About Us

Margot E. Wilson, PhD

TransGender Publishing is a small independent publishing house located in Victoria BC. The first Canadian publishing house focused specifically on publishing transgender manuscripts, TransGender Publishing is an imprint of Castle Carrington Publishing.

We offer a wide range of supports for authors and researchers, including research design, interviewing, audio recording and editing, transcription, writing support, proofreading, copy editing, digital typesetting, cover design, photograph scanning and image editing in preparation for publication.

The proprietor of TransGender Publishing, Margot Wilson is an anthropologist recently retired from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Over the past 30+ years, Margot has undertaken anthropological research in South Asia. She has lived in a bamboo hut with no running water or electricity in a rural village in northwest Bangladesh, learning to be a village woman by living as one. Margot has also undertaken research at a shelter for abandoned women and children in Dhaka (the capital city) and at the Danish-Bangladesh Leprosy Missions in rural northwest and central Bangladesh.

She has published a number of research papers based on that research and two books based on women’s narratives. These include Daughter of the Spirit and Beyond Ideas of Wrong Doing and are available through Castle Carrington Publishing.

More recently, (since 2014), Margot’s longstanding research interests in gender, personal narrative and life story telling have led her to undertake life history research in collaboration with elders in the Canadian and American transgender communities.

In 2018, Margot published the first in a series of transgender elders’ life histories, Girl in the Dream, the life story of Stephanie Castle, a Canadian transgender woman and early advocate for the rights of transgender people and, more specifically, for transgender people incarcerated in the Canadian prison system (see Stephanie’s publication Prisoner of Gender available through Stephanie Castle Publications).

Also published in 2018 is a second edition of Feelings: A Transsexual’s Explanation of a Baffling Condition, which is edited and includes a new introduction by Margot. Originally published in 1992, Feelings was Stephanie Castle’s first non-fiction book on transgender issues. Other fiction and non-fiction books on transgender topics written by Stephanie Castle are available at Stephanie Castle Publications (a recently affiliated imprint of Castle Carrington Publishing).

In 2019, My Untrue Past: The Coming of Age of a Trans Man by Alex Bakker was published in English by TransGender Publishing. Margot worked closely with Alex and Hilda Bakker (the original translator) to negotiate challenging idiomatic Dutch that did not translate easily into English.

Glimmerings: Trans Elders Tell Their Stories, edited by Margot Wilson and Aaron Devor, a volume of 15 life stories written by trans, non-binary and Two-Spirit elders, is available in paperback and e-book formats beginning in July 2019.

Currently, Margot is collaborating with Jude Patton, Joanna Clarke and Ariadne Kane on upcoming publications of their life histories.  These publications are expected in 2019 and 2020. A volume of creative non-fiction written by Gayle Roberts and titled From Shame to Freedom: A Gender Variant Woman’s Journey of Discovery is also expected in 2019.

Additional projects currently underway at TransGender Publishing include:

Finally, if you are a trans author and would like to talk to us about publishing your manuscript, please use the contact form below to get in touch with Margot.