Books
Novels, memoir, and serialized fiction.
Transgender author, reporter, and columnist — telling the story of a life she never sought nor expected, and the culture around it.
Brianna Austin is a transgender — male-to-female — author, reporter, and columnist, and a co-founder of TG Life, an online magazine by, for, and about the male-to-female transgender community.
Brianna was born a man in the baby-boomer age. She excelled at sports and would have been seen by most as a good-looking, athletic alpha guy — despite a long-kept internal secret of gender dysphoria. During those years she was a career entrepreneur, launching and operating several companies, from small ventures to others generating up to $500,000 a month in the transportation and entertainment indusries.
Her first memory of feeling different came when her older sister dressed her up one afternoon. She didn’t know what the feelings were, or why dressing as a girl brought such a sense of well-being — only that it was deliciously curious. When her sister ran to fetch their mother, Brianna panicked and blocked the door. She went into the closet that day, and stayed there, dressing in private, for another thirty-five years.
By 2000 she needed to understand the compulsion, find its source, and — she thought — cure herself of it. What followed was a self-exploration pursued with almost reckless abandon. The more she came out, first within the transgender community and later into the mainstream, the more comfortable she became with who she was. Not a girl, she says, just someone living a girl’s life, daily. Self-acceptance, and “the ability to explore without fear of what I may find, became for me one of the keys to liberty."
Be truthful always — with yourself and with others.
Hungry for answers, Brianna began writing essays about the transgender journey she was on, and the adventures that came with stepping into the mainstream. The writing found an international following. Within a year she became the New York columnist for GIRL TALK magazine, and a contributing columnist for TG News. Her column “A Bite of the Big Apple” in GIRL TALK, blended interviews, reviews, and commentary — carrying her from trans club shows and special events to mainstream Broadway.
With the transgender community still largely hidden in the early 2000s, she was greatly influenced by Pauline Park who was a speaker at one of the first events she covered. Brianna became an advocate for visibility, beginning with an article she wrote for The New York Blade, and continuing wherever she could educate. She wrote cover articles for Transgender Community News and GIRL TALK, filed one-off reports for LadyLike, and saw many of her essays republished across the community, usch as TG Guide, and other resource websites. In 2001 she founded The Transgender Girls' Club and, later that year, co-hosted one of the hottest monthly parties in New York City at the East of Eighth restaurant. She went on to co-found TG Life.
Brianna writes to inform, not to argue. Her work begins from lived experience and reaches for the questions underneath it — identity, belonging, and the distance between the reflection in the mirror and the person behind it.
Is the reflection in the mirror me, or merely the taxi that carries “me” around?
The throughline is honesty: reporting the transgender experience plainly, giving the community a voice, and trusting readers to think for themselves.
Brianna approaches every piece as reporting first. Claims are checked before they are published, people are given the chance to respond before they are characterized, and quotes are kept in the context in which they were given. Opinion is labeled as opinion and held separate from reporting. When something turns out to be wrong, it is corrected openly rather than quietly revised. Sources are treated with care — especially members of a community for whom exposure can carry real risk — and anonymity is granted only when the reason is sound and the information can be corroborated.
The work favors primary sources: first-person interviews, original documents, and direct observation over secondhand summary. Where history and terminology are involve, claims are grounded in the record and dated, so readers can see how understanding has changed over time. Interviews are conducted at length and in the subject’s own words, and context — who said what, when, and where — is preserved rather than flattened. The aim is a piece a careful reader can trace back to its sources and check for themselves.
Novels, memoir, and serialized fiction.
A plain-language reference to the history and terms.
Current thinking on culture and identity.
One thoughtful piece a week, plus what's behind it.
A transgender author, reporter, and columnist who has covered the transgender community since the early 2000s, writing across books, commentary, and interviews.
Her books, columns, interviews, and curated reading guides on transgender life, identity, media, and culture.