Trans lesbian fiction has evolved dramatically over the past decade, with more authors telling their own stories and challenging assumptions about femininity, identity, and what it means to be a trans woman who loves women. These five books showcase that range: from cyberpunk goddesses and soft butch trans women to intimate graphic novels about family and transformation. Whether you’re looking for speculative adventure, contemporary romance, or lyrical literary fiction, these books offer trans lesbian protagonists navigating love, community, and self-discovery in all their complexity.
The Hades Calculus by Maria Ying
Decadent cyberpunk cities. Greek mythology and giant mechs. Hades and Persephone as never seen before.
For generations, colossi have besieged the gates of Elysium. Each day, the city’s fall looms closer.
As one of Elysium’s rulers, Hades has long sought to break this stalemate. In Persephone, a cyborg tailor-made to kill, she finds the key to victory and the perfect pilot for her war machine. She will acquire Persephone at any cost.
Born to wield violence and with the bloodthirst to match, Persephone chafes under her mother’s control. At the first opportunity, she brutally breaks free and seeks sanctuary with the unlikeliest of patrons: the Lord of the Machine Dead, the Master of the Underworld.
All Hades and Persephone have to do to realize their goals is to navigate the city’s treacherous politics—and survive the coming war.
Small Beauty by Jia Qing Wilson-Yang
Small Beauty tells the story of Mei. Coping with the death of her cousin, she abandons her life in the city to live in his now-empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt’s long-term secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she has left behind. The novel explores the protagonist’s transness, but it also tenderly yet bitterly unpacks her experiences as a mixed-race person of Chinese descent, cycles of death and loss, and queer and intergenerational community. Small Beauty wanders through isolation and then breaks it – a trajectory that will resonate with readers who are thirsty for their own stories on the page.
Fake It by Lily Seabrooke
To spark interest in Avery’s restaurant, and to revitalize Holly’s image, a fake relationship is the answer to both their problems.
And the start of a pressing new problem: falling in love.
Avery Lindt finally opened her dream restaurant—and there’s no customers. She’s staying optimistic, though: she’s confident she can fake it till she makes it, roll with the punches, and find a way to save her luxury restaurant, Paramour.
But it gets harder when she gets restaurant mogul and star chef Mike Wallace angry, and finds herself on the other end of a campaign to shut down Paramour.
Celebrity chef Holly Mason’s show is in trouble: people are bored with her routine of helping struggling restaurants. Worse, her ex-boyfriend Mike Wallace is making backdoor deals trying to steal the starring role.
Luckily, Holly’s agent Tay has a solution: ditch her show plans for the season, throw their lot in with luxury restaurant Paramour against Mike Wallace’s racketeering operation of a restaurant partnership. The cherry on top? A fake relationship between Holly and Avery to stir up drama.
It would already be a mess if Holly and Avery weren’t already struggling to hold back their attraction for one another. Despite their promise not to date, the lines between acting and reality get awfully blurry sometimes.
Stone Fruit by Lee Lai
Bron is a trans woman, and the graphic novel sensitively explores her relationship with Ray (a lesbian) as they navigate family, identity, and vulnerability. Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties ― Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother sister and Bron with her religious teenage sister who doesn’t fully grasp the complexities of gender identity. Taking a leap of faith, each opens up and learns they have more in common with their siblings than they ever knew. At turns joyful and heartbreaking, Stone Fruit reveals through intimately naturalistic dialog and blue-hued watercolor how painful it can be to truly become vulnerable to your loved ones ― and how fulfilling it is to be finally understood for who you are. Lee Lai is one of the most exciting new voices to break into the comics medium and she has created one of the truly sophisticated graphic novel debuts in recent memory.
Reverse Tomboy by Auto Anon
Naomi Soloveitchik has taken the first steps towards medical transition and with them, the womanhood she hopes to embody. However, she does not really understand what that means for her relationships, both to friends and lovers, but also to her own body. She wrestles with the more masculinized forms of womanhood she had admired and aspired to all her life, asking herself if it is possible for a trans woman to be that kind of woman. As she attempts to find her body and her body’s place in this new, exciting, and at points terrifying world she encounters a cast of characters both from her immediate past, who haunt her and leave her wondering what their roles served to do to her, and new ones who she must learn if she can trust enough to love.
In addition to the central story, also included are a small collection of poems and a brief essay on trans femme butch identity.
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