This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
read dates: 2025/03/22 - 03/24
Okay, this book is so fucking not meant for me. I felt like k was reading some unearthed alien text, where they're trying to describe things I know of, but it's completely inhuman and baffling to me. Is this really what cis people think? How are they allowed to have gender??
The mother is nonstop thinking and talking about her daughter's penis, the dad is googling vaginoplasty, this is about an elementary schooler, what the fuck. And this entire family is acting like that the fact that this girl is trans is their shameful dark secret that will ruin their family. Cis people surely aren't like this, are they?
There's also five whole pages of the mother imagining a hate crime, that just felt so fucking gross and I don't understand why it's in this. The only time I remember ever seeing the trans girl's POV is when she's in then middle of deciding to detransition, so it's constant deadnaming and misgendering in her brain. Thankfully she's in Thailand so she can talk to a wise trans woman!!! I'm not joking, what the fuck.
This book is incredibly cis-core and I mean that extremely derogatorily.