Review of How to Be a Girl: A Mother's Memoir of Raising Her Transgender Daughter by Marlo Mack

I came across Marlo Mack’s podcast of the same name and listened to many of the episodes. She discontinued it for a time, at her daughter’s request, which spoke highly of her commitment to putting her daughter’s needs before any possibility of notoriety or listenership. The podcast briefly got an update last December, where Mack mentions she might podcast infrequently with updates about her life and less about her daughter’s, which makes sense. In any event, I knew immediately I needed to read this book. How to Be a Girl is

Just as heads up this review will be a little more personal than most, given how entwined this book’s subject is with my identity as a trans woman.

Mack tells her story chronologically, which makes sense, starting with her daughter’s insistence that she’s a girl. This occurs as Mack is in the process of divorcing her daughter’s father, who to his credit seems like a good dude in the sense that he accepts his daughter’s gender identity pretty willingly. Mack does not sugarcoat or suppress the anxiety, discomfort, and reluctance that she feels. She struggles with the revelation. Hopes it isn’t true. Tries to find any possible alternative, up to and including the idea that her son might a gay and effeminate boy—but still a boy. It’s a long road for her to come to terms with things, and she’s plenty critical enough of herself—I won’t judge her.

That’s one reason I wanted to read How to Be a Girl. I came to my identity as a woman later in life, when I was thirty (though, in hindsight, I think I had inklings as far back as Grade 7 or 8, maybe younger). My coming out to my (supportive and affirming) parents was far more expository than beseeching: I was letting them know what I had decided, not requesting their help. In the case of M., as Mack refers to her daughter throughout this book, at three or four years old, she is so dependent on her parents’ good will. This is the first of many stark differences between my gender journey and M.’s, and it’s why I’m glad I read this book. Every trans experience is different, and even though this is not a memoir of a trans person, it is a transgender memoir of a kind, and I will keep collecting these stories as I live my own.

Mack shares some of the details of reconciling with M.’s identity: the visits to therapists and psychiatrists, the paperwork and sorting out of procedures at school. I can’t imagine what supportive parents go through as they navigate these bureaucratic and social hurdles on behalf of their trans children. This should be required reading for cis people in positions of policymaking power at school boards and similar authorities: there is a difference between being tolerant of trans and gender-diverse kids and actually working to dismantle the systemic barriers that make it harder for them to learn, grow, and succeed. Mack is great at crystallizing those barriers, both from her perspective as a mother and from what she shares of M.’s perspective.

On that note, the perspicacity and simplicity of M.’s understanding of her gender and how she relates to her friends is beautiful. I appreciate Mack’s willingness to step out of the way and repeat her daughter’s wisdom as verbatim as she can remember. Trans kids are, ultimately, kids. They just want to have a childhood, live their life. Mack marvels at M.’s resilience even as she bemoans M.’s precocious understanding that she is different from other girls and exists at a disadvantage in the system as it is set up. So we marvel and bemoan as well.

This was a hard book for me to read. “There but for the grace of God…” and all that. I often (like, weekly) contemplate how my life could have been different had I transitioned sooner. I likely would have had a much harder time, to be brutally honest. Transitioning at thirty, well into my career in a union job in a country with imperfect but progressive human rights protections for gender identity … I did it from a position of immense privilege. Transitioning at twenty-three just as I was moving to England? At seventeen, on the cusp of university? At ten, still in elementary school? Wow. Even as I mourn the childhood I didn’t have, I can’t conceive of what that childhood could have been like.

So it’s hard, reading Mack’s memoir, because even as I feel for her and M., I’m also incredibly envious. I want M.’s childhood. I want her life. No, that’s not precisely it—I don’t really want to be coming of age during this tumultuous time for trans rights. But I’m getting emotional as I write this paragraph because I’m reflecting on how the massive sense of loss welling up from within me. Even though my transition has been an exceedingly happy one. Even though my parents have both been unfailingly affirming from the moment I came out. Through no individual person’s fault but rather through the fault of the society in which I grew up, I missed out in a way that M. won’t, thanks to Mack and her advocacy.

That’s the power of this book. It’s a simple memoir told simply—Mack is not an exceptional writer, but her words are raw and honest. She avoids sensationalizing. She avoid being dramatic. When sucky stuff happens, she sketches an outline of the incident. Even those individual incidents are few and far between for the family, emphasizing how anti-transness and transphobia, much like racism, are more about systemic acts than individual ones. It isn’t the people in Mack or M.’s world that give them problems so much as it is the systems that make it hard for M. to live authentically—and, though this book was published just prior to the surge of anti-trans lawmaking the United States, the legislation or lack thereof to support transition, especially for trans kids.

I don’t know what else to tell you. This book is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s not perfect. If you have read other trans memoirs or memoirs of trans parents, you will recognize many of the themes here—though like I said, every journey is unique. Mack herself acknowledges the privileges she and M. have, being white in America, being middle class enough to afford (if barely) a private school that’s more inclusive and affirming. Racialized trans kids have it even harder. Privilege aside, though, Mack’s story—and her daughter’s story, but M. is not old enough to tell it from her point of view yet and may never want to tell it, which is totally valid—matters.

Would I recommend this to other trans people? Sure, though be prepared to find it provocative-on-the-verge-of-triggering like I did. More obviously, this memoir is for the cis folks in the room. You need to do your homework, especially if you’re a parent or becoming one soon—because, yeah, your kid could be trans. And that isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a thing, one thing among many that our society happens to make more difficult at the moment. So do your research. Read this book. Prepare yourself for the possibility, and if your kid doesn’t end up questioning their gender, cool—you’ll be ready to support your parent friends whose kids do go through this. The more we can do that, the more we can tear down these systems, the more kids who get to grow up like M.—or even more smoothly. And the fewer who grow up and realize later, like me—or who never grow up at all.

Sorry to end it on a downer. It’s a good book. It’s important. But that’s really what this comes down to: survival. How to Be a Girl is a story of trust, of believing one’s child, and of coming through to the other side stronger as a family.