Telling Great Trans Stories for All Ages (with Kyle Lukoff)

Intro – 00:00

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes. We're mapping out the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other. Our guide in this episode is Kyle Lukoff.

KYLE LUKOFF: I have a special burning hatred for books that I agree with politically and that I agree with technically, but that I don't find to be an enjoyable reading experience. Any message or lesson will not work if the story itself isn't working.

BLAIR HODGES: Kyle Lukoff knows how to captivate readers. He also knows what it's like to have your book get banned. Because in picture books like Call Me Max and middle grade novels like Too Bright to See, Kyle introduces characters who proudly defy common expectations of gender identity. Trans readers love to see themselves reflected in his books. But frankly, Kyle's giving readers of all backgrounds the opportunity to think more deeply about our own journeys of self-discovery.

In this candid interview, the acclaimed author pulls back the curtain on his creative process—how he threads the needle to create inclusive and captivating stories without getting preachy about it. In Too Bright to See, the secret ingredient is ghosts.

Do You Believe in Ghosts – 01:44

BLAIR HODGES: Kyle Lukoff, welcome to Relationscapes.

KYLE LUKOFF: Thank you for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm excited because I first got to know you from a children's book called Call Me Max. I read this a while ago, and it’s actually been banned by various schools in the United States because it tells the story of a transgender boy. You're a trans man yourself, and the book has been a way to increase trans visibility.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: We'll get to that book a little bit later. It's great. But I actually want to start with a book you wrote more recently. This is your first novel. It's called Too Bright to See, and you wrote it for people aged 10 and up, so about like fifth grade to middle school.

And to prepare for this interview, I actually read it with my 11-year-old and we had a lot of fun. I want to say, first of all, you got five stars for me and my kid.

KYLE LUKOFF: Oh, good. Thank you for those stars. I could use them.

BLAIR HODGES: Let's give people the book cover description so they know the basic plot. Actually, I might just have you read the book cover description. It's a nice little synopsis of the story.

KYLE LUKOFF: Sure. When you said book cover description, I thought you meant a description of the cover of the novel, which is a beautiful painting by an artist named Noah Grigni, who's very cool.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, cool.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, it's a great cover yeah, they're very talented. But the jacket flap says:

“11-year-old Bug is used to haunted things after all. The occasional cold spot or mysteriously slamming door is to be expected when your house is almost as old as the dirt it sits on. But when any presence makes itself known, the summer before Bug starts middle school, it's clear that this spirit is intent on communicating something directly to Bug.

But what and why?

As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of this new ghost, an altogether different truth tugs free. It's the answer to a question of identity, one Bug never even thought to ask.”

BLAIR HODGES: Great. So, a word of warning to people. This discussion is going to include some spoilers. Let's get to the question that's certainly on everyone's mind right now. Whether you have ever seen a ghost or believe in ghosts.

KYLE LUKOFF: I've never seen a ghost…That I know of. And I would say overall, I don't believe in ghosts, but in the kind of way where I hope that none of them hear me say that and get mad at me. [laughter] Yeah, like I'm not gonna do anything to get a ghost mad.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. I don't believe in ghosts until it's like 3am and I have to go to the bathroom and I just watched a scary movie that night.

KYLE LUKOFF: Other than that, you know, I don't wanna find out.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So that's what I kind of wanna ask about that. Because you're weaving a story together, a story into a supernatural tale. How did you navigate the scary level? This was my only concern in reading this with my kiddo is, sometimes scary stuff's pretty intense for them. So how do you pitch scariness at an age-appropriate level? There are some intense scenes in the book.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, I mean, well, number one, I have loved scary books since I was a kid. I remember reading the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz with the original Stephen Gammell illustrations and those made up my entire childhood. I loved Goosebumps. I watched The Exorcist when I was like 12.

So for me it was really going back to something that I loved as a kid and that I still love now. But one way of making the scariness “less scary” than it is in other books for middle grade and YA is that the main ghost in this book really cares about Bug.

