A Girl Trapped in a Boy’s Body

A Psychologist explains the transgender experience.

I have read a number of posts here on Medium in which feminists and others debate with increasing hysteria the ‘problem’ of transgender and the difficulty they have with people born with male genitalia who identify as women.

The Argumentative Penguin recently produced the kind of rationalisation of the ‘problem’ that fefw other writers could.

Sugar and Snails is written by a psychologist who understands these things. At its core it is a story about relationships, within families and among work colleagues. But its first person narrator is a 45 year-old woman whose childhood contains an unexpected reality. Here is the review a wrote for Rosie Amber’s book review website.

I was about a third of the way through this book, the end of chapter ten to be precise, when I recognised the nature of Diana’s secret. And I saw how some readers would abandon the book once they made that connection. Others might even throw the book at the wall in disgust.

Either course would have been a mistake. What I wanted to do was to read on, in order to discover the degree of empathy Ms. Goodwin would bring to her analysis of the effect of Diana’s troubled childhood, and the choice she made at the tender age of fifteen, upon her…