How to be a Girl

More about the book

A poignant narrative of one mother's struggle to support her transgender daughter. 'Mama, something went wrong in your tummy. And it made me come out as a boy instead of a girl.' When Marlo Mack hears these words from her three year old, she's not surprised - but she's completely unprepared. Marlo gave birth to a beautiful baby boy - M - who started insisting on wearing only pink clothes when he was two years old. When he turned three, he begged his mum to buy him pretty dresses and let him grow his hair long. Friends, family, experts and Marlo herself had been able to brush these behaviours aside as a little kid's playful experimentation with gender, but when her son begs to be put back in her tummy because he came out wrong, she knows she has to listen more closely. With a foreword from Mermaids' CEO Susie Green, How to Be a Girl is a raw and unflinching memoir of a mother grappling with her child's transition from male to female. Always wanting to support M, Marlo finds her liberal values surprisingly challenged, and as she learns more about gender and its varied expressions, she often finds herself wondering what being a girl - or a boy, or something else entirely - really means.