It is the ghost of dead Uncle Roderick, who has always been like a calming, loving presence in Bug's life. So I had to figure out a way to both make it spooky, but also make it clear that the ghost in question was also a positive character.

Writing Trans Characters – 05:21

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, we'll talk about Uncle Roderick in a minute. Great character. But let's learn a little bit more about the main character, Bug. And we don't know the name that Bug was given at birth, but we do know Bug was assigned female at birth.

One question I had is, like, did you ever say Bug's deadname? Did you know Bug's deadname as the author? I'm not going to ask for it. I don't want to know it. But yeah—

KYLE LUKOFF: Oh, that's fair. I mean, the answer to that is yes and no. In a very, very early draft of this book, I did come up with a dead name for Bug because I was a little less creative than I am now, and also because I had not quite homed in on my more “philosophical” perspective on writing trans characters.

So I did come up with one, but that draft was so long ago and so different from the original that I don't think that that is what Bug's dead name was in the first place. So now I'm not sure I know what it was, I don't know what it is.

BLAIR HODGES: Say more about deadnames in general for people that aren't familiar with the concept and how it plays into your philosophy of writing about trans characters.

KYLE LUKOFF: That's a tricky one for me. So the term deadname is relatively recent, and it is not one that I've personally adopted for myself. Like, I don't refer to my “deadname,” I refer to my old name. I refer to the name my parents gave me.

BLAIR HODGES: Ok.

KYLE LUKOFF: I also don't feel especially sensitive about it. I'm not going to share it on a podcast just because I don't know who's going to listen and do something with it. But in general, it is not a thing that I keep a deep, dark secret. However, that is a choice that I make for myself, and that is not a choice that I feel I get to make for other people.

And I feel similarly about my fictional characters. I don't get to make that choice for them. But then also similar to how, despite the fact that I don't feel sensitive about my old name, I'm not going to tell you what it is because I know that if I used Bug's old name in a novel, every single review would say, you know, “Susanna” or “Madeline” or “Isabella,” who's now going by the nickname Bug.

Every review would feel the need to say that, and I did not want to give people the chance to do that.

The Ghost in the Mirror – 07:31

BLAIR HODGES: Let's go to an early scene in the book here where Bug is at the wake of their beloved uncle. They're extremely uncomfortable wearing a dress. And if people don't know where the book is going, that can mean anything, because plenty of girls don't like dresses anyway.

Take us to that scene and what you were trying to introduce to the reader with just the way Bug was, in their body and in their clothes.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, that's also part of my larger philosophy of writing trans characters. I'd hope that I'm not misogynistic. I'm also not femme-phobic. I know that boys and girls can wear all kinds of different clothes and also that many people love dresses. And it is tricky to depict someone who does not like that without making it seem like a vaguely misogynistic or femme phobic critique of that piece of clothing, period.

So I thought that juxtaposing the discomfort of the situation itself with the discomfort of the clothes would be an effective way of introducing that. There's maybe something else going on here that we're not quite sure what it is. And it might be clothes, it might be gender, it might just be that this kid is feeling really sad and nothing feels good.

I wanted to introduce that sort of confusion that would hopefully be clarified more later on.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you have clothing type stuff while growing up? Was that a point of discomfort or frustration for you?

KYLE LUKOFF: I mean, I think my mother could also help answer that question more than I could because I don't, you know, I don't remember my childhood as well. And also, my memories of my childhood are now informed by what I know I am today.

But I do know that I did like wearing dresses and skirts. I did love being beautiful. I'm also a gay man now, so sometimes I like to joke that I had the taste of a drag queen even as a child. [laughter]

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

KYLE LUKOFF: And I wore like, I wore knee length skirts and blouses up until I left for college when I was 18. But there was always this sense of unreality to it.

Like I would look at myself and I would think, wow, there is a girl in the mirror. Look at her. And I kept thinking that, like, eventually I would feel like that girl that I was seeing. And it never quite happened.

