First Year Out: A Transition Story by Sabrina Symington

First Year Out is a thinly-veiled primer on what it’s like to be a trans person. It’s about a trans woman, Lily, and her struggles and triumphs during her first year “out” as her true gender. She spends a lot of time explaining things to her mother, who has all the struggles with Lily’s gender one would expect a loving but pretty clueless parent to have; she experiences dysphoria as she has to deal with getting rid of facial hair; she goes on dates and talks to friends.

Throughout, the dialog is a bit clunky and the pacing is clearly about ticking off all the items on a list of Issues Trans Folks Face. It’s not great literature, and it’s not beautifully drawn. But it’s a fine example of what it is, an educational book candy-coated to make it palatable.

A good book to hand to your loving but somewhat clueless relatives and loved ones who need to learn the basics of what being trans means; it's well-calibrated for folks who aren't very in the know, aren't invested enough to want to read a bunch of scientific literature, and/or have fairly basic questions that they don't quite know how to ask.