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“Be proud of your family structure. There are people out there that are like you with similar experiences, you just may not know it.”

—CAMERON V., AGE 22

Books like this one didn’t exist when my dad was transitioning. I thought I was the only person on the whole planet with a family like mine. We met a few people through my dad’s therapist, but none of my friends at school, as far as I knew, had parents transitioning like mine. At the time, there were no trans people on television or in mainstream movies. We had no reference points. We didn’t even have a language to talk about it. No one’s family looked like mine.

This book aims to fill a gap in conversations about the many shapes of families. I hope that reading this book will provide you with a built-in community of people like you. Like me. Like all the people around the world with trans parents. This book answers questions and gives a space for more questions.

This is the book I needed as a kid, but it’s not one I would have sought out. I would have been reading it with the cover wrapped in brown paper under my bed with a flashlight. Nothing is different about my family. Don’t look at me. I would have had Amazon deliver it to someone else’s house and then gone in the night to pick it up. At the same time, I needed to know that we weren’t the only ones. I’m still surprised to hear of other trans families, though now I know we are everywhere, across the planet and around the world.

I talked to people in Canada, Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom, as well as every corner of the United States. Whether we were in Tennessee, or California, or Wisconsin, our feelings were often the same. There was a little boy in Oslo, Norway, back in the ’80s whose family also watched the movie Tootsie. Our families were looking for our stories even though the story told in Tootsie wasn’t the exact same as those of our families.

Had I known that at the same time as my parent transitioned, there was a little girl in Michigan named Sharon and a boy in Tennessee named Justin who had parents like mine, I would still have had to go to school every day with kids who didn’t have trans parents, but maybe I would have felt less alone. It’s important to know that you’re not the only one. Yet so many of us looked outside and around us while our families were changing, and felt like we were the only ones.

I had expected to find a sea change since the days when my parent transitioned, but I was amazed by how similar the experiences of kids with trans parents are today when compared to my story three decades ago. The truth remains that it is still the world that needs to change, not our families. As Becca L. said about the neighbors who drifted away when her dad started to transition, “They just need to get over themselves.”

Often what I found in talking with kids in our community was a sense of isolation, of having to go through this alone. It felt like unknown territory for many families. There were no manuals or guides, no suggestions given for the right path.

In the course of creating this handbook, I reached out to trans families all over the world in search of stories. I interviewed, surveyed, and talked to over 30 kids of trans (people with trans parents), trans parents, and therapists and experts working with trans families. COLAGE, a national organization that supports people with one or more LGBTQ+1 parent, linked me to the wider community of trans families. The more I shared about the project, though, the more I found people all around me with trans parents. Friends of friends and people I met in writing workshops popped up saying, “Hey! I have a trans parent, too.”

I talked to one parent and child who’d just reconnected after 38 years of not talking, and to a girl who knew her parent only as trans. I talked to someone with two trans parents and someone with both gay and trans parents. Some had known for many years and some had just found out. Some had never met anyone else with a trans parent and some are now leaders in advocating for kids with trans families. One of the parents came out before my parent did and one is still coming out today. Her daughter still doesn’t know. Some of the kids grew up in the ’80s with trans parents, and some are still growing up today. How is it that someone whose parent came out in 1987 and someone whose parent came out this year could have so much in common? I thought by now everyone was broadcasting about their families and parading around their neighborhoods in celebration. Yet backlashes have delayed progress.

Pride in trans families is a part of daily life in some small pockets of the United States and other countries. Places where people are more aware. In some places, kids grow up in communities where schools celebrate rainbow days and educate students about gender expansiveness from a young age. As more kids grow up in a world that understands that gender identity is not a matter of checking a box and that this is part of human experience, more families will start with trans at the center instead of in the margins. Jordan L. found that everyone he told in recent years had one degree of separation from someone trans: trans kids, trans parents, trans people in their communities. All across the world, people are transitioning. The more we tell our stories, the more we’ll know we’re not alone.

We are at the very beginning of a bigger conversation about families. There’s no one shape for families, just like there’s no one way to be trans. As Jennifer said, “There’s not one universal experience that all of us have had. People transition in so many different ways—so many different degrees of being out. That’s another thing that people should know—our stories are so different but equally important.”

There’s still a need for open conversations about our families. My parent still does not feel safe to be open in her community. There are backlashes as we make progress. There are parts of the world that get it, and parts that don’t. Communities are forming, but not everyone has caught up yet. We need more stories about our families. Let’s keep trading stories until no one thinks there’s one way to have a trans parent, to be transgender or just to be.

We need more stories where the fact of our parent being trans is in the background. The everyday moments: eating breakfast, watching TV. It’s powerful to look out into the world and see your story. The more people hear about our ordinary lives, the more they’ll get to see that this is part of their lives, too.

I didn’t expect so much of my own story to find its way into these pages. As I talked to kids and parents around the world, my memories came back. I didn’t want to think about times when I’d rejected my parent, when I wanted nothing to do with her, or the times when I laughed along with my friends about something that made fun of crossing the gender lines. It hadn’t been too long since I’d played the pronoun game—when you avoid pronouns to try to fit in. I still play it when I don’t want to launch into a big long explanation of my family. I had to look at myself, too, at the ways I’d learned that my family was somehow wrong.

