I need to establish some things off the bat in reviewing this book: 1) I received it through the Early Reviewers program at LibraryThing, and am grateful to Beacon Press for the free copy of the book; 2) I'm a cafab non-binary person who, like Donald, came out while at boarding school in 2011, which means I am going to go into this book with certain feelings.

All of this being said: this book was a difficult read for me, especially the essays written by Mary, and much of my difficulty is informed by my own experience socially transitioning at a young age. At one point I wrote that her struggles with Donald's transitions seemed to have little to do with his trans identity, and much, much more with the idea that he was no longer under her control at 16 (or subsequently at 18) and could do with his body what he wanted. She kept referring to him making these choices, especially medical choices, without her consent, despite the fact that he did not pursue medical transition before the age of 18; her claims that therapists and doctors interfered with her parenting seemed to completely ignore the fact that at the time he made these decisions, he was a legal adult, and he did not go through that process without any gatekeeping, as his chapters make explicitly clear.

In all of this, Donald comes out looking comparatively level-headed and remarkably reflective; he is able to acknowledge the pain his mother went through throughout her transition, including the ways he hurt her, while also holding the same space for his own pain--to put it neatly, he has created the "middle ground" she demands be opened, while her essays leave her claiming "discrimination" from people who were more supportive of her son than she was. I want to be clear that I don't think she doesn't have important things to say, but it is incredibly telling to me that it is Donald who makes the all-too-telling assessment that his mother experienced "the bigger, more abstract fear that [he] needed something she couldn't give and that [he] would seek it out wherever [he] could find it, whether she was included or not." He follows this observation with an incredible insight: "I have to admit, she was right."

And that to me is where the miss in this book came; Mary's rigid insistence that she had been slighted, or abandoned, or kept out of the process of Donald's transition seems to block her from articulating what to me is a huge piece of misunderstanding between trans children and their cis parents, and between children and parents more generally: parents cannot always provide everything for their children that their children need. (It seems important to note that I came to this book less than a week after I finished Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?, which I would call a readalike with this book.) Donald seems in what I would call his best essay ("Hidden Fees") to understand and even almost articulate that point, while Mary is too caught up trying to explain the why behind her actions and feelings without really digging into the why within herself.

What bumped this book up from two stars to three for me (beyond Donald's last essay, which I am very impressed with) were two things, the first being the section at the back, especially the interviews with trans people, which were delightful as a trans person because it is so rare to see communication between community members in print, but also because it gives a wider variety of narratives for parents who did struggle with their feelings about their children's identities. Being able to step outside Mary's seeming lake of self-pity helped generate a broader sympathy for the parents of trans children (though I should note that trans children and adults are often discouraged, and in some cases are legally prohibited, from being their true authentic selves for the sake of their parents, a thought which never seems to cross any of the parents' minds.) The second thing was how much this made me reflect on my own relationship with my parents, as a trans child who came out at the same time as Donald (literally down to the year- it's almost spooky!) I will be handing off my copy to my mother and then hopefully give it to my father, in the hopes of generating a conversation that we never had about their feelings about my transition (were they more inclined to accept me because I told them a year before I came out socially and changed my name? because I was quick to reassure them that medical transition, if an option at all for me, was not in my immediate future? because they understood or knew their understanding didn't really matter?) That is definitely in-line with the series theme, and so I do think it was worth it from that perspective.