Kate (Epstein) Mankoff, LA93, who writes under the name of Kate Brookes, has the story of a family in transition. Transister is not a prescriptive narrative but an affirming one, a raw honest, sometimes humorous account of a mother’s journey as her young child grapples with gender identity and becomes her authentic self.
Brookes has longed to become a mother for as long as she can remember. And for almost as long, she has harbored a fierce determination to parent her children differently — better —than her own mentally ill mom parented her. To create the “normal” family she’s always wished for. And when she gives birth to twins after two years of fertility struggles, she is, admittedly, hugely relieved that she’s found herself with two boys. There will be no need for her, a decidedly un-girly girl, to braid hair, buy Barbie dolls, or pick out party dresses for her kids. Boys. Easy. Right?
But by the time her twins are eight, Brookes has had two realizations: 1) her obstetrician’s “it’s another boy” announcement was flat-out wrong, and 2) there is no such thing as a “normal” family — and that’s a beautiful thing.
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