Interview with Kyle Lukoff, Author of “When Aidan Became a Brother”

This book focuses on what Aidan and his family do right, rather than the mistakes they make. As he prepares for his new sibling, Aidan learns that getting everything right is less important than choosing to love and respect the baby for whoever they turn out to be. Why did you choose to make this the focus?

In my years working at an elementary school, I saw a lot of anxiety from parents and teachers. About lots of topics, including supporting children in their gender identities and expressions. I'd sit in on conversations where teachers would try to get every sentence exactly right, and tie themselves in knots figuring out how to talk about different identities with students. I always tried to advise them to just focus on seeing the child in front of them, and making sure that each kid knew that they were loved and supported for who they were, and they would still be loved and supported if who they were changed. Cory Silverberg (author of Sex Is A Funny Word) once said that we are constantly failing children, and that they usually come back to us with love. And I think that is why I wrote the ending the way I did: to describe the process of doing your best, making mistakes, and what comes after that. 

Who do you think could gain the most from reading When Aidan Became a Brother and why?

I think that my career as a librarian makes this an impossible question to answer. I don't see books as ibuprofen or cough drops, easy prescriptions that straight-forwardly correct what ails you. Books are one half of a relationship, and the other half is everything the reader brings to it. I would never write a book hoping that every reader would get the same lesson out of it, but I did want to create a space with a story for readers to ask certain questions, or think about the world in a new way, or gain language to talk about something they might not have had before.

What are the hardest and the most fulfilling parts about being a writer who is trans?

The hardest part, for me, is always questioning whether someone's responses to me and my work are genuine or rooted in their own biases. If someone tells me they love my work, are they just saying that because they don't actually like it but think that honest critique is transphobic? And conversely, when an editor says that they don't think a text is right for them, is that about the text or their own inabilities to see trans writers as more than circus animals?

By far the most fulfilling part is talking to trans youth when I'm able to do school and community visits. I was once reading AIDAN to a group of trans children, and when I got to the line, "They learned a lot from other families with transgender kids like him," they all exploded in excitement, saying, "I"m transgender too!" They hadn't realized that I was as well, and when I said "I know that, friends, I'm transgender too, that's why I'm reading this book today," their reaction was incredible. One young boy stared at me and said, "You're a trans boy too??" and I said, "Yeah, buddy, I am," and it was one of the most profound moments of my life.

How reflective is the story of your own experience growing up, and how much is fictional? 

It's entirely fictional! I have a big brother, not a little sibling. I came out when I was in college, which is very different from coming out as a young child. When I was little I didn't want to be a boy, but I did desperately want to be Dorothy Gale, from Kansas. The only part of the story that would be familiar to my younger self is, "He always ripped or stained his clothes accidentally-on-purpose," but I also wasn't forced into dresses...I enjoyed wearing them, sometimes, but was generally a sloppy kid. And I changed the spelling of my birth name a few times, never quite feeling like it fit me, but I didn't change to a more typically male name until I came out in college.

The book describes “different kinds” of girls and boys: those who enjoy activities not typically associated with their assigned gender. What would you say to children who might feel like a “different kind” of girl or boy, or not like a girl or boy at all? 

I would say, "Hi friend! That's such a cool dinosaur on your shirt, can you tell me about it?" or "Wow, I love that color of nail polish, did you do it yourself?" or "I noticed that your name tag says [ABC] but you shared your name is [XYZ]. I will call you XYZ here, but should I call you ABC if I'm talking to your parents or teacher? Or is it okay if they know you go by another name?"

Are there any children’s books out now - written by yourself or others - that you wish you could have read as a child?

It's hard to say. I was such a bookish kid, and never felt like I wanted to read anything different than the books I was reading. But books also felt so sanitized back then. My favorite Baby-Sitters Club book was the one where the girls end up sitting for a family of white supremacists, who first make fun of Claudia, close the door when Jessie shows up, and then literally request an Aryan sitter. I read that one so many times because it felt like it was telling me something about the world that I wasn't seeing in other books, something that I recognized as one of the only Jewish kids in my school. But I also think that my reading experiences, all of them combined, make me who I am today, and I like who I am, and don't necessarily want to change that, so...no.