In When Kayla Was Kyle, Amy Fabrikant’s tale for “children of all ages,” 10-year-old Kyle won’t go to school. His classmates know he plays with dolls. They won’t sit with him at lunch, and no one came to his birthday.
“I’m a mistake!” Kyle screamed. “I only look like a boy, but I’m not like other boys. Everyone hates me. I want to live in heaven.”
That exchange captures Fabrikant’s realization that she and her spouse must fully acknowledge and accept the reality of their own transgender child or risk losing that child. Ultimately, they affirmed Kayla, who found friends and became a confident young woman. But initially therapists advised telling her that “he could be any kind of boy he chose.” When Fabrikant sought library books about transgender kids, she was handed one about gay penguins. A publisher said to change her own characters to ducks.
School districts and the Anti- Defamation League endorsed her book, and now she’s published another: Paloma’s Secret, about a young girl’s struggle with anxiety and depression. Fabrikant also provides schools and organizations with important information — for example, scientific evidence that gender identity is a feeling of maleness or femaleness, fluid along a spectrum — and shares strategies and tools to talk without criticism, listen without judgment and connect beyond differences: “To help young people in our care, we need self-awareness to grapple with our own implicit biases.”