How can adults and allies most effectively support transgender young people, especially amongst the harmful rhetoric surrounding issues of gender identity?

Being an adolescent comes with challenges regardless, but for young trans people, gender dysphoria, transition, and political grandstanding can create additional obstacles to their quality of life. In Trans(formations) and Tenderness, professor and child advocate Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey unpacks the most common harmful rhetoric that we might encounter about gender identity, and how to counter it. Written with the tenet of tenderness for human beings at its core, this book explores the three key spaces that can be formative for transgender youth – family, school, and community – to equip the reader with resources to provide effective – and tender – support for the young people they care for.

Vital reading for parents, teachers, social workers, clinicians, and care providers in practice and in training, this book will also be of interest to higher education students and scholars of Queer Studies, Child Development courses, Social Work Studies, Sociology, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and related courses.

Prathim-Maya Dora-Laskey DPhil is a professor, writer, and child advocate living in Michigan, US. They teach English Literature and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Alma College.