I'M NOT A GIRL

A young transgender boy finds the words to come out to his parents and begin his transition.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator, a white trans boy, knows only that he is “not a girl.” Something is wrong, but he can’t quite name it. Over the course of the book, he comes to be able to say “I am a boy.” At the public pool, he meets new friends, black siblings, and they teach him the word “transgender,” arming him to come out to his parents. The story ends with the most touching of the largely uninspiring illustrations, as the boy smiles at his new haircut in the barbershop mirror. This straightforward coming-out story may be useful as an issue teaching tool, but it doesn’t have the spark that makes a picture book special. It pales when held up to Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita’s When Aidan Became a Brother (2019), the only real competition in the category of picture books about transgender boys, lacking both the heart and the comfortable trans competency. Verdi and Lyons are careful to neither disparage girls nor fall into the common trap of gender stereotyping trans children, and the first-person narration at first seems like a clever way to obscure the boy’s birth name—but unfortunately, the dreaded name still weasels its way into the didactic text.

A springboard (but not much more) for talking to kids about being transgender.