Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

Gender Outlaw, by trans author Kate Bornstein, became a key book in unpacking queer and transgender lives in the mid-1990s. Seventeen years later, Bornstein together with writer and artist S. Bear Bergman, released Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, a collection of essays, poetry, conversations and comics in a volume that challenges traditional notions of gender and embraces a spectrum of possibility in gendered identities. The diverse contributors in Gender Outlaws challenge the presentation of trans narratives as a journey from man to woman or vice versa by embracing identities combining both genders – or neither – and illustrate there is no one trans identity, but that trans* identities are influenced by ongoing intersections with race, class, sexuality and lived experiences. Social pressures impose an oversimplified gender binary on us all, but Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation reminds us that resistance is possible and collectively we are far more than we have been told we are.