On Saturday 28th June 2025, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: a racial history of trans identity. We have selected the final chapter, “DeVine’s Cut” as a focus chapter for those unable to read the full book – and will spend around half the discussion time on this. See below for links to download the chapter free as a pdf, buy the book at a discount from the local Yellow Lighted Bookshop and to view free audio/visual resources relevant to the book.

We will meet at Creative Sustainability’s shopfront space at 10 John St, GL5 2HA (a short distance from the town centre train or bus station, with parking available nearby at Church St).

Entry is free and everyone is welcome – you do not need to have attended previous sessions, and we do our best to make the sessions welcoming to people who have not been to reading groups or similar settings like university seminars before.

We’re reading Black on Both Sides at the recommendation of a participant in the reading group. Our discussion comes at a time of increasing hostility (in legislation, media, and public) to trans people in the UK – and elsewhere around the world, for example the USA and Hungary, and rising racism.

Our discussion is on a Saturday – unlike usual. This is because it will take place the night after Stroud Pride’s annual event. This year this will begin with a Parade at 11am, followed by entertainment, information stands, and stalls selling goods from 12noon at Bank Gardens (GL5 1BB, mapcarta map, Accessible Gloucestershire’s images and description of access). It would be great to see Radical Reading Group members at these events earlier in the day too!

Content notes:

This is an academic book and can be hard to read. As with all SRRG sessions, the idea is that collective discussion will help us to explore and improve our understanding of the difficult content.

This is a book that deals with many difficult topics, including in graphic ways. Obviously, Transphobia, Racism and Sexism are covered extensively. The following is a summary of additional content notes for the whole book from StoryGraph:
Ableism, Bullying, Deadnaming, domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Gun violence hate crime, Homophobia, Injury detail, Torture, Slavery, Discussion of mental illness, Medical trauma, Misogyny, Murder, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Rape, Sexual assault/violence.

The chapter “DeVine’s Cut” which we will focus on, specifically references 3 murders.

More information about the books, venue and how sessions work is below.

About the book:

“In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible.

Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s access to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don’t Cry out of narrative convenience.”

About the author:

C. Riley Snorton is Visiting Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University. He earned his PhD in Communication and Culture, with graduate certificates in Africana Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. Snorton’s research and teaching expertise include cultural theory, queer and transgender theory and history, Africana studies, performance studies, and popular culture.

Snorton’s first book, Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in news and popular culture.

Resources

• Buy Black on Both Sides, a racial history of trans identity by C. Riley Snorton – RRP £19.99, £16.99 with discount (saving £3). To get a 15% discount: Look at your “basket”, and enter the “couponcode” 25stroudradical. Pick up book from Nailsworth, Tetbury or Chalford shops, or get books delivered to your door for £3.50 postage. If posting books, you may wish to buy other books we are reading this year
• Free pdf version of Chapter 5 “DeVine’s Cut” (702kb)
• Free pdf version of Black on Both Sides available from the transreads.org website (41.9MB)
• Approx 15 minute read text interview with C. Riley Snorton in Mosaic Magazine (2024)
• 30 minute recording of C Riley Snorton reading the Preface to Black on Both Sides, and commenting on how it reads in 2021 (Black Freedom Lectures, embedded below)
• 52 minute interview with C Riley Snorton on the This is Hell! podcast, “What we know of as flesh: Black and trans identity in an age of exclusion.”

About our events and the venue

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover venue hire costs – please bring some cash.

We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. We do not want the sessions to feel like school – the idea is that everyone has something to contribute, even if primarily through finding the discussion texts difficult and having questions with other attendees can attempt to answer.

To ensure marginalised people feel welcome, we encourage care and thoughtful contributions that respect people’s identities and lives. We are an LGBTQ+ inclusive and anti-racist space.

Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing.

There is an opportunity for more informal discussion after the session in the Ale House pub for anyone who wants to continue their evening.

About the venue

We will meet at the Creative Sustainability shopfront space at 10 John St, GL5 2HA (round the corner from Iceland and next to the Ale House pub). This is close to the train station and not far from the bus station. There are stands to lock bikes to outside, and parking for cars nearby at Church St car park. There are no toilets at the venue. There is a small step to access the building, which is then step free). The room is well lit. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.