activist. The Sandman doesn’t exactly make trans normal, but he makes it something that’s expected. The one that comes to mind is the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs . By golly, that really hurt to see a psychotic serial killer cast as a transsexual in a big picture. The character, Jame Gumb, was a parody of everything you were afraid of becoming when you started your own transgender journey. That’s trans phobia. Transphobia is fear of anything that doesn’t match the either/or standard for gender regulation. It’s on a par with antisemitism, racism, classism, ageism and homophobia. Gender is ruled by the binary distinction between man and woman – anything other is really scary. What is that? Is that a him or a her or an it? How do I deal with it? I’ve never been taught."

"This is the first analysis that strongly ties the male-to-female transgender experience to misogyny. It goes beyond the individual narrative into a political analysis from a transwoman point of view. Julia called me out for my failure to point out the fact that trans misogyny is evident, in that transsexual women most often bear the brunt of the mainstream – or meanstream – media’s obsession with and demonisation of trans. Transgender is a subject that has been fodder for feminist critique for half a century now, and Julia Serano speaks smartly to it. She’s one of the leaders of the next generation of trans theorists. It’s writers like Julia Serano, S Bear Bergman, Keith Cooper and Christine Smith who are carrying the torch forward. How it hit me is that patriarchy and misogyny entail the persecution of anyone who is not a real man. That could mean somebody who’s a little bit girly, that could mean somebody who’s a lot girly, that could mean somebody who is homosexual and not at all girly. The point that Julia Serano makes so brilliantly is that misogyny in the culture is kind of like Windows on your computer – it’s everywhere. Which misconceptions can you come up with? Open minds contain misconceptions. What do I say to that? . Poppycock. I am mentally ill, I’m certified PTSD [Post-traumatic stress disorder] and I have borderline personality disorder. My trans stuff is what keeps me sane."

"I’m proud of that book. Seal Press had been after me for a couple of years to update Gender Outlaw after 15 years. I thought about it, because there are sections of Gender Outlaws that are dated. Then I thought: There’s a whole new generation of gender outlaws who could voice the progress of the transgender movement far more eloquently than I was equipped to. Each and every article in that collection of 50 to 52 writers is written in the voice of a person whose sexuality and gender I never dreamed of back when I wrote Gender Outlaw . Tranny is busting out all over. Each and every writer welcomes the worldview of each and every other. They’re not saying I’ve got the very best kind of gender expression. No, mine is one of many and I wish you the joy of finding your own. That’s the message in that book. I’m really proud of it for gender’s sake. I was recently a featured guest on MSNBC. It was a milestone in trans politics, the very first time that a respectable media outlet devoted an entire hour to trans issues. The next big issue that I’d like to see queer leaders present to the world is stopping the violence against kids – and I mean any freaky kids, whether they’re queer or not. Stop beating them up, stop throwing them out of your house, stop murdering them and stop raping them. That’s something that a coalition, which goes well beyond LGBT, could be forged around. Let’s get a more inclusive politics, a politics of compassion rather than a politics of power. I’d like to say one more thing. It was a terrible thing of you to do, to make me pick only five books. I’ve been hungry to read about gender ever since I was 11 years old and I found out people were writing about it. I’ve been reading pretty much everything about gender for the last 50 years, and I believe that attention must be paid to books that are saving lives right now. The last quarter of a century has seen an explosion of amazing writing in this area. The first that comes to mind is Butch is a Noun by S Bear Bergman. Then Some of the Parts by T Cooper. Anything by Patrick Califia Rice, such as Sex Changes . I would also recommend The Marketplace series by Laura Antoniou. She is the Mark Twain of BDSM – so much gender crossing goes on in her books. Then The Princess is a webcomic by Christine Smith. And let’s not forget the classics. Gender: An Enthnomethodological Approach by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna taught me that you could question the binary. In Transit from the sixties, by British author Brigid Brophy, is about waking up in an airport terminal and not knowing your gender. Then, of course, Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin presents the gentlest picture of gender . And my favorite exploration of cross-dressing of all time is in Huckleberry Finn ."