A transgender girl who wants to transition and a boy who is bipolar become friends and navigate the shoals of middle school life. This well-intentioned story, told in the protagonists’ alternating perspectives is nevertheless problematic.
The girl, Lily, wants to start dressing as a girl in public and to begin puberty blocking medication, but while her mom and sister are supportive, her dad is (initially) opposed to any manifestation of her identity as a girl, although we see that this is because he fears for her safety. The boy, who has just moved to Florida from New Jersey, doesn’t like his given name, but finds happiness with the name Lily suggests, “Dunkin.” Nevertheless, he faces peer pressure from a group of bullying basketball jocks not to socialize with Lily, even as he’s surprisingly picked to be on the team. But can he manage his mood and anti-psychosis medications to keep himself stable?
The book tries to be sympathetic to its characters, although the frequent use of Lily’s deadname, by herself and others, may be offputting to some readers. Use of the term “biological girl” is also a red flag, as many trans people do not like the term. (Planned Parenthood explains, “This term doesn’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical, and chromosomal variations that can occur. Having only two options (biological male or biological female) might not describe what’s going on inside a person’s body.” Author Donna Gephart misses this point further in the Discussion Questions at the end, which say, “A transgender person is someone who does not identify with the biological gender assigned to him or her at birth.” But gender, even more than sex, is not a matter of biology. The term “biological gender” reflects a fundamental lack of understanding about the difference between sex and gender.
I’m also put off by several references (in both the main story and the Discussion Questions) to Lily being “brave” for living as her true self. This is a seeming compliment often told to trans people, but with problematic connotations. (See this article at the Guardian for more on why.) It’s also a close cousin to calling disabled people “brave” or “inspirational,” which is also problematic, for reasons explained here. Given that the other main character has a mental disability, this feels even more like a “compliment” that should have been avoided throughout the book for either character.
Also, the process Lily goes through to be put on hormone blockers is faster than it would actually happen in real life, with much less discussion and endocrinological testing, which could feed into right-wing misinformation about how quickly kids are put on such treatment (with the implication that such speedy actions are erroneous). And Lily is determined to go on female hormones someday, which is a legitimate desire for some trans women, but not all, and is never balanced here by other perspectives that indicate there is more than one way to be a trans woman.
Additionally, Dunkin is described as having bipolar disorder, but he hears voices and hallucinates, which are more typical (as I understand it from a non-expert position) of schizophrenia. Gephart based the character on her son, who is bipolar, but it feels like she also included some characteristics that could give the wrong impression of what it usually means to be bipolar.
The book also gets a big content warning for sexual assault and discussion of suicide, and does so in problematic ways. There are spoilers here, so I’ll write them in white on white below; click and drag over the area to see:
We discover towards the end that Dunkin’s father, who also had bipolar disorder, died by suicide (another non-typical association with the disease that Gephart unfortunately includes). And what finally sways Lily’s dad is that someone tells him that “Forty-three percent of transgender kids try to kill themselves” and asks, “Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?” Lily, however, has shown no signs of suicidal ideation; she’s been taking more and more steps to live as the girl she is, and has the support of her best friend, sister, and mother. Her family is reasonably well off and has the means to get her hormone blockers. It feels like Gephart has read about the (legitimate and horrifying) high risk for suicide among trans youth, and feels obligated to weave it in here, even though it doesn’t feel true to this character. It also ignores the intersections of race and socioeconomic status that are also woven into the suicide statistics.
Additionally, Lily is assaulted by some boys at her school who remove her pants and underwear to see what genitalia she has. This feels egregious; we already know that they bully her, and we don’t need to know what Lily’s genitalia are, so I fail to see what this scene adds to the story, except to reinforce people’s awful obsession with the genitalia of trans people.
While the book may have been a rare, seemingly positive middle grade book about a trans girl when it was published in 2016, there are happily better ones today.
