Trans Bodies, Trans Selves

Edited by Laura Erickson-Schroth, the 2022 second edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a community resource rather than a clinical manual that turns trans people into objects of expertise. Its 704 pages bring together trans and gender-expansive contributors on race, culture, immigration, disability, religion, coming out, law, work, health, relationships, parenting, life stages, arts, and organizing. That breadth makes a political argument through its scope: trans life is not a single medical episode or an abstract dispute over identity, but a whole course of living shaped by families, workplaces, care systems, and public institutions.

The table of contents moves from “Living as Ourselves” through health, relationships and families, life stages, and “Claiming Our Power.” This order changes how readers encounter trans knowledge. Medicine is not dismissed, but it is not the only authorized entrance to the subject. Bodily autonomy means more than expressing an identity: it depends on access to resources, respectful treatment, and the ability to seek care without first performing a narrow, institutionally legible version of gender. Life history, institutional conditions, and health information are placed in relation rather than making medicine stand for the whole of trans life.

The opening section makes this position explicit. Tiffany Sostar’s review quotes its contributors challenging recognition and service thresholds: trans people should not have to prove who they are or enact a prescribed gender role before they can access safety, legal recognition, community participation, or needed medical care. Shared advocacy does not require a community to erase every internal disagreement. The question therefore shifts from “who qualifies?” to institutional responsibility. When rights depend on telling a story that an outside authority already recognizes, an apparently neutral assessment is deciding which ways of living gender can count.

The form matters as much as the argument. Beyond 23 chapters, the second edition includes more than 150 shorter pieces, personal accounts, survey quotations, art, and poetry. These materials do not ask a few stories to stand for everyone; they show how the same institutional question changes across race, migration, disability, age, religion, and access to resources. Community experience is not merely an example awaiting professional validation, but a source capable of revising professional knowledge. Yet selection, arrangement, and naming remain editorial acts: a collective document does not automatically solve the problem of representation.

The project takes inspiration from Our Bodies, Ourselves and its history of using shared knowledge to challenge medical authority, but it is not simply an extra chapter appended to an older account of women’s health. Trans contributors help define the questions, unsettling the assumption that “a woman’s body” names one universal biological model. The feminist question becomes more demanding: who names a body, who can obtain care, and whose account is trusted as knowledge? This inheritance does not erase bodily difference; it refuses to make an existing boundary of feminist knowledge the price of trans recognition.

The editors also acknowledge that this collective record cannot represent everyone. Most contributors are based in the United States or Canada, many are white or middle- and upper-class, and many voices remain unheard. This is not a polite caveat: it determines how the book should be used. Its breadth is not global coverage, and its medical, legal, and linguistic guidance has temporal and geographical limits. It is more responsible to treat it as a map of questions and an entry point into community knowledge than as a universal rulebook; specific decisions still require attention to local systems, care conditions, and individual needs.

For a useful FemRes pairing, read it with Trans Medicine: this volume shows how trans communities organize practical knowledge and lived experience, while Stef M. Shuster’s study examines the formation of clinical expertise and systems of care. They offer different scales, not interchangeable answers. Oxford University Press bibliographic information and contents appear in the Google Books edition record. Tiffany Sostar’s review essay in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work discusses the opening section, community materials, and the book’s geographical and class limits.