Now though I am, my personal aesthetic has shifted entirely to comfortable jeans and T shirts. I don't even like to wear button down shirts. I hate buttons. I've gotten much more sensitive to clothing as I've gotten older.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm glad you mentioned mirrors, because this was something you played with so well in the book. Bug lives in this older house, it's sort of haunted already. Weird stuff's already happening before Uncle Rodrick comes back to haunt. And Bug experiences these weird mirror things.

I thought this would be a good excerpt to have you read here to take us to one of these actual mirror moments. This one's on page 85.

KYLE LUKOFF: Sure.

When I finally get up to wash my hands, I glance at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror, and the face reflected back isn't mine. This never happened to mom or to Uncle Roderick. I remember being little and asking them about it. “What goes wrong with the mirrors sometimes,” is how I asked it, and they didn't understand.

I tried to explain and said something like, “When your face looks wrong.” They looked at each other worried. So I never brought it up again. Whenever the strange reflection shows up, I avert my eyes. But right now I'm looking, and I can't explain what seems so wrong. But I just know that it's a different face staring back at me.

If I described it, it would sound like me. Long, straight, dark hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. Green blue eyes. A tanned face with freckles. Nothing special. But that face isn't mine. It looks like someone's idea of what I look like without me behind it. I stare into the blue green eyes, and they don't blink until I do, maybe a sliver of a second late.

I don't break eye contact until mom shouts, “Are you okay in there?” And when I look back, the strangeness has fled and it's just my normal face again, looking tired and worried. “One sec!” I yell back and practice different expressions until the line between my eyebrows fades and my smile is less forced.

BLAIR HODGES: This is so great, because how you talk about it as a haunting. Bug is almost being haunted by who they know they are inside.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, I think there are a lot of different elements I was trying to play with here. Especially, I think, for me, something I really wanted to push back against is this sense that dysphoria for a trans person is an exclusively and highly gendered phenomenon. That it is, you know, only related to our primary and secondary sex characteristics and to the most extreme of gender stereotypes.

Whereas for me, it always felt much harder to describe and much more amorphous than that. Like the sense of watching, you know, a TV channel with a little bit of static behind it. Or even more, you know how when you're talking on the phone or doing a podcast, and you hear an echo of your voice and you can't keep talking because you're hearing yourself reflected back to you. It's that same sort of, like, something is wrong and I should be able to power through it, but I just can't.

BLAIR HODGES: And it's not just the mirrors for Bug. There are a lot of moments in the book where we get to see Bug wrestling with different things.

There's a moment where Bugs kind of wonders if puberty might help him feel more like a girl than he did at the time. He's not thinking of himself as being trans. He's just wondering, like, geez, I don't really feel “right” right now, and maybe even puberty might be something that helps.

KYLE LUKOFF: I felt that way. I really, really believed that once I hit puberty and started wearing bras and, like, looked like a woman, then I would feel like one. Like, that would just fix everything. And it didn't.

Like, I didn't have the same sort of intense dysphoria that some people describe. I didn't know that I was a boy. I didn't have these overwhelming, like, quote unquote “masculine” urges, but I just never quite felt like I fit into anything that made sense to me.

Gender Stereotypes – 13:40

BLAIR HODGES: And Bug's also triangulating with people Bug knows. You introduce us to their friend Moira, and they kind of have a conflicted relationship. They start off kind of frenemies, I guess, because their moms know each other. But as they're growing older, there's still kind of a tension between them.

And Moira, as they're heading into junior high school or middle school, is always wanting to do makeovers. Moira's really excited about girly girl type stuff. And she also wants to kind of help Bug and maybe be Bug's mentor, which causes more tension in their relationship.

KYLE LUKOFF: I wrote a lot of those scenes with really clear memories of doing, like, makeovers and hair parties with the girls that I was kind of friends with as a kid. And I also wonder if the real girl who inspired Moira is ever going to read this book and find out, because there was a girl in my life who had some similarities to her that I had to be friends with because our moms worked together, but we never liked each other.

But I would say that Moira and Bug have a better relationship than I had with this girl.

BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] I was gonna say it's great because Moira's not a villain. I mean, Moira can be annoying, just like I think anybody could. But you're not making Moira a villain here.

