What inspired you to create the book?

Here is a snapshot of me circa 1987, the year my dad came out as transgender:

There she is: the girl with short brown hair pushed back in a pink bandana. She dresses mostly in pink with a lot of jams and Tretorn sneakers. She watches Jem and the Holograms (truly outrageous) and reads Sweet Valley High. Each night, she sits in front of the TV while Vannah White flips the letters on Wheel of Fortune, towering next to the host, Pat Sajak. It’s a boy-girl-boy-girl world. The word “transgender” is hidden in obscure medical texts. If someone asks, I tell them that my parents are divorced, that my dad lives in England. Now, I have an “aunt” who comes to school events and performances. No one knows that my aunt used to be my dad. Not even my best friends.

I wrote the book so that families wouldn’t feel like the only ones, so they could see other families like them. I wrote the book for that girl who turned on the TV in 1987 and saw no families like her own.

What would you like a reader to take away from reading?

Meet Leila:

Leila put on her rainbow cape and introduced me to her Barbies when I interviewed her for the book. She was getting ready for her school’s Pride Day.

“My transgender parent can do anything,” she said.

When her parents decided to have a baby, she went to school and announced to her friends,

“My dad’s having a baby!”

One of her friends told her this wasn’t possible. Yes, she said, it was. She told her friends it was possible because her dad was transgender. When we talked, she wrapped her rainbow cape around her shoulders and twirled in her room.

I found COLAGE, a national organization for people with LGBTQ+ parents, 20 years after my dad came out as transgender. I wonder what it would have been like to find it sooner, to have that community of support. My hope is that the book will be a built-in community, a place to go with questions, to connect with other families.

At the end of each chapter, there are questions to start your own story, because there are more stories that need to be told. I used to hide my family story from everyone I knew.

Just writing this book was like coming out of the closet, stating my truth, and it was conversations and interviews with other families that gave me the courage to break the silence. I heard my story in so many of the people I talked to, even Leila. I admired her and hope readers will borrow some of her courage, her rainbow cape to share their own story.

Heather Bryant is a writer based in Sunnyside, NY, and the author of My Trans Parent. Her work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Southeast Review, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art and Action, Anchor Magazine, and multiple anthologies. Her essay, “Habitat,” won the Southeast Review Narrative Nonfiction Contest. My Trans Parent came out of her work as an ambassador for the “People with Transgender Parents” community with COLAGE, a national organization for people with LGBTQ+ parents. She was an Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College and has taught writing at Pace University and in workshops in New York City.