A thoughtful and personal look at what it means to be transgender, this book is one of a set of three titles by “champions” of the GenderCool Project, a youth-led movement of teens who are speaking out to show that transgender and non-binary youth can thrive. The books are part of the lauded A Kids Book About (AKBA) collection (named as one of Oprah’s Favorite Things 2020), which began in 2019 with A Kids Book About Racism, and continues with volumes on other important topics that can be challenging to discuss. The GenderCool series is aimed at children ages 5 to 9, but written by the teen champions, who share their personal stories as a way to open up conversations about gender, identity, and inclusion. Like the rest of the AKBA books, the GenderCool ones use bright colors and a variety of fonts rather than pictures, keeping the focus on the words and giving the books a conversational feel. All of the AKBA books also note, “This book is best read together, grownup and kid.”
“Something cool about me is that I am transgender,” Parr starts the book, immediately letting readers know that far from being something negative, being trans is actually a positive characteristic. (Not that everyone should aspire to being trans; just that it’s cool for those who are.) Parr explains that doctors say “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” when a child is born, but sometimes, as in her case, they don’t get it right. She shares the story of doing a self-portrait in class an drawing a boy, but that “didn’t feel right.” She started again, this time drawing “how I felt on the inside: A girl with long hair and a flowy dress.” Her classmates were “confused” by this, though, which scared her, “So I hid who I was.”
The pages then turn black as a white box with green text offers an analogy of how Parr felt at this time—as if there was a room filled with things that made her happy inside, but in which she was trapped. The white box of text gets smaller and smaller over several pages as she tells us, “I put all of me in one small space. I shut my door and didn’t let anyone in.” It’s a powerful visual analogy.
Eventually, though, “I found stories of people who were just like me,” and she worked up the courage to tell her parents, who hugged her and told her they loved her. The black pages go away and the colors return to green and white as Parr tells of starting her next year of school as who she really is, with the clothes, hair, makeup, pronouns, and friends that she wants—all of the little things that can matter in big ways. “It may be really hard or scary to let people in, but if you do, you will always find people who love you exactly as you are,” she concludes. May that be true for all trans people.
