Welcome advice
New books address how to be an ally to your trans child, how to survive same-sex divorce DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer taffet@dallasvoice.com Authors Ben Greene and Karl Dunn have advice on topics rarely talked about in the LGBTQ community: being an ally as a parent to a trans child, and same-sex divorce.
Dunn said that when he was looking for a book on same-sex divorce, he couldn’t find one. So he wrote his own. And Greene is a trans man who has advice for parents of trans kids on how to be an ally and a good parent to their trans child.
Greene’s new book — My Child is Trans, Now What? — offers advice to parents of trans youth. On discussing gender marker and legal name changes, Greene says, “I was seriously considering joining Cirque du Soleil because of how good I’d gotten at jumping through hoops.” In his chapter on a child or teen coming out as trans to their parents, Greene ends with a list of joy exercises to celebrate coming out.
More than any other, his first suggestion is loving, simple and silly — and my favorite: Buy a cake with rainbow icing. For a parent who just doesn’t know where else to turn or what else to do, buying their child a cake is something they know how to do.
