one of them in particular has a historic relationship to me and i'll tell you about it in a moment all right today we have as my first guest peggy crighton and she has written  expectations the story of a family in transition i'm going to find out about this this is just amazing so let's start with the fact that the question why did you write this book what if you want to express and share when i originally by writing a book i don't writing a book that would help other parents raise their children under unconventional parenting situation i wasn't really sure how to go about doing it but i figured the best way to do was to take a look at my upbringing which was not horrible but it certainly was unconventional and definitely difficult i thought by writing my story first and painting a picture of my life so that people could understand that i didn't come from the absolute best upbringing even though it wasn't abusive it was neglectful and it was difficult i thought by expressing the fact that i was able to become a fairly decent parent would help other parents understand that if they were to just trust themselves and look for some resources that maybe they could also become good parents even so they themselves may have not had excellent parenting that would take hope it would take humor it would take time and definitely take reaching out to people and this was my reach out ok should we explain you know what the unconventional element is with you referring to sure well in the beginning when i first decided to have children i wanted in my hopes and dreams and my expectations to have a boy and have a girl i always wanted to have a girl because i wanted to have a connection with a daughter that i didn't have with my mother and so i did my first child was a girl born a girl and my second child was born a boy well several several years later when my girl was about twelve she came out as being lesbian shortly after that she came out as being transgender and since then she has transition she transitioned very young when she transitioned she is now a beautiful son and my younger son at sixteen came out as gay and those are she is the doe and oldest daughter of my brother michael goldstein who was a very respected psychologist at u c l a and i haven't seen john it for twenty years until today until they flew in from los angeles through to philadelphia to attend a book convention but then you might want to explain that book convention janet do you want to tell us something about it because something important has just happened yes  the convention is called the well adelphia trance conference ok and it's a conference for families and with trans members and trans people and their whatever their friends and loved ones and one of the things that's very exciting this year is that peggy is going to be giving a talk on friday afternoon and we also have our book is going to be sold there are publishers going to be there and selling the book and we will have an opportunity for  meet the authors and do some book signings there ok but you just were alerted group to some wonderful we did we actually just got an email this morning from our publisher telling us that our book won a silver medal and that twenty seven t living in living now book awards in the sexuality femininity category so yeah we just found that out this morning and we're very excited about that congratulations thank you yes station and didn't see them come off the train and said oh my gosh i'm talking to the trainmen what happened where are these people i'm waiting for and he said all they'll be another train and twenty five minutes that we don't have twenty five minutes going to go to the t and then i walk around and i see these two women blocking towards me and they're waving at me and there they were they had gotten off the train but we hadn't seen any of the only other life was full of scaring adventures and we both had all agreed to that have absolutely so how did the two of you meet well number of years ago gosh almost twenty years ago or fifteen years ago yeah  i was asked by a mutual friend to join a woman's poker group and another mother at my son's school and so peggy was in the group she had already been in the group for a while so we got to know each other by playing poker once a month and went on to their joint another group of women wine tasting group and we were both part of that as well and so peggy sometimes hosted these poker games or the wine tasting group and at her home so over the years i would go to her home and i met her family and i met her children and i actually watched her older son jake go through the process of first coming out gay and then becoming transgender so i kind of feel like i was a party to you know watching all this happen and now my background is that i used to work in the literary side of the entertainment business and i was sort of a frustrated writer myself and always wanting to write something substantial and looking for a topic and one day peggy and i were taking a hike up in one of our beautiful canyons in los angeles and she mentioned she wanted to write her story and i was i said hey i'm a writer how about we do it together and she would love the idea and s an amazing journey that is that is absolutely you know if you jog my memory when i was in los angeles visiting twenty years ago when my father my brother was dying and i want to say goodbye to him and i had to go out and walk janet that's what we have in common we are movers walking and i needed to move and janet told me about this little of the park let it if i could walk there i could find this park but that's when i started to do and then i would go there and then i do some type she and then i wanted to write a poem one day and i had a paper but i didn't have a pen and there were men repairing the road and i went up to this man and i said can i borrow a pen or a pencil i want to write a poem that is if i was saying the most ordinary thing in the world he handed me the pen says here keep it and i did write a poem and i want to share it with some nice yeah ok let's get back to the book and the book and the story so they yours oldest child it started out julia and then feels that she is possibly gay and then discovers perhaps that she is really trent genda and she becomes jake yes and there was a lot of  changes what did you discover what what what happened when she went from being a female to being a male it's a fascinating situation because as a i'm a mental health professional in california and my original specialisation was working with adults who had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder i did that for many years and tell my daughter came out as transgender i added a new specialization not surprise with that is so i was with a lot of clients who are transition and are either in the beginning stages of discovering and exploring their gender identity some of them are at a point where they know absolutely this is who i am and i definitely want to start transition and some of them are just ok with knowing and not necessarily want to progress because gender identity is a box on the spectrum so everyone