There is bullying, misunderstanding from family, the policing of gender from all sides, difficult conversations, rejection from family and community (especially religious community), depression, anxiety, despair, self-blame, internalized transphobia, etc.

This is the perfect book for introducing trans characters to someone who may have zero experience with them in fiction or reality.

I’d still recommend it to cis people as a way to get your toes wet in the vast ocean of trans experiences. My local library has a copy and I’ve tried reading it a few times (I love trans fiction) but every time I do I feel a deep sadness in me. Grant wants to open up to Amanda and let her into his life so he brings her home to his small trailer that houses himself, his mom, and his sisters. Over the course of the story, Amanda opens up to one friend, a move which will have some far reaching consequences for her. This isn’t a book where Amanda’s trans-ness is but one aspect of her character and the plot is about other things (although I like those too).

When Meredith is not busy writing she can be found reblogging pictures of cats and babies, reading fan fiction and fantasy novels, arguing with strangers about social justice, and raising her two amazing children, Vivian and Darwin. If I Was Your Girl is written mostly in the present day, but there are a number of scenes from back when Amanda was Andrew, showing us what her life was like before, the abuse she had to suffer, the hopelessness she felt, the certainty that no-one, including her parents, would want her if they knew the truth. Their conversation prompts them to switch costumes and walk in the shoes of the opposite gender for a minute.

I liked how we get a lot of flashbacks from Amanda's past from the time of confusion before her realization that she's a girl, the bullying, the support of her counselor, her suicide attempt/aftermath, all combining with her present. Similarly, the revelation that someone is trans does not entitle one to ask that person all sorts of intrusive questions. The good news is that Amanda (obviously) didn’t die and her cry for help led her to a support group which really helped, sympathetic friends, counseling and, after she turned 18, transitioning via hormones and surgery. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.

I imagined how I must look to him, and my mind leaped to fill in all the worst things I had ever felt about myself. They weren’t fooling around or anything unseemly but her dad takes it hard enough to start drinking after he kicks him out. She just lays out a solid story about a young girl dealing with a difficult community she doesn’t quite fit in with. Because as romantic and sexy as one person pushing their lips against another person without warning might seem in movies, obtaining enthusiastic consent is even sexier.

I realized he’d only asked about me as a formality so he could talk about himself, but I didn’t mind; it meant I didn’t have to say that much.