Trans Day of Visibility with Alberta Books

March 31st is International Trans Day of Visibility, a time to celebrate and uplift our trans and non-binary friends, neighbours, and loved ones. In honour of this important day, we’ve gathered some reading recommendations to keep trans voices at the top of your mind—and shelf—all year round. This booklist is a testament to trans resilience, joy, and the power of being seen.

Pass Me By: Lily

By Kat Simmers and Ryan Danny Owen

A romantic coming-of-age story about understanding queer identity and what happens to the stories you never tell. Ed’s granddaughter, Lily, arrives in Ed’s life for the first time in a long time. Forcing both of them to acknowledge and address the changes they are both experiencing. Ed’s dementia is accelerating, robbing him of more of his now, and sending him increasingly into his past. A past of self-discovery, glam-music and exhilarating live performances.

Lily has been forced from her home in the city to stay with a grandpa she doesn’t know, in a small town of strangers, whilst dealing not only with transitioning but the pain of rejection for just being herself. Despite their struggles, Lily and Ed have an opportunity to get to really know each other, if they can find a way to really connect. Exploring family, loss, tragedy, identity, and self-discovery, the 3rd book in the award winning Pass Me By series, Lily, is a heartfelt tale about how our stories carry through time, and how we come to terms with change.

Lily

Kat Simmers , Ryan Owen

Published: Mar 19, 2025 by Renegade Arts Entertainment
ISBN: 9781989754306

Muster Points

By Lucas Crawford

A journey through COVID, small rooms and big cities, hungers and healing, all via the power, pleasure, and pain of queer and trans worldmaking.

Muster Points is a frank discussion of desire, nostalgia, mental illness, and health from a professor with one foot kicking the ivory tower and both feet sloshing in all the sundry fluids of queer sex and depression. These poems bring us on a trans boy’s trips through the shard-sharp ruins of heterosexual marriages, into weird rural masculinities and their fraught survival, into regret and recovery, durability and desire.

Muster Points

Lucas Crawford

Published: Jun 15, 2023 by University of Calgary Press
ISBN: 9781773854526

There’s Magic Here Too: A Trans Woman’s Guide to Being Monstrous

By Skylar Kay

Trolls, fairies, zombies, kelpies, mermaids, sirens, witches, and other marvellous beasts run rampage through Skylar Kay’s much-anticipated second collection of poetry. The contemporary fairytales in There’s Magic Here Too: A Trans Woman’s Guide to Being Monstrous celebrate radical self-reclamation and transformative power. From the stark cul-de-sacs of Calgary’s suburbs to the surreal liminality of Windsor’s riverbanks, Kay’s menagerie of shapeshifters refigures the image of monstrous queers and trans identities. There’s Magic Here Too moves across borders between stories, memory, bodies, and the neon-lit edges of identity, all in search of a home.

There's Magic Here Too: A Trans Woman's Guide to Being Monstrous

Skylar Kay

Published: Oct 13, 2025 by Frontenac House Ltd.
ISBN: 9781997580010

In the Defense of Liberty

By Keith Maillard

Set on a US college campus in 1964, In the Defense of Liberty is a powerful, fast-paced novel exploring gender nonconformity and the reach of history.

It’s 1964, and the students at Merida University in Ohio can sense that something is brewing — the campus is rippling with undercurrents of anger and alienation. As they work to make sense of the rapidly shifting cultural and ideological climate, the four main characters of In the Defense of Liberty are also consumed by their own personal dramas. In this fascinating and fast-paced novel, Keith Maillard expertly captures the ethos of the mid-1960s and explores threads of gender and sexuality, while holding up a mirror to the roots of modern-day American polarization.

In the Defense of Liberty

Trans Day of Visibility with Alberta Books