Cross-dressing is the act of wearing clothes traditionally or stereotypically associated with a different gender. From as early as pre-modern history, cross-dressing has been practiced in order to disguise, comfort, entertain, and express oneself.
Gender dysphoria (GD) is the distress a person experiences due to a mismatch between their gender identity—their personal sense of their own gender—and their sex assigned at birth. The term replaced the previous diagnostic label of gender identity disorder (GID) in 2013 with the release of the diagnostic manual DSM-5. The condition was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder. The International Classification of Diseases uses the term gender incongruence instead of gender dysphoria, defined as a marked and persistent mismatch between gender identity and assigned gender, regardless of distress or impairment.
Emerald is a town in the Greater Melbourne area of Victoria, Australia, 44 km south-east of Melbourne's Central Business District, located within the Shires of Cardinia and Yarra Ranges local government areas. Emerald recorded a population of 5,890 at the 2021 census.
The Dylan Thomas Prize is a leading prize for young writers presented annually. The prize, named in honour of the Welsh writer and poet Dylan Thomas, brings international prestige and a remuneration of £30,000 (~$46,000). It is open to published writers in the English language under the age of forty. The prize was originally awarded biennially but became an annual award in 2010. Entries for the prize are submitted by the publisher, editor, or agent; for theatre plays and screenplays, by the producer.
The Women's Prize for Fiction (previously with sponsor names Orange Prize for Fiction, Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes. It is awarded annually to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year. A sister prize, the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, was launched in 2023.
British author J. K. Rowling, writer of Harry Potter and other Wizarding World works, has garnered attention for her support of the Labour Party under Gordon Brown and her criticism of the party under Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer, as well as her opposition to the American Republican Party under Donald Trump. She opposed Scottish independence in a 2014 referendum and Brexit during the 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.
Melissa, previously published as George until April 2022, is a children's novel about a young transgender girl written by American author Alex Gino. The novel tells the story of Melissa, a fourth-grade girl who is struggling to be herself to the rest of the world. The rest of the world sees Melissa as George, a boy. Melissa uses the class play, Charlotte's Web, to show her mom that she is a girl by switching roles with her best friend, and playing the part of Charlotte. Scholastic first published the novel on August 25, 2015, and it has had a mixed reaction because of its LGBT+ content. In 2021, Gino retitled the novel Melissa.
Nicole Amber Maines is an American actress, writer, and transgender rights activist. Prior to her acting career, she was the anonymous plaintiff in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court case Doe v. Regional School Unit 26, in which she argued her school district could not deny her access to the female bathroom for being transgender. The court ruled in 2014 that barring transgender students from the school bathroom consistent with their gender identity is unlawful, the first such ruling by a state court.
Jodie Marie Comer is an English actress. She began her career in an episode of The Royal Today in 2008. Comer gained recognition for appearing in the series My Mad Fat Diary (2013–2015) and Doctor Foster (2015–2017), and starred in the drama miniseries Thirteen (2016).
Sophie Labelle is a Canadian cartoonist, public speaker, and writer. She created the webcomic Assigned Male, which draws upon her experiences as a transgender child. She is an activist in the transgender rights movement, and speaks on the subjects of transgender history and transfeminism.
Juno Dawson is an English author of young adult fiction and non-fiction. Dawson's notable works include This Book Is Gay, Mind Your Head, Margot & Me, The Gender Games, Clean, Meat Market, and the series, "Her Majesty's Royal Coven".
Transgender people and other gender minorities currently face membership restrictions in access to priesthood and temple rites in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints —Mormonism's largest denomination. Church leaders have taught gender roles as an important part of their doctrine since its founding. Only recently have they begun directly addressing gender diversity and the experiences of transgender, non-binary, intersex, and other gender minorities whose gender identity and expression differ from the cisgender majority.
Hunter Schafer is an American actress and model. She first made headlines in 2016 with her activism against the North Carolina bill HB2. In 2017, she started modeling for many worldwide fashion brands. She made her acting debut as transgender high school student Jules Vaughn in the HBO teen drama television series Euphoria (2019–present). Since then, she has had roles in Belle (2022), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023), Cuckoo (2024), and Kinds of Kindness (2024).
Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian fiction writer and video artist, best known for their novels Freshwater, Pet, and their New York Times bestselling novel The Death of Vivek Oji. Emezi is a generalist who writes speculative fiction, romance, memoir, and poetry for both young adults and adults with mostly LGBT themes. Their work has earned them several awards and nominations including the Otherwise Award and Commonwealth Short Story Prize. In 2021, Time featured them as a Next Generation Leader.
Laura Kate Dale is an English video game journalist, author and activist. She is known for writing about the transgender and autism communities in relation to video games and for her video game industry leaks. Many of her topics tackle accessibility for disabled players and LGBTQ+ representation.
Transgender literature is a collective term used to designate the literary production that addresses, has been written by or portrays people of diverse gender identity.
Abigail Shrier is an American author and former opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal.
Alison Evans is an Australian novelist and writer. They are a transgender non-binary person who identifies as bisexual, and their work often features queer and transgender characters. Evans grew up in the town of Emerald among the Dandenong Ranges, a setting which went on to heavily influence their work.
Ida is a 2017 young adult novel by Alison Evans. Set in the Dandenong Ranges, it tells the story of Ida Wagner, a young person who begins to encounter her own dopplegangers and realises she can both travel through short increments of time and also shift between parallel universes at will. Many of the novel's characters are transgender, including Daisy who is genderqueer and Frank who is transmasculine.
Highway Bodies is a 2019 young adult post-apocalyptic novel by Alison Evans. It tells the story of a group of young people attempting to survive a zombie apocalypse as a found family in regional Victoria. While grappling with the lack of information and life on the run, they also "navigate issues of friendship, gender, and identity". As is common in Evans' work, many of the characters are queer and transgender.
