"This memoir recounts one mother's struggle to come to terms with her grown-up transsexual daughter. When she learned that her adult son planned to become a daughter, she felt like her child was heading for disaster and she desperately tried to stop the transition.
As time progressed, her efforts to stop it led her to learn more and more about transsexualism instead. She also became increasingly aware that her child was happier and more confident as a woman, had more friends than ever before, and in some inexplicable way, actually seemed more "normal."
However, Baker's own transition was not so easy. She describes a poetic transfer of dissonance: "I watched my son disappear; it felt like he had died and an entirely different person emerged to replace him. As my child became whole, I became more dissonant. It was as though we were trading places.""