There are still more stories to tell. This book doesn’t represent all trans families everywhere. More stories are needed from kids all over the world with parents stepping out as non-binary and gender queer. From kids with more than one trans parent. From kids with trans parents from birth. From kids who just found out when their parent was a senior citizen. From kids who identify as trans alongside their parent. Many more stories are coming. As Becca said, “Everyone’s stories are unique and different, even though they’re all fundamentally the same.” Each story I found along the way told my story in different ways.

This book invites you to tell your story, too. Follow along with the prompts at the end of each chapter. Find out something you didn’t know about yourself or your family by writing answers to the questions designed to help you explore your own story.

Back when my parent transitioned, there were other families out there like mine. I just didn’t know it. I also thought my parent’s transition was her journey, that it had nothing to do with me. When I talked to Amy S., another person with a trans parent, she said, “I’m happy that there’s something out there that’s helping the children understand that they’re a part of it, because I really didn’t feel like a part of it—I didn’t feel like I had any voice at all.” You’re a part of this. When one family member transitions, the whole family transitions.

When Becca L.’s dad came out, it was her mother who found that her friends in the church community faded away. They didn’t understand why she stayed in the marriage. When Jonathan W., a pastor in Brooklyn, decided that his church would stand by his dad and become an LGBTQ+ affirming church, they lost their funding from the network of churches they were linked to. The family is impacted in ways people don’t always see. At the same time, as Morgan G. said, “The transition can be something that brings you together with your parent, something that increases your sense of intimacy and connection.” The transition can be a chance to get closer to your parent. It’s not a linear process, though. There are no instant results.

Wherever you are now in your perspective on your family, start there. It’s okay not to be okay. That doesn’t mean you don’t love your parent or that you don’t support the trans community. “No one told me it was okay to be angry,” Becca said. “So I felt like crap because I was mad.” Trying to fast-forward to acceptance doesn’t work. It’s not so simple. “I couldn’t get rid of me being angry, because that was my first emotion—anger—it was mostly anger, then sadness, then anger again, and then acceptance.”

Even B. talked about his own way to acceptance. “I stopped trying to understand it, because I can’t, because you have to be transgender to understand it, but I just learned that some people are different, so it doesn’t really matter what they are. Don’t analyze it, just accept it. We have so much trouble understanding ourselves, you know, trying to understand everyone, we would have a really hard time, so acceptance is a much better way to go.”

For me, I still don’t have answers to all of the questions, but I’m learning how to name what I don’t know or don’t understand.

This is a book for us, for our stories, for our lives. So when you have a question and are wondering what to think or do, you can see that there are others like you.

“You are going on a big adventure in talking to all of us,” Morgan G. said. And she was so right. It was an adventure, one that helped me see even more the gifts of having a trans parent. Morgan reflected on this, too: “Having a trans parent has better allowed me to relate to my own gender in a way that seems genuine and unique, and I’ve felt—I think I have felt that it has been easier for me to be a woman and that’s also among the gifts that I’ve experienced.” When she said this, I saw how this was true in so many ways for me, too. I never felt I had to fit into a box or a role. As she said, gender “goes beyond the binary, it goes beyond girls and boys and men and women, because everyone ultimately is unique and takes from gender and uses gender in their own way.” Her perspective is one that took me a long time to see.

We aren’t different from other families. The stuff we struggle with is the same as in every family, and the stuff that brings us joy is the same, too. In our families, pockets of silence still impact our lives. “Nana doesn’t need to know.” Or, “Let’s not tell cousin Brian.” Yet being trans is part of all of our lives, not just people with trans parents. It’s part of our world. We need to find a way to talk about having trans parents, within our families and within the larger world.

It took me a long time to find my own community. In my family, my parent didn’t find a trans community once she claimed her identity. It didn’t feel like a community in the way the gay community did. We didn’t have neighborhoods or spaces to gather in like those in the gay community. Most of the time, it felt like a part of my identity was invisible. “I’m cisgender,” Kara M. said. “So there’s also that aspect of being like how do I fit in the trans community?” When I marched in the New York City pride parade, I wore a “Kids of Trans” sign, but people don’t see that every day. Still, having a trans parent is a part of me. When trans topics are mis-portrayed in the news, it feels personal. “Hey,” I want to yell, “that’s my family, too.” As I talked to both kids and parents, I saw how we’re a part of this community, too; how we have our own unique place.

Olivia C. talked about what it was like for her finding a larger community of people with trans parents: “Hearing all the other voices that were saying exactly how I had been feeling—it was so validating, because I feel like when you’re not talking to other people who have been through it, it’s hard to be completely honest about how you feel, and even if you are, no one wants to be like—oh yeah—it’s just hard to feel validated, so that was really helpful.”

I hope you’ll find validation within the pages of this book, that you’ll hear echoes of your own story, of your family. I hope you’ll find what you need to share your story, too.