has their own opinion of what their identity is there's no necessarily no written rule and i in the beginning way back fourteen twelve fourteen years ago now that we were no resources out there there was really no information that i could go to and when my just couldn't hold it any longer so he needed to tell me but when jake originally started as julian which we refer to as the a gender the gender assigned a birth she at that time believed that she was a lesbian because she knew there was something different about her but she really wasn't sure what it was but she knew it had something to do with her sexuality or her gender and therefore since she was young and willing only knew about being been she automatically assume that that's what she was so she originally come out twelve to me as a lesbian who isn't a lesbian and because she was so typically male she was very tomboyish as we call and i knew there was something different about her when she came to me and told me she was love me and i wasn't at all surprised it was sort of like ok that was also i think at two in the morning i said ok i know i get it i now go back to bed and then two years ago she realized during that process that she just it wasn't who she was and didn't really quite fit and she just happened to meet somebody who was transgender and he sort of became her at the time her mentor and she discovered through knowing him that that was in fact who he was and at that point coming to me again as i said it three in the morning there was i didn't know what what to do who to talk to where to go i had no friends so he had actually done research and self and he presented me with this packet about this big of information on this is who i am sold it to me and i said ok i go back to bed we'll figure it out tomorrow and we did and that set us on a course of looking for resources going to these conferences which is how i wound up now i've been coming to this conference for probably ten years and it it was definitely a blessing for us to have this because there were other families the conference was much smaller now it's up to forty five hundred people meaning that come parents and i needed to talk to and it was very reassuring that there was sort of life after all of this but even so the medicine now is much more state of the art than it was then and there's a lot more information out there to the whole that we when i was about looking for research getting some help some support fortunately we had a family that was eventually tight knit close and supportive and that's sort of where we are now and part of what you also brought up when we talked about this before the show is there's not only the biological but also motional difference in some o basically new science so don't quote me you have to go do your own research to get the actual statistics but we have found and especially through me with the work that i do with my clients when there is an unusual amount of one of the other hormones in an otherwise gender specific body if a female gender signed a birth biological female has more testosterone in their body than the body ordinarily would produce they will develop whiskers they'll develop different areas of their body will change they will their moods will change and very often what we found sort of interesting is they actually will stop producing tears and having that emotionality that is related to women in terms of having more testosterone they also often become a little more aggressive and  officer through having a son is they become quite hungry lot more energy more strength it seems like and in terms of my trance email clients when they start taking estrogen they find certain areas of their body change that it will produce and therefore they're producing a last male hormone themselves in addition to taking the estrogen and they actually will become more emotional and more sensitive so i'm wondering you see when i was a national coordinator for the national organization for women and women's health and mental health the president of now called me up and said would you fly to chicago we'll pay for it we want you to debate a man on television we had written a book called the inevitability of patriarchy and when the book said that because men had to stuff to or own they the only ones who could be the leaders if that's the case of testosterone is the enemy we should go out and march against his tossed her own they're the enemy and that ended the oh ha ha ha ha but i this man was a little scientist and  yeah and i'm thinking oh my goodness is there some truth to this or not no though actually being more aggressive may not necessarily equate with becoming a leader that's right or a good leader on that set for the one i've heard that women have that women can be blog i think that we would be right we're missing leaves so one other thing about the physical changes that is kind of interesting i said so when jake was first taking the testosterone and starting to go through these physical changes we had a poker game at peggy's house and we didn't know the rest of us did know this was going on and what we noticed because well when jake was julia she would always come over and say hi to us and was very friendly and we all were very fond of her and then so she or he came over to our table to say hello and we all noticed some sideburns and a lower voice and a boy's haircut and we were all kind of thinking what's going on here and we're all kind of looking around for something going on here and then i guess word got back to peggy because the next time we all got together she said yes my son is you know transitioning and he's transgender and they were all ok and we were all so impressed at house except in supporting she was of the whole process because that's not usually how the story goes you know a lot of families reject their children when they come out as trans and this was an unusual story where the family was very supportive and you know and it came out with a very happy ending because jake now is a very productive happy you know person has he has a nonprofit organization called tough trans united with family affair and it's a it's actually an amazing an amazing organization where they raise money that they then offer scholarships to started it when i think he was probably sixteen i think and i assisted him with it he will say it's not the truth but the way i remember that he wasn't quite old enough at that time because he was sixteen and to enter into anything you know legal but he has a mentor also through this amazing point foundation that offer scholarships to academic individuals who are somewhere on the aisle g b t spectrum and he did help him a tomorrow where we kind of do this mother son tag team and we we help both parents and trans individuals and also it's really moving because i went to her talk to her talks for the families in seattle at the conference we were just at gender odyssey and the families were just it was so meaningful for them to hear peggy story and you know so many of them came up to her afterwards and you know they were really struggling with dealing with their child you know personally had come out as gay and they could kind of get behind that and then transgender and they o'boy this is a whole other thing you know what do we do how do we support this you know and she just had she was able to give them a lot of comfort and hope so that was a really because transgender women say being able to pass this female is essential to their safety so there is a what are the problems discrimination abuse is there the there become another minority younger that individuals transition obviously the easier it is for them to sort of us acclimate to kind of big i get i always hate to use the word past but i guess that it's the word that most people use and it it says so because it was young his body was more reactive to the testosterone that he was taking so if you met him you would have absolutely no idea and you just have no idea what you just think you see young man just think you see a man yeah that's one of the one of the wonderful things about being a trans man is that they often look quite younger than an actual biological males this gender of the process when i first met and we had an experience where we were at a movie theater near us a large movie theater complex and he went in and at that point he was just beginning to transition so he didn't feel quite confident yet going into the men's bathroom so he actually went into the women's bathroom and upon coming out he was fifteen maybe sixteen coming out of there one of the father of one of the young girls i guess who'd been in the bathroom approached him and said to him you know you really shouldn't go into the bathroom you don't belong in there and at that point his voice hadn't changed so he spoke to this man and said yes this is my bathroom too i'm allowed to go in here and he said well you know why you scared my daughter when you shouldn't go in there why you just think about using the restroom before you leave home if you never need to use it again right well fortunately he had a friend with him who was quite outspoken and he told that father where to go right and he was at that was a point where he was dressing male and resenting to the world as a male but having gone through all the procedures her identity so there's a lot to solved there's a lot involved and a lot and the there are not necessarily laws and it comes to changing there and here named certain things that you have to do in terms of legally by going to the court and filing for name change and gender change but the standards of care that we call them which are set by an organization called the world professional association for transgender health w path it used to be called the harry benjamin standards of care they said the of care are not laws but they're suggestions for proper care both both mental health and also physical medical transition and they change in fact right now the w path that i'm a member of is in the process of coming up with  eighth version of the standards of care so they they've changed and when jake and i were originally expediting his transition they were different and they are now now the a little more lenient than they were then then there were quite a few things we had to do yet to be in counseling for two years because he was under the age of eighteen he was not an adult he had to be on testosterone for three months he had to dress as his preferred gender for at least a year and then we could submit for we could then apply for a good name change in gender to you change your name a time you want to but that doesn't matter it's the gender change that bathurst the gender f and for quite a while they required this was many years ago they required some sort of of as we call gender affirming or there are all different sort of an alphabet gender affirming surgery to be able to get a gender change you have your gender marker changed by that it's not quite the same anymore because of the fact that that will require then that a that a male might need to go in and have more extensive surgery than he might be able to afford or might be available to him so things have changed do you think with society's becoming more accepting or less accepting i think that there are more resources and i think parents are beginning to understand what that this is something that's real i think that they're reaching out i think conferences like what we're going to this week and in conferences that i've been to for many years i think this is this is helping parents with their young children so i think the next generation even the younger jenna the generation below my son it will be easier for them that doesn't mean that there are aren't areas in the world that are still not accepting just because some of the more lenient areas myrna many of the more liberal states in the world are accepting it doesn't mean that everyone is and i think it's hard for people to understand it truly is and that's another reason why i wrote the book because i was sort of hoping that people might see that it's more prevalent and then people realise yes that's something i realised riyad book mean it's a lot of things reading the book can i just go a little background here on john and you're a counsellor and you work in food addictions there yes i'm a marriage and family therapist as well as peggy and my specialty is eating disorders so another reason this interested me to write this book is because peggy's younger son has that something he struggled with to so there was some expertise i could bring to that and yeah right because you are you have  full time job you work and yes little yes where i oversee an eating disorder program and actually are this hospital is psychiatry department we also have a transgender program there now and lately i have been seeing more and more transgender patients with eating disorders so that's become a new area that i'm really fascinated about and what i need to research and find out more what that's about because being transgender having body dysmorphia goes along with it but then it sometimes translates into an eating disorder or like if they're transitioning to a female or male they might have an idealized idea of what their body should look like just like anyone with an eating disorder who thinks that they're supposed to have this idealized body that the media forces on us that most people can't achieve or if they go on estrogen they might start putting on some weight and then they start going to extreme measures to take the weight off so it's very it's a very complex yeah yeah well this is simply amazing i i think everyone who has any interest whatsoever in human evolve from it would want to read this book because i had to read it the second time in order to make sure that i had picked up all the nuances and all of because one of the things that they've done is they've tracked peggy's life and into her life first as a child and then as a mother and most people don't do that they don't follow that trail and part of it helps us to understand what's happening and how we need to help each other so peggy cried and janet goldstein ball thank you so much for coming today all the way from california to backstory with your goals thank you thank