I’m a trainee teacher in a school that has had in the past transgender pupils and I’m going to focus on this area for my next PGCE essay so when I saw this book recommended for educational professionals (linked from a very good online article) I decided to buy it to get some early research in.
The book is quite short (64 pages) and the first 40 pages reads as if it were written by a 12 year old boy from his point of view of transitioning from his assigned birth gender of female. The text is obviously written by an adult in a child’s voice, but this is fine – it really makes you think about how the transgender child might feel. It does a good job of explaining that ‘Kit’s story’ is not the only way a child can explore their gender and introduces a lot of what might be new vocabulary to some students / adults:
Assigned female / male; transgender; intersex; cisgender; binary; non-binary; medical transition; social transition; pansexual; asexual; gender dysphoria; gender queer; gender non-conforming.
It does a really good job of explaining these terms in a way which secondary school students would understand. The book, I think, is primarily aimed at educational professionals as the last 24 pages of the book deals with the legal rights of the transitioning child, how to deal with the transition in a school setting and how to make the child feel comfortable in school. It would be good if the first part of the book ‘Kit’s story’ was available as a separate booklet which could be given out to classmates of transitioning students to read leading up to transition as it really does help the reader to empathise with the child’s position and answers many of the questions a curious students might want to know but might embarrass the transgender child if asked directly.
I class myself as a pretty well read individual and I have read around this topic in the past, but I still learned quite a lot from this book, particularly how a transgender child might feel.
This book is quite pricey for its size, but I think there should certainly be several copies in every school library – both in the students’ section and the teachers’ section. It would also be useful for professionals in the health service, social services and youth work too.
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3.8 out of 5
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