When I started transitioning and coming out, in the halcyon days of 2015, I was lucky to do so during the heyday of New York-based indie publisher Topside Press. Topside put out novels written by trans authors, for a largely trans audience. Growing up in the â90s and muddling through my 20s in the 2000s, I found literature about trans people was largely confined to memoir or exploitative fiction written by clueless cisgender people. Neither were particularly helpful for someone like me, who had spent much of my life using literature and art to try to find answers to the question of what, exactly, was my deal.Â