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 meansto be butch (and not). In thirty-four deeply personal essays, Bear makes butchness accessibleto those who are new to the concept, and makesgender outlaws of all stripes feel as though theyhave come home. From girls' clothes to men'shaircuts, from walking with girls to hangingwith young men, Butch is a Nounchronicles the perplexities, dangers, and pleasures of living lifeoutside the gender binary.This new edition includes a new introduction by the author.

'Butch is a Noun' is a story of butch in its best and worst moments, about butch in the context of femme, butch in the orbit of another butch, and butch trying to stand alone, sometimes bravely and sometimes foolishly, sometimes successfully and sometimes fatally.

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 meansto be butch (and not). In thirty-four deeply personal essays, Bear makes butchness accessibleto those who are new to the concept, and makesgender outlaws of all stripes feel as though theyhave come home. From girls' clothes to men'shaircuts, from walking with girls to hangingwith young men, Butch is a Noun chronicles the perplexities, dangers, and pleasures of living lifeoutside the gender binary. This new edition includes a new afterword by the author.

Lambda Literary Award finalist American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme." Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come. Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992. Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system. Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

As an author, educator, and public speaker, S. Bear Bergman has documented his experience as, among other things, a trans parent, with wit and aplomb. He also writes the advice column “Ask Bear,” in which he answers crucial questions about how best to make our collective way through the world. Featuring disarming illustrations by Saul Freedman-Lawson, Special Topics in Being a Human elaborates on “Ask Bear”’s premise: a gentle, witty, and insightful book of practical advice for the modern age. It offers Dad advice and Jewish bubbe wisdom, all filtered through a queer lens, to help you navigate some of the complexities of life—from how to make big decisions or make a good apology, to how to get someone’s new name and pronouns right as quickly as possible, to how to gracefully navigate a breakup. With warmth and candor, Special Topics in Being a Human calls out social inequities and injustices in traditional advice-giving, validates your feelings, asks a lot of questions, and tries to help you be your best possible self with kindness, compassion, and humor. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A book with many images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

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 humour 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 youaaC--/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.

S. Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer on trans issues. In hir third essay collection, Bear tackles the concept of the "modern family" as the trans parent of a young son; in Bear's extended family "orchard," drag sisters, sperm-donor parents, and other relations provide more branches of love and support than a mere family tree. Defiantly queer yet full of tenderness and hilarity, Bear's book redefines the notion of what family is and can be. S. Bear Bergman's previous books are The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, Butch is a Noun, and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation.