In the memoir Rethinking Normal by Katie Rain Hill there’s a boy, Lucas, who has never felt comfortable in his body. He explained it as if he were a girl trapped inside a boy’s body, but at that age, he didn’t really think anything of it. When Lucas grows older he knows what’s wrong and repeatedly tries to tell his mom, but she always brushes him off thinking that it’s just a phase and he’ll grow out of it. Eventually, though, when his mom actually listens to him, she starts trying to accept that Lucas is no longer Lucas and that he is now Katie. Throughout the rest of the book you follow Katie and learn about the struggles she went through to finally learn how to accept herself, even if some people in her family didn’t completely understand it and didn’t accept her. While reading this book one theme stood out to me and that is to not let others change the character inside that’s still growing. The author has the perspective that everybody should be informed about the struggles of a person who is becoming a transgender or who is already done with their transition. Also it taught me that I shouldn’t let something one person says get in my way of achieving my dreams. That it doesn’t matter if they were born a boy and decided that they wanted to be a girl or the other way around. This book has taught me that not everybody will always accept who you are and the choices that you make in your life. It also taught me that it’s okay to be different from everybody else and to stand apart from the crowd, as long as I’m happy that I shouldn’t care what other people think about me.

I absolutely loved this book because I got to learn about somebody else’s life and what struggles they faced to get to where they are right now. There were so many lessons I learned from that and Katie also had to face them herself. It doesn’t matter if you’re transgender or not you can still learn from those lessons. It’s definitely a journey, but it’s also an amazing one to go on and experience through somebody else’s eyes and listen to their own thoughts about the subject.

I would recommend this to anybody who is interested in learning about people who are transgender, people who think that they’re transgender and are confused or embarrassed to talk about the subject, or even if you just want to learn about a life story from someone you haven’t met yet. The reason that you should read this book is that everybody should be informed about this topic and how they feel when people make fun of who they are.