It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity

Product Information

These objections are sometimes associated with bigotry around alternative sexualities, but that is a distraction, because many gay and lesbian voices are no less outraged at this form of gender theory. Children should be allowed to be children without their gender being questioned (or encouraged to change) for liking pink, or football, or "boy things" or "girl things. It would be much less confusing, and more accurate, if it actually said that you were assigned boy at birth because traditionally boys have a penis and girls do not.

If one page had said, "George identifies as a sunflower," this would have been consistent with the whole approach. Giving kids and adults a hopeful model for discussing (and embracing) one another's gender is just one of the gifts offered by this valuable narrative.It appeals especially to children with mental health problems that make them vulnerable and open to persuasion. The back of this book provides additional information, terminology, and talking points for parents to explore, but even there, the author never models how to define gender itself, or how to encourage children to see past meaningless stereotypes without assuming that they are transgender. Noah Grigni's illustrations are FANTASTIC and I hope this is only the first of many more books they illustrate! It includes two non-binary characters: ones who feels like both a boy and a girl, and one who doesn't feel like either.

I had a 4th grader that firmly believed that she was a cat, a few boys (2nd grade) who thought they were robots and all of them just trying to figure out who they are in the world, within themselves, and in relation to others. And with a book that’s perfect for our first Pride Month review: It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity, written by Theresa Thorn and illustrated by Noah Grigni. Especially wonderful is the way the illustrations explore further elements, such as diversity, intersectionality and non-gendered clothing and play, giving kids and parents even more avenues to discuss all the wonderful ways we can be different. This sweet, straightforward exploration of gender identity will give children a fuller understanding of themselves and others.

This book simultaneously manages to be concise and expansive, favoring an approach that recognizes the truly diverse forms gender can take ("more than could fit in one book") instead of attempting to pin down or define different gender identities too strictly. For instance, it displays adults standing about, hands on chin, looking puzzled, unable to decide what the sex of a new baby is, BECAUSE the baby is unable to tell them, so it says they make a guess. There is a lot of information to digest but Thorn is reassuring, repetitive, and connects with the audience through your/you pronouns.

This dangerously stupid and misleading book sets out to teach children to think and speak in confused terms about their feelings and it advocates the bizarre possibility that they [or their school friends] may actually be born into the wrong body, a mad, almost medieval proposal that any sane parent would not wish to be promoting to children as young as four. This book throws around gender terminology without grounding it in any meaning or context, and I can imagine a child reading this and thinking, "Oh, I'm going to be a boy today!Really loved the joyful simplicity of this one, especially the soothing and celebrational repetition of the expansive phrase, "too many to fit in a book!