Book of the Day Roundup: May 26-30, 2025
Before Gender
Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950
Eli Erlick
Beacon Press
Hardcover $28.95 (280pp)
978-0-8070-1735-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
There have always been transgender people, shows Eli Erlick’s dynamic biographical collection Before Gender, about thirty trans individuals of the past.
This riveting, compassionate collection of life stories uses a process of transgender historiography to introduce new biographical information and to analyze the ways the stories of trans people were written in the past. Most of the subjects are North American, though there are also European, Asian, and Middle Eastern people represented, with the book aiming to tell racially diverse stories while acknowledging that white transgender people’s stories were the best documented.
German countess Gerda von Zobeltitz, who wore “girls” clothing under her approved outfits in childhood, was at the 1930 Rauchfangswerder riots, which predated Stonewall by nearly fifty years. Effie Smith was an active criminal and a beauty to boot; her constant theft and ingenious shoplifting kept her in the newspapers. Peg Leg Ann Storcy was a shotgun-wielding Michigan homesteader, and after her death, her story grew like a folk tale, with different sources claiming varying birthplaces and ethnicities.
Others lived under the radar as long as they could. Shoemaker Ray Leonard was in his sixties, living a quiet life in Oregon, when he was outed after medical care. Georgia Black, a Black wife, mother, and cook living in Sanford, Florida, was around the same age when she fell sick and doctors exposed her. Black’s son was one of many who supported her afterward, even writing about her in an Ebony magazine article.
The historical biographies collected in Before Gender show that, while society’s language about gender has changed, trans people have always been part of communities around the world—and that it’s crucial to get to know their stories.
MEREDITH GRAHL COUNTS (April 21, 2025)
The Wanting Monster
Martine Murray
Anna Luisa Read, illustrator
Enchanted Lion
Hardcover $19.95 (76pp)
978-1-59270-419-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Dreamlike illustrations track this fable about the dangers of envy. The Wanting Monster whispers in the ear of a villager, prompting him to redirect the stream to make himself a pool. His neighbors grow envious and dig their own pools; soon, the stream runs dry. The flowers in the fields, the trees in the forest, and even the stars in the sky fall prey to the Wanting Monster—until a compassionate child reminds the villagers of their responsibility to one another and the world.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (April 21, 2025)
Generation Queer
Stories of Youth Organizers, Artists, and Educators
Kimm Topping
Anshika Khullar, illustrator
Lee & Low Books
Hardcover $22.95 (240pp)
978-1-64379-520-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Kimm Topping’s heartening collection Generation Queer celebrates young LGBTQ+ activists who shifted cultural stereotypes about who is allowed to lead.
Centering organizers, artists, and educators whose work began prior to the age of twenty-four, this guide to LGBTQ+ rights activism shares the stories of thirty-one youth who fought against discrimination and for legal protections. Alongside their profiles are brief histories of LGBTQ+ events and policies, as with the Stonewall uprising, a timeline of the US’s adoption of antidiscrimination laws, and overviews of successful forms of protest, including walkouts and marches.
The book elevates activists who “became organizers out of necessity.” Dehkontee Chanchan, for instance, became an advocate for unhoused youth after her own arrest for truancy at sixteen years old. Gavin Grimm’s years-long battle to access the bathroom appropriate for his gender at high school, which resulted in a legal case won in state courts, illustrates that activism often begins as a form of self-defense. Other events elicit staggering awe, as with a 2022 Illinois law that Kaylyn Ahn helped pass about assaults that occur while the victim is under the influence, which made over 7,000 unaddressed cases eligible for prosecution.
Pointed questions about what a world without oppression might look like, and about how someone’s experiences with discrimination direct their activism, inspire subverting social hegemonies. Honoring these youth also deconstructs the ageist narrative that young people shouldn’t be taken seriously. At the same time, the book admonishes the pressure LGBTQ+ children are under to become organizers; as artist Ella McKenzie says, “there’s maturing that we should be able to do later in our lives that we’re being forced to do now … We are the future, but we’re also kids.”
Generation Queer is an inspiring intersectional portrait of powerful young people enacting social change.
AIMEE JODOIN (April 21, 2025)
Forest Euphoria
The Abounding Queerness of Nature
Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
Spiegel & Grau
Hardcover $30.00 (273pp)
978-1-954118-90-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
Mycologist Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s book Forest Euphoria demonstrates that queerness is inherent in the natural world’s form and function.
Growing up in the foothills of New York’s Taconic Mountains, Kaishian knew early on that she was different, describing herself as “gender dysphoric,” “queer,” and “racially ambiguous.” She preferred being outdoors, where frequent encounters with the area’s abundant snake population led to her love for the slithery creatures, along with a vast array of fungi and other inhabitants of forest and culvert that others wrote off as creepy, repulsive, and dangerous.
In support of its observation that that the natural world abounds with queerness, the book includes information such as that fungi have twenty-three thousand sexes, that female bower birds drive the evolution of the species by only mating with males with superior nest-decorating skills, and about the slow, sensual mating dance of snails. The book has a quirky, open stance toward nature’s acceptance of the doings of its creatures, positing that studying reproduction from a broader perspective than the binary and heteronormative would enable asking different questions about human biology and evolution. It suggests that doing so would invite research that would yield deeper, truer answers.
Indeed, Forest Euphoria is a liberating nature text that finds level ground and interrelatedness between humble microbes and the swirling cosmos, all abounding in queerness. Addressing capitalism, eugenics, the legacy of slavery, and how Western society rendered people, places, things, and time as commodities valued only for what they could contribute to the bottom line, the book makes a cogent case that “queerness teaches us that someone or something need not be productive—or reproductive … to be valued, respected, or loved.”
KRISTINE MORRIS (April 21, 2025)
No Straight Road Takes You There
Essays for Uneven Terrain
Rebecca Solnit
Haymarket Books
Softcover $16.95 (184pp)
979-888890363-6
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
The urgent, prescient essays in Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There name social inequities and ecological pains while insisting upon hope.
Writing after the 2020 election, at a time when many on the left implored triumphant Democrats to reach across the aisle and soothe hurt feelings, Solnit is a blunt defector from such niceties: “When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace,” she writes, “there is no peace to be made.” Hers is not a book in which ground is ceded to centrist concerns, or excuses delivered for inaction. Rather, in her signature style, it diagnoses contemporary ills and suggests logical paths forward—via reason, determination, and knowledge that change is possible.
Revising tired paradigms—herein, left and right are less accurate designations than isolationists and interconnectionists–the essays ask people to acknowledge hard realities while also using their privilege to work toward improving the world. Solnit notes that progress does not happen overnight: the student loan relief moved toward under Biden had roots in Occupy Wall Street and before; feminist victories always took time, too. And while technology billionaires “often seem more interested in surviving the apocalypse than preventing it,” there’s power in naming the liberties they take with truth and justice while working against them, toward a future not dominated by the rich.
The selfishness of the science-resistant during COVID-19 is examined; so, too, is the #MeToo Movement and the felling of predatory men once thought untouchable. While climate change is a dire presence throughout the book, the book refuses to call today too late: “the future is shaped by what we do in the present, on what we make happen. There are no guarantees but there are possibilities.”
No Straight Road Takes You There is a powerful book of essays from a beloved activist.
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (April 21, 2025)
Kathy Young
