Gender Outlaws - The Next Generation

"By turns provocative, humorous, insightful, radical, and open to vulnerability and tenderness as well as strength." - Lambda Literary Review

In the 15 years since the release of Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein's groundbreaking challenge to gender ideology, transgender narratives have made their way from the margins to the mainstream and back again. Today's transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being. In Gender Outlaws TNG, Bornstein, together with writer, raconteur, and theater artist S. Bear Bergman, collects and contextualizes the work of this generation's trans and genderqueer forward thinkers - new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world's most respected mainstream news sources.Gender Outlaws includes essays, commentary, comic art, and conversations from a diverse group of trans-spectrum people who live and believe in barrier-breaking lives.

The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

"Bergman's elegantly written collection of essays chronicles life as a gender non-conformist with a laugh-out-loud sense of humor.... This engrossing memoir is highly recommended." - Gay and Lesbian Review

Alternately unsettling and affirming, devastating and delicious, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You is a new collection of essays on gender and identity by S. Bear Bergman that is irrevocably honest and endlessly illuminating. With humor and grace, these essays deal with issues from women's spaces to the old boys' network, from gay male bathhouses to lesbian potlucks, from being a child to preparing to have one. Throughout, S. Bear Bergman shows us there are things you learn when you're visibly different from those around you—whether it's being transgressively gendered or readably queer. As a transmasculine person, Bergman keeps readers breathless and rapt in the freakshow tent long after the midway has gone dark, when the good hooch gets passed around and the best stories get told. Ze offers unique perspectives on issues that challenge, complicate, and confound the "official stories" about how gender and sexuality work.

Butch is a Noun

"Butch is a Noun is a book that a) should be required reading in any gender studies curriculum; b) femmes should read whenever they're feeling unloved, lonely, or misunderstood; c) butches should read; d) all of the above. The answer, of course, is d. Thank you, dear Bear." - Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw

"Bear's poetry of butchness lets us see into facets of gender that usually aren't so transparent. And made me fall in love with butches all over again." - Carol Queen, author of Real Live Nude Girl

Butch is a Noun, the first book by activist, gender-jammer, and performer S. Bear Bergman, won wide acclaim when published by Suspect Thoughts in 2006: a funny, insightful, and purposely unsettling manifesto on what it means to be butch (and not). In thirty-four deeply personal essays, Bear makes butchness accessible to those who are new to the concept, and makes gender outlaws of all stripes feel as though they have come home. From girls' clothes to men's haircuts, from walking with girls to hanging with young men, Butch is a Noun chronicles the perplexities, dangers, and pleasures of living life outside the gender binary. This new edition includes a new introduction by the author.