Jesse Thorn, a prolific content creator and dad to a trans daughter, recently posted a heart-melting defense of trans kids during which he posed a question for all the cisgender haters standing in the way of their acceptance: “What if we ask ourselves about ourselves, and we don’t like the answer?”

About ten years ago, Thorn’s oldest kid told her mom and dad she was transgender. Thorn’s wife went on to write a picture book based on the revelation called It Feels Good to Be Yourself, Thorn shared.

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“And I have this memory of my wife handing me a printout of the book, and I read it, and I was just pouring tears,” he recalled. “You’d think that would be because, like, this is a beautiful story of a trans kid, and it’s our kid. But actually, no. Actually, it was because it was about all of us.”

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The proud dad went on to explain how his daughter’s experience, and the book that inspired it, moved him to look at his own gender identity in the same way that trans people examine their own.

“I’m cisgender. Everybody always assumed I was a man, and I actually am a man. And until my daughter came out, I never really had to think about my gender identity or even about anyone else’s. It was like transparent to me. I never consciously checked in with myself. People just assumed something, and it happened that they were right, so it just sort of ‘was'”.

“And so when my kid came out,” Thorn said, “I had to really stretch my mind to imagine her experience. It was so different from my experience.”

“I never chose my identity, and so my daughter must be choosing hers, and she must be rejecting my way of being in the world, is how it felt,” he added.

Thorn said that initial reaction mirrors the same kind of reflexive hostility that a lot of people feel about trans people.

“They’re sort of caught on their back foot like, ‘Wait, I didn’t choose anything. These trans people must be choosing. I’m neutral. They’re different. They are rejecting me,’ and then people are taking that uncomfortable feeling and getting really nasty.”

The cis dad suggested people take a cue from his wife’s book about their approach to gender identity.

“In my wife’s book, there is no, ‘This way is normal. This way is different.’ There is the expectation that we each will engage with our own identities, think about who we are, and we might come up with different answers,” he said.

“Trans people had to look inward. Everybody was wrong about them. They had to figure themselves out. For cis people, we just never even tried.”

According to Thorn, It Feels Good to Be Yourself has been banned in countless libraries and classrooms, “not because it’s about sex or about private parts. She doesn’t mention those things at all,” he said of his author wife. “I don’t even think it’s because it has trans kids in it.”

The problem people have with the book, Thorn thinks, is that “it puts trans kids and cis kids on the same level. It’s because it asks cis people to think about themselves.”

That reveals a vulnerability that makes people crazy, he said.

“It’s scary. What if we ask ourselves about ourselves, and we don’t like the answer?”

If you’re uncomfortable with trans people, Thorn suggested, then “ask yourself: Is it because they’re weird, or because you are being forced to deal with you?”

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