Hello Cruel World

Finalist, LGBT Nonfiction Lambda Literary Award, 2009
Honor Book, Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award, 2009
Foreword by Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara

Celebrated trans trailblazer Kate Bornstein has, with more humor and spunk than any other, ushered us into a world of limitless possibility through a daring re-envisionment of the gender system as we know it.

Here, Bornstein bravely and wittily shares personal and unorthodox methods of survival in an often cruel world. A one-of-a-kind guide to staying alive outside the box, Hello, Cruel World is a much-needed unconventional approach to life for those who want to stay on the edge, but alive.

Hello, Cruel World features a catalog of 101 alternatives to suicide that range from the playful (moisturize!), to the irreverent (shatter some family values), to the highly controversial. Designed to encourage readers to give themselves permission to unleash their hearts' harmless desires, the book has only one directive: "Don't be mean." It is this guiding principle that brings its reader on a self-validating journey, which forges wholly new paths toward a resounding decision to choose life.

Tenderly intimate and unapologetically edgy, Kate Bornstein is the radical role model, the affectionate best friend, and the guiding mentor all in one.

A celebrated pioneer for the LGBTIQ community, KATE BORNSTEIN is the author of My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely and Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and The Rest of Us, as well as the editor with S. Bear Bergman of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Her plays and performance pieces include Hidden: A Gender, The Opposite Sex Is Neither, and Too Tall Blondes In Love. She lives in New York City with her partner, Barbara Carrellas.