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Me and My Dysphoria Monster ISBN: 9781839970924
Dale, Laura Kate and Qing, Ang Hui
Published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2022
Everyone believes Nisha is a boy, but inside herself she knows that she is a girl. Her teacher, her classmates - even her parents are convinced that she is a boy because she looks like one, but Nisha has a 'monster' who follows her around and makes life very difficult. This monster grows bigger and bigger as time goes on and she is made to play games with boys, use the boy's loos, and respond to others as though she was a boy. This gets so bad that she begins to withdraw and become lonely. When she meets a friend of her father who has transitioned from female to male, he is able to explain what is happening to her: 'Our monster is that little voice that knows who we are and who we want to be when we grow up, and it doesn't like to be ignored.' She finds out from him that the way to shrink the monster is to explain to her parents about the problem, who then allow her to become herself, wear the clothes she is comfortable in, use female pronouns about her and to change her name to Nisha. All these changes make her happier, even though she is still the same person, and the monster shrinks to the size of a pea when she is allowed to play football with the girls' team. At the end of the story, there are four pages written by the author, herself trans, explaining the different terminology used about trans people, which is comprehensive and useful. The pictures are very colourful and lively. While the changes in Nisha's life seem rather too easy, this is perhaps a necessary way of showing how things should be rather than how they actually are at the moment for trans children, so that adults can begin to understand better.
Age: 6+
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