Recommended Reading

Last updated: 19 July 2026 (reposted due to Google/Blogspot censoring my other suggestions for ways you can ethically acquire books by white guys)

The following is a list of some of the writing that has affected, radicalized, aroused, or taught me the most.

Free To Read Online

Against Safety/Towards Bleed - The Garden Below - about the dangers of safety in transfemininity and tabletop gaming

The Palette Grid - Jay Dragon - what if safety tools were good?

Faggot Games: An Urgent Warning - Eclipse Dot Gay - incitement to make unapologetically horny games. This follow-up post builds on it; read both. 

Priestess - Gray Levesque - very lyrical and trans short story. There's a lot of good stuff published in The Temz Review (including this) but I think this is my favorite piece from it so far.
 

Books You Should Loan From Your Library

I Hope We Choose Love - Kai Cheng Thom - essay collection covering transfemininity, "mental illness", racism, queer and activist spaces, and more. Her fiction is also very good.

Bad Habit - Alana S. Portero - one of very few novels to make me cry.

Stag Dance - Torrey Peters - short stories & novella, all extremely transfem from wildly different angles, all extremely good. Read all her work.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed - Mariana Enriquez - short horror stories set in Argentina. All her collections are great, but this is my favorite.

The Collected Schizophrenias - Esme Weijun Wang - nonfiction about living with our culture's most stigmatized "mental illness."

How to be an Antiracist - Ibram X Kendi - I feel like this is mainstream enough I probably don't need to platform it, and it looks like low-hanging fruit to say: "look how woke I am!" but it did really leave a mark on my worldview; especially the emphasis on judging systems and beliefs over individuals. And if you're white and haven't examined your white fragility at all, it's a very (too?) gentle first step toward fixing that.

Before Gender - Eli Erlick - nonfiction about trans people alive between 1850-1950, pretty much all of whom were erased by history. It also covers MULTIPLE trans-led riots pre-stonewall. Effie Smith is an icon.

Books You Should Pirate Because They Were Written By Cis White Men (They're Still Good I Promise)

Crazy Like Us - Ethan Watters - journalistic nonfiction about the irreparable harm the white supremacy and imperialism inherent to psychiatry and big pharma has done worldwide.

The Book of Woe - Gary Greenberg - nonfiction; discusses the greed and farcical incompetence of the corporation that decides which of us are insane, the American Psychiatric Association. I now recommend this over Saving Normal by Allen Frances, especially because Frances himself features prominently in this book, in a more honest and critical light.

The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber & David Wengrow -  big long list of prehistoric and ancient cultures that were way less evil than what we've gotten stuck with today; a counter to the dominant narrative in archaelogy/anthropology/history etc.   

Shardik - Richard Adams - the guy who wrote YA classic Watership Down also wrote a fantasy epic for grownups. No speculative elements, big fuckoff bear, child slavery, what more could you want?

Jerry Cornelius series - Michael Moorcock - My favorite Moorcock books, even above Elric (this blog's namesake). It's like if James Bond was severely fucked in the head and extremely queer, plus pornographic illustrations.

The Prisoner - Patrick McGoohan - yes it's a TV show; it's important to me, shut up. Aggressively 60s, weird allegorical sci-fi, way ahead of its time and our time. Watch it, then watch the documentary so you can understand why I'm crediting this show to one guy, and worry for me that I relate to him so much.

Collected Works of Otto Gross - Gross was one of the founders of psychoanalysis, as influential as Jung from what I can tell, but he's been erased for being a communist about it. He's far from blameless, but fascinating, and he does have some good takes (my favorite is his essay that calls gender norms a "humanity-encompassing etiology").

Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges - I dunno what to say other than that Borges' work is deeply weird in wonderful and influential way, and he conveys a love of books that is very specific and relatable.

Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino - fiction without narrative; just sheer weird imagination.