Dreaming Ourselves Into Being

Examining the works of ten different transgender comic creators, including Julia Kaye, Mae Dean, and N.D. Stevenson, Zoe Wendler and Jamie Garner show the vital role these comics play in online transgender communities.

Dreaming Ourselves Into Being: The Rhetoric of Trans Comics explore the ways in which transgender webcomic creators and their readers use comics to offer guidance on coming out, support during those early months, and hope for a world in which being transgender is far from remarkable. Ultimately, they show how these comics fill the void created by decades of cruel medical gatekeeping and neglect and media representation that reduced the incredible complexity of gender diversity into a binary transness much more palatable to cisgender audiences.

This book is a deeply interdisciplinary autoethnography, bringing together research in rhetoric, medicine, history, psychology, sociology, queer studies, and comic studies to show just how essential transgender webcomics are to the trans artists that create them and the trans people who read them.