Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

What's it like to have a transgender child?

That's the focus of this show as we talk with Mimi LeMay, a forceful

advocate for transgender rights, and author of the memoir, What We Will Become, a Mother,

a Son, and a Journey of Transformation. Mimi is the mother of three children, one of whom is Jacob,

a transgender nine-year-old. Mimi, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Tell us how you came to know that your two-and-a-half-year-old. Nimi, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Tell us how you came to know that your two and a half-year-old at the time was transgender.

Well, it took a while. When Jacob first started to tell us that he was a boy, I just thought it was play acting, and I didn't pay it much mind at all.

And it wasn't until several months later when it was accompanied with, you know, a change in mood and attitude, a sadness.

And he was so persistent about it that I started to listen.

But at that time, I didn't, hadn't heard of

transgender children, barely heard the word transgender at all. And it didn't come together for over a

year and a half, which in the life of a small child is a really long time. I tried to eliminate anything I thought

that could be bothering him other than a gender identity issue. So we tried to make sure that

we talked about the quality of toys and everything was, oh, it doesn't matter what you play with.

It doesn't matter. Boys and girls can do equal things and they can do the same things. And

there's no

real difference, I said. But that did not satisfy him. He knew who he was from a very young age. And he

told us that insistently for over a year and a half before we realized that we had to give him the

choice to live as he truly knew that

...