Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is.
One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family's door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family's journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core.
Self-aware and intimate, Letter to My Transgender Daughter asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. Letter to My Transgender Daughter is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is—and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
The paperback release includes key additions to the text, including a reader's discussion guide, an interview with the author, and a list of resources and links for LGBTQ+ individuals, families, and allies.
"Letter to My Transgender Daughter exists in a recent tradition of epistolary memoirs by leery parents (or prospective ones) careening between hope and anxiety on the page: from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me to Warmth, by Daniel Sherrell. Powerfully intimate ... Hays trains her powers of observation on the sheer wonder of a child in bloom ... spare prose quaking with love and consternation."—New York Times
"Touching, combative, compelling...this memoir begins with the suspense of a thriller and ends with...hope."—Vogue [Italian edition]
"Hays here presents a different view of God—as a being of pure love that would never consider her daughter a mistake, but instead, a gift."—Oprah Daily
"Poignant . . . [a] clear-eyed, love-filled tale."—Booklist
“Carolyn Hays’s memoir is searing, haunting, and inspiring. It’s a story that asks us to consider what we would do if the simple act of loving our own child threatened to cost us everything. In prose memorable for its gentleness and wisdom, Hays’s story is about more than the transgender question: it’s about ignorance and wisdom; hatred and love; men, women, and children. In the end, Letter to My Transgender Daughter is about all of us.”—Jennifer Finney Boylan, author of She’s Not There and Good Boy
"An incredibly poignant and timely story for trans families everywhere. I wish my parents had access to these words, stories, and beautiful thoughts while raising me."—Tommy Dorfman, actress, writer, director