For the YA Book Club August Reading Challenge:
Read a memoir.

Actual review to come.

This is an excellent memoir by an amazing woman. McBride details both the intimate moments of her life — coming out to her parents as transgender, her relationship with the man she would marry four days before his death — and those on a larger, political stage, from her pivotal role in getting a gender identity non-discrimination law passed in her home state of Delaware to her experience speaking at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Throughout her story, she manages to weave in both a kind of Trans 101 education for readers and also frequent acknowledgements of the privilege she holds as a white, well-connected, "passing" trans woman. She reminds the reader over and over again that the rights she's fighting for cannot just be rights for trans people like her, but must be for Black, Muslim, undocumented trans women as well.

I switched to the audiobook halfway through, and while she's not the world's best example of an author reading their own work, she did a great job. I was amazed at how steady her voice was through the passages that made me cry — I wonder if it took multiple takes, or if she's just used to telling her story over and over again by this point.

This book came out in 2018, and I think McBride strikes a nice balance between acknowledging the progress that has been made and facing the progress yet to be made in our country. I'm glad she was elected a state senator in 2020, and I don't think that's the last we'll see of her on the national political stage.