Renee James

Welcome to the Site of Banned Books . . .

 

. . . and they're not even erotic. They're just about life in America in the early 21st Century. Oh, and the lead character in each book is a transgender woman trying to lead a life of self-sufficiency and principle. My books aren't as famous as some of the other books banned by MAGA politicians and religious crazies, but they're just as deserving of this status because they're well written and tell the stories of people who aren't supposed to exist in MAGAworld.

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A Social History of Trans Life in the 2000s

 

    Coming Out Can Be Murder. Set in 2003 Chicago, Coming Out traces Bobbi Logan's first year of gender transition in a world that is still hostile to transwomen. Even as Bobbi engages in a life-and-death struggle with a powerful man, she must also do battle with both subtle and overt forms of societal rejection and condemnation.

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    A Kind of Justice picks up Bobbi five years later, in 2008. Transwomen are no longer a novelty in Chicago and she has ascended to elite status as a hairdresser. Anti-trans bigotry still exists, but it's subtler than in 2003 and people like Bobbi move about her world with less fear of being assaulted on the street.

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    Seven Suspects picks up Bobbi's life in 2013, after another five-year span. She is a successful, self-assured woman who is mostly accepted in Chicago like any other woman. There is still anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in the population, but street violence is rare in Bobbi's mostly white, middle class part of Chicago.

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     BeatNikki's Café is set in the summer of 2017, the first summer of the Trump presidency when anti-minority sentiments are running high in MAGA-world, with transgender people an especially popular target for bigotry. Nikki Finch is a successful middle-aged transgender woman who saves her business partner from an assault by putting a thug in the hospital . . . which leads to reprisals.

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    These are all crime novels--works of fiction--that together portray the ever-changing landscape for trans people in the first two decades of the millenium. They also portray transgender women as mainstream people who believe in hard work, independence, sacrifice, and fair play. And each story deals with a crime that presents a moral dilemma for the heroine . . . because, what's life without a moral dilemma?

 

I hope you enjoy reading these books as much as I've enjoyed writing them.

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--Renee James, Author