KYLE LUKOFF: I didn't want to, especially because—going back again, is that I think making this, you know, conventionally gendered cis girl into a villain would just be playing into some kind of misogynistic stereotype about how a feminine person is automatically, you know, an airhead and not worth your sympathy.

Moira's cool, like she wanted to learn to do her makeup from a drag queen. She's just different from Bug.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly. They have personality differences.

Another thing about Bug is you don't lean into stereotypes because, like, Bug isn't really into sports. This comes up like, Bug says “I'm not a sports person. I'm not really interested now.” Like, Bug's kind of more of a nerdy type person.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, I mean, that's just me. This was my first novel, and I think especially for a first novel, the easiest way to make it seem true is to root it in something that is true about yourself.

BLAIR HODGES: Write what you know.

KYLE LUKOFF: I was not, you know, a hyper-masculine child. I just liked to read books.

BLAIR HODGES: A book kid.

There was one scene I was really moved by when, you know, sometimes Bug seems to be leaning into, sort of, “girl ways” and feeling sort of comfortable with that. I'm thinking of a scene where Bug has to borrow Moira's dress and then bike home. And he says it was a lot more pleasant than he expected.

He looks down, he sees a girl riding the bike. He kind of feels like it fits and it feels kind of good. So it's not constant dysphoria for Bug. It's not constant discomfort. Like Bug's just trying to figure out what's up. And sometimes that can include good feelings, too.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah. And I just think that that's honestly more interesting. It makes for more interesting of a story than a more traditional, “I hate everything feminine and I only want to play sports and do trucks.”

Do trucks? [laughter] That's not a thing you do. You know what I mean.

BLAIR HODGES: I certainly have never done trucks.

KYLE LUKOFF: And again, that's just coming from my own experience. Like, I, to this day—honestly, like, I was in Goodwill with my partner the other day and I was feeling annoyed that I can't—

It was getting hot out and I can't wear just a very simple, nice sundress because then people would look at me and be like, “Oh, there's a man in a dress.” And I just don't want people to look at me ever. I wish that I could just wear a comfortable, flowing garment in the summer and not have it imply anything about who I am or what I believe this.

BLAIR HODGES: Also, the scene where the bike happens was probably my kid’s favorite “laugh out loud” moment. Because Bug's like, rehearsing in their head what they're gonna say. They're going to visit this new boy who moved in— Griffin—and they're pedaling over there and, they’re thinking “‘Just thought I'd pop by,’ I'll say breezily, and I'll talk about how interesting that book sounds.”

And so Bug’s rehearsing this stuff. But then when they finally get to the door, Bug says “the opening speech I've been rehearsing just falls out of my mouth in a heap. “I popped by!” is what I say. [laughs]

KYLE LUKOFF: I mean, I don't know if we all do that, but I certainly do that. My head is full of these beautiful speeches. And then, unfortunately, the presence of another human being just turns them into a mess.

BLAIR HODGES: I love it. You know, we get to see Bug's insecurities. I mean, the book's written in Bug's voice. And so we're really seeing into Bug’s thought process. And because of that, we're also seeing a lot of Bug’s vulnerabilities and wonders and just curiosity.

That's the strength of the book, of choosing that POV. Did the earlier drafts, were they in Bug's POV as well? Was that always part of the book?

KYLE LUKOFF: I think so, yeah. I think it started first person the whole time, especially because I knew that pronouns were going to be a thing. And I don't like referring to Bug as she/her. And Bug never goes by they/them. But it also wouldn't be correct to refer to Bug as he/him from the beginning.

So really first person—I guess one could do second person, like “your house is haunted.” But I might save second person for a more ambitious novel.

Becoming an Author – 18:52

BLAIR HODGES: And this is the first time you wrote for middle grade folks, too, right?

KYLE LUKOFF: It is, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you read a lot of books in preparation to kind of get into voices, or how did you make that transition from, like, younger books to middle age? Middle grade!

KYLE LUKOFF: Well—middle age! [laughter]

My writing career really started while I was working as an elementary school librarian and my students were two year olds up through fifth graders. So, you know, I was reading hundreds of picture books a year, and I was reading middle grade novels aloud to my students. And I was also reading middle grade novels to know what to recommend to them.

So I was just immersed in all of those different voices. I would say that the trickiest thing of transitioning from picture books to middle grade for me is that a good picture book has to be very tightly structured and every word has to be perfectly matched to whatever word came before. And in a novel, you have a lot more room to stretch.

And I actually found that to be difficult. Like, I found myself obsessing over every little detail. Because in a picture book, every little detail has to matter.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

KYLE LUKOFF: And it's not that they don't matter in a novel, but less so than in a picture book. Every single word is a load-bearing structure there. And in a middle grade novel, not every word has to be a load bearing structure.

BLAIR HODGES: And not only the load, but also the poetry of it. Like the best of these kid’s books, the words just flow together beautifully. So it's not just the simplicity of language, it's also the very words you're picking. My favorite example of children's literature that I think is the pinnacle, Frog and Toad.

KYLE LUKOFF: Oh, I do love Arnold Lobel.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

KYLE LUKOFF: To me, those aren't picture books, though. Those are early chapter books.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. Yeah. [laughs]

KYLE LUKOFF: Which is an entirely different art form from anything else!

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, okay, that's fair. But the economy of language Arnold Lobel uses and the way those stories are hilarious and the language he uses is just perfect. And I try to imagine the skill it takes to do that.

So if you're kind of in that mode, and I think it's even more difficult when you go earlier because as you said, these are sort of early chapter books when you go earlier, I think you're right. I guess Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon is a good example of just great prose. Very simple picture book. Every single word counts. It's got a nice flow and a poetry to it. And if you're used to writing in that register and then you want to like, go long.

KYLE LUKOFF: Oh, yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: Every sentence would seem like work.

KYLE LUKOFF: Pretty much. I'm also, I would say for me, I'm a big Shel Silverstein fan. I love The Missing Piece. And The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. Those to me are two really phenomenal works of art in the picture book realm.

BLAIR HODGES: Classics. I mean, I don't know, you've read a lot more recent stuff. Have there been newer books that have reached the heights of those? When people think of Shel Silverstein and Goodnight Moon and Arnold Lobel, have we seen more recent authors that have been able to reach those heights? And maybe things are just so spread out that they're not catching on culturally the way that those older books did.

KYLE LUKOFF: I agree with you with the “spread out” part. I am also confident that there are books now that definitely reach those heights.

But one interesting thing about transitioning from librarian to writer is that I no longer have an easily accessible mental back catalog. So I can name a few examples, but I don't want those few examples to stand in for, like, the wealth of picture books that I think exist.

But two examples off the top of my head are The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld, which I think is a really perfectly structured picture book, and also really almost anything by Yuyi Morales. I really love her work a lot.

BLAIR HODGES: I'll check them out.

We're talking today with Kyle Lukoff, author of several picture books, including When Became a Brother, Explosion at the Poem Factory, and Call Me Max. In this interview, we're talking about Too Bright to See, which is a middle grade novel, a finalist for the National Book Award. It's received six starred reviews, including from Kirkus, and it's appeared in a bunch of best of year lists. It's also a Stonewall Book Award winner and a Newbery Honor book.

The Uncle in Drag – 23:01

BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about Uncle Rodrick. We mentioned him earlier. He's a really fascinating character in the book, and I think this is a character that's going to ruffle some feathers because he came to live with his sister, who is Bug's mom. So Bug's his niece.

And he was a drag performer. I wondered if you hesitated to include that because there's a lot of ruckus being raised—and maybe it's just gotten even louder since you wrote the book—about things like Drag Story Hour and drag as kind of a threat to children. Tell me about the decision to include Uncle Roderick here and the fact that he’d been a drag performer.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, well, I started writing this novel way back in, I want to say 2015 or 2016 when we weren't seeing the same kind of uproar. So that wasn't in my head in quite the same way that it would be now. Also, it's interesting that that element of the novel has so far, like, God-willing, really flown under the radar.

I've gotten a few unhappy emails from people and this book has been occasionally at the center of controversies. But Uncle Roderick as a drag queen has not really come up at all, which I am surprised by.

But I also, I don't even remember the initial thought process in making Uncle Roderick a drag queen. It just felt so obvious. I think partially from a narrative perspective, it was easier to have Uncle Roderick be single because if he had a partner, that would just add like a whole other dynamic to the novel that I didn't feel like I was skilled enough to pull off quite yet. But I had to make it clear that Uncle Roderick was very gay.

And just saying “My uncle was gay” isn't going to permeate our understanding of him and their relationship, because that doesn't necessarily have to work itself into all these little details that I could easily pull out. And what is the gayest thing imaginable that is appropriate for a middle grade novel? Being a drag queen!

BLAIR HODGES: We don't get to see Uncle Roderick doing drag. Like, this is something he did back in New York before he moved in here. And so he has some of his costumery with him and he has his huge makeup kit and this sort of stuff.

So, yeah, we don't see drag performance in the book. We just know that that's part of who Uncle Roderick is. And actually, my kid was really interested in Uncle Rodrick's other possible relationships. You toss off an aside at one point about like, one of Uncle Rodrick's boyfriends that came around and I think they were a dressmaker and they, like, wanted to engage Bug with that, I think.

And then that person didn't come around anymore. And my kid was really interested in that. My theory was that maybe Uncle Roderick was like, oh, this person's sort of trying to girlify Bug. And so I'm gonna take him out of the scene. And my kid said, “Nah, I don't know if that's the real reason why.”

So we kind of differed on that. And now you can clarify for us what you think about this scene. If there's a reason why that particular character only appears for like a sentence.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, I think you're right. I had that character—I think there's even a bit where he says, like, “Oh, you could be beautiful if you tried.” And Uncle was like, no, this isn't right for us. Yeah.

I almost forgot—another reason why I wanted Uncle Roderick to be a drag queen was because I knew I was going to be writing a whole novel about a character who was uncomfortable with the sort of femininity that he would be assumed to like. And it was another way of me showing that I am not anti-femininity and I am not promoting Intense gender stereotypes here.

And I also wanted there to be, you know, another high femme, positive character for Bug to contrast with, to make it clear that this really is what Bug feels comfortable with and not a larger statement about who gets to be feminine.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you have any Uncle Rodericks around? Did you have people in your life that kind of help you explore who you were?

KYLE LUKOFF: No, not until I really came out as gay. The first time when I was, like, 17, is when I started hanging out with a couple other queer kids in my high school and going to a support group for queer kids about twenty miles north of where I grew up. But, yeah, that wasn't until I had already started to figure it out and was, you know, fully about to leave for college.

Bug Wrestles with Gender Identity – 27:18

BLAIR HODGES: Mm. I mean, this is pivotal for Bug because, you know, Uncle Rodrick dies early in the book and then comes back haunting Bug. And eventually, the ghost leads Bug directly into Uncle Roderick's room, where, under the bed, Bug finds a collection of literature, some pamphlets, and a lot of those are about trans experiences.

So I thought, let's have you read this part where Bug is reckoning with what he found under the bed there. This is on page 135.

KYLE LUKOFF: I had read some of the stories in there in different pamphlets and things, and they weren't what I had expected. For some reason, I thought that being trans was all about your, you know, private parts, like, knowing that they're wrong and that you should have the other kind. But that almost never came up.

A lot of the trans people telling their stories talked more about a general feeling of not-rightness, like people were looking at you through a frosted glass window, guessing at what they were seeing. But that just sounds normal to me. It must be more of a human thing. I'm not trans, but I always feel like people are looking at me and seeing something wrong.

Everything that's wrong with me, I mean, even though none of it is anything that can be easily described. I look okay on the outside, but every piece of me just adds up to something not quite right. And, sure, that could mean that I'm trans, too, but I know that it doesn't.

Another thing all those articles were clear on is that trans people really are the genders they identify with. That arguments saying otherwise are transