Gender Identity Workbook for Teens: Practical Exercises to Navigate Your Exploration, Support Your Journey, and Celebrate Who You Are

My kiddo loves this workbook- highly recommend!

This workbook is absolutely my new favorite. It’s written in a respectful, exploratory, encouraging and tone that conveys that there are no wrong answers. The graphics are beautiful and the content is relevant. Many of the questions in the Q and A seemed like they were written by the clients I serve. I am recommending this book to everyone!

I'm a clinical social worker (who is also nonbinary) and this workbook has been an amazing resource for me. I think it would also be beneficial for young adults and not just teens. The art is beautiful too. If you are thinking about getting this book, just do it!

I explored different gender identities when I was a teen and most of the people I know, if they are being honest, can say the same thing. I had both hopes and fears about this book that I want to talk about in this review. I hoped this book would be a solid set of exercises that a teen could work through to help them work through their own explorations. The flow of the exercises is great, the repeated enforcement that there is no one way for you to identity is reassuring, but too often it was also too open and vague. I think more specific questions would help as would more expanded examples from people that author and therapist Andrew Maxwell Triska has known would help a lot. When you are exploring, when you are trying to put a name to your identity you are looking for some words you can use and definite meanings for those terms. I worried that this book would only offer a duality -- masculine and feminine -- and not even grasp that those exist on a continuum. Instead I found the words used often overlapped in meaning and that biological and physical realities were often dismissed or pushed through quickly. Gender signals, that trigger reactions from us all whether or not we act upon them, have fairly stable social meaning and that needs to be addressed for anxiety over how we'll be treated when we dress or decorate ourselves to be tackled. Similarly, without a set of commonly recognized words and phrases to use, it becomes next to impossible to think about ourselves and to talk to others. I really loved that the book was so open about gender but the points I raised above is why I rated it down one star. This could have been a good book for me as a teen, but it certainly would not have done enough for me. Ultimately I feel like this book might be best as a forerunner to getting guidance from a therapist or counselor instead of a solo guide.

My 13 year old kid received this workbook for Xmas and says he learned a lot from going thru page by page. He spend most of Xmas day and the next absorbed in the pages. We did a fee together.

While I've worked in education and youth development for more than a decade, and participated in workshops and other types of training around how to support young people that are exploring their gender identity, I learned things by reading this book. Some of the terms, material, and resources were new to me and made me realize I may not be as hip and up-to-date about these things as I used to be (or at least thought I was). While written with young people in mind, I think this workbook can also serve as a resource for teachers and parents (like myself) who want to better understand how to support the young people in their lives. That's not to say I don't think it is going to appeal to its intended audience! I can think of at least one former student of mine that would have probably read this from cover to cover in a single sitting. That said, I think the format lends itself well to skipping around to the topics or information that the reader finds most relevant or interesting. I think the styling is super welcoming and intentionally inclusive, and will invite a young person to reflect on their own feelings, thoughts, and experiences while exploring their gender identity. I'll agree with another reviewer who said this book is less directed to the general youth population and more toward youth that may already be questioning or exploring their gender identity. That's not to say it wouldn't be a helpful text for any young person to read. We certainly need more young people understanding these topics than just those working through them personally. As a new dad myself, I'm glad to have this around the house as a resource for my child in the future. For full disclosure, Andrew Triska is an old friend that I met more than long time ago in one of my first jobs in youth development, and I was given a free reviewer copy of this book by the publisher.

Got this for my younger sibling for Christmas. Thought it was pretty cute so I flipped through it a bit and it looks really nice, the pages are decent thickness and the questions are relevant and helpful. As a trans person myself, this would have been such a good gift for me earlier on, and would have helped me figure myself out so much sooner! It looks great, I’ll see if I can come back when my sibling opens and reads it!