If I Was Your Girl

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When those girls pull over next to the overheating Amanda and essentially bundle her into their car, the cynical reader is expecting something Mean Girls-esque to go down. When he asked me what was wrong with me, I wrote six words on a notepad, my throat still too sore from the stomach pump to speak. She’s moving because back in her old town she transitioned from being a male named Andrew and the hateful southerners did not take kindly to that. By the time there was If I Was Your Girl had been taken out of the offer, and I resolved that I’d have to find it in a library somewhere.

It was… really awful to read, and I think it would be even more awful to read for a young trans reader. We definitely don't need another trans horror story, but I wish one of the first mainstream YA trans books by a trans author didn't play it so safe.If I Was Your Girl starts with our young protagonist, Amanda, moving to a new town to live with her dad and attend a new school. The way they learned to relate to one another; how he moved to a place of acceptance and began to embrace her as his daughter, was really lovely. As it was marketed as an LGBT+ book, surely there should have been a more multi-faceted depiction of the B in the acronym! On the more positive side, Amanda’s life isn’t all doom and gloom, the story of the tragic trans person. Similarly, Amanda and her dad have a kind of “cold war” going on throughout most of the book regarding her dating.

Grant has to work a job after school to provide for them and Amanda sees him as a hard working, loyal, loving, family man and starts to really fall for him. I couldn’t help seeing my reflection in the window: a gangly teenage girl with long, brown hair in a cotton shirt and shorts rumpled from travel.If you have an article you like, or a worry to talk about, or you just want to vent a bit about trans life, then we're here!

It's a fairly short book with short chapters which inevitably made the progression of the story feel very fast without deepening certain scenes. But, by high school, her parents are divorced, and Amanda has been living with her mother in Atlanta where she is subject to horrible bullying. I'd highly recommend it to literally anyone, especially if they're interested in a book about a trans person. Eighteen-year-old Amanda Hardy moves from Atlanta, Georgia to the small town of Lambertville to live with her dad just before starting her senior year in high school. We want to see stories that show the struggles of those of us who are non-binary/genderqueer/genderfluid/genderfucks, those of us who are non-cis-passing, those who don’t want to “pass,” those of us who are too poor to access hormones and surgery, those of us with health conditions that make medical transition difficult or impossible, those of us who are fine with our bodies and our gender expressions as they are but not with the way people label us with their assumptions based on them, those of us who are fat, those of us who are disabled, those of us who struggle with intersecting oppressions of racism/transphobia/homophobia/ableism/etc.For all of its positive points, there were certainly parts of this book that annoyed me or threw up speedbumps as I read.

But it’s okay because they too were genuinely lovely people, and I have to admit that Chloe was my favourite just because of the ONE scene where she’s an absolute bad-ass who’s taking no prisoners. I understand that Russo is trying to show us how, over the course of the story, Amanda’s father has slowly started to accept the idea that he has a daughter. So my criticism isn’t necessarily against the author individually as it is against the industry that favors this kind of narrative for the spotlight.no, but it was the best of I’ve also read Some Assembly Required by Arin Andrews and Rethinking Normal by Katie Rain Hill, which are a pair of memoirs by two trans teens who were formerly in a relationship with each other.