We're the parents of a transgender child in the United States who found ourselves on a journey we didn't plan to take.  When our child came out to us, we took time to research, and ask experts, and get to know people in the trans community.  We went looking for information on the lived experiences of other families.  Along the way we found amazing content creators, and our eyes were opened to the previously invisible-to-us trans people all around us.  

When our kiddo was ready to be "out" to the world, we realized that each person we talked to was now hearing this news for the first time, asking the same questions we asked, experiencing the same ignorance we had felt.   "Dear Family & Friends" was born out of a need to share some of the information and culture we had found with the people we were inviting into our lives.  We realized that coming out would, in so many ways, always be about educating the people around us, and that other families would need to do the same thing.

While the transgender person in your life may be happy to talk about their experience, their life will be full of an unending need to come out to, and educate, the people around them.  It's your responsibility to make a good faith effort at educating yourself on the issues they face as a community, to be an ally where you can in the struggle for basic human rights, and to respect the privacy of the individuals in your life.  

We put this together to share with our loved ones, and to help other families educate their loved ones.  And so this place is a collection of resources where you can see and hear from the very people who have been so invisible for so long, satisfy your curiosity, gain some understanding, and go forward with a little less fear of the unknown.  And hopefully we'll get to a day where a person's gender isn't on the list of "most interesting things about me."