"When Marlo Mack’s three-year-old utters these words, her world splits wide open. Friends and family, experts, and Marlo herself had long downplayed her “son’s” requests for pretty dresses and long hair as experimentation - as a phase - but that time is over. When little “M” begs, weeping, to be reborn, Marlo knows she has to start listening to her kid.
How to Be a Girl is Mack is an unflinching memoir of M’s coming out - to her father, grandparents, classmates, and the world. Fearful of the prejudice that menaces M’s future, Mack finds her liberal values surprisingly challenged: Why can’t M just be a boy who wears skirts and loves fairies?
