A Practical Response to Gender Distress: Tips and Tools for Families

The author has an interesting backstory: she suffered from a tremendous, debilitating illness from 2016 through 2021, and was too sick to pay attention to much else. She went back to work in 2021 and observed changes that disturbed her. Since she had been out of work, she was the frog that immediately notices the water has gotten really hot. And then, she suffered more arbitrarily enforced leisure when she was forced out of her workplace because she would not allow herself to be injected with a COVID-related pharmaceutical. And so she broke ranks, and ended up publishing this book in 2024.

The book itself is simple; it dishes out basic common sense and good advice (which is hard to follow, like all good advice) without a whole lot of show more rigor. Chapter 7 is a grim sequence of various people describing the gruesome, painful, or humiliating side-effects of the "gender affirming care" that they have undergone. No surprise to me; poor Ritchie Herron's miserable story is familiar to me, but helpful to dispel the magical thinking of others. The book has long lists of hopefully helpful resources in the back, some of which I'm already familiar with. Its significance is that it exists at all, and that it is available, finally, from one library in Massachusetts.

The author has a pretty broad web presence, with a Substack and a professional web site. Her first Substack post, "Rip Van Therapist", describes her experience of emerging from her lengthy illness into a shocking new world. That post, or something very similar, has been included in this book. show less