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Two thoughts coming together
Mar. 6th, 2018 09:32 pm1. Kids today know way more about transgender etc. than we did when I was a kid. Seriously. Ana has transgender friends her age and it's just... not an issue. I don't think she understands when I've told her how much this was not even on the radar when I was her age.
1a. It's probably true that increased awareness and discussion of transgender issues is why more adolescents are identifying as somewhere on that spectrum than in the past, but not in a sky-is-falling, it's-so-trendy way. These are kids who would've suffered in silence before, either being deeply in the closet or not even having words for their own experience.
2. The state of publishing for kidlit and YA continues to get more diverse. However, the state of recommending books does not. People seem to default to the sort of books they read as kids, which of course heavily leans towards books their own parents and teachers read as kids. I have a general policy of only advising books published within the past 20 years, and I never recommend one book that doesn't hit some point on the diversity checklist without recommending two more that do.
3. But it's been hard for me to find books dealing with transgender issues to recommend either for kids or teens. There are some books out there now! But the negative reviews... well, okay, mostly they're what you expect, but once you skim past the haters you find a lot of the same comments over and over again:
A. The author has no personal awareness of what it's like to be transgender and boy, it shows.
B. Yes, it's true that being trans can be really sucky at times in our society, but why did everything awful have to happen to this kid? Do we really want kids thinking that you can't be trans without this litany of terrible things happening?
C. Okay, so the author got the transgender part right, which is great, but they screwed up this other issue so badly that it's hard to recommend the book.
D. I'd love to recommend this, but the writing isn't so great.
So these are potentially serious issues. Does anybody have any recommendations which maybe slipped my notice? Something to be enthusiastic about rather than "Well, but"? I'm starting to feel like this is a notable gap in my advice giving.
1a. It's probably true that increased awareness and discussion of transgender issues is why more adolescents are identifying as somewhere on that spectrum than in the past, but not in a sky-is-falling, it's-so-trendy way. These are kids who would've suffered in silence before, either being deeply in the closet or not even having words for their own experience.
2. The state of publishing for kidlit and YA continues to get more diverse. However, the state of recommending books does not. People seem to default to the sort of books they read as kids, which of course heavily leans towards books their own parents and teachers read as kids. I have a general policy of only advising books published within the past 20 years, and I never recommend one book that doesn't hit some point on the diversity checklist without recommending two more that do.
3. But it's been hard for me to find books dealing with transgender issues to recommend either for kids or teens. There are some books out there now! But the negative reviews... well, okay, mostly they're what you expect, but once you skim past the haters you find a lot of the same comments over and over again:
A. The author has no personal awareness of what it's like to be transgender and boy, it shows.
B. Yes, it's true that being trans can be really sucky at times in our society, but why did everything awful have to happen to this kid? Do we really want kids thinking that you can't be trans without this litany of terrible things happening?
C. Okay, so the author got the transgender part right, which is great, but they screwed up this other issue so badly that it's hard to recommend the book.
D. I'd love to recommend this, but the writing isn't so great.
So these are potentially serious issues. Does anybody have any recommendations which maybe slipped my notice? Something to be enthusiastic about rather than "Well, but"? I'm starting to feel like this is a notable gap in my advice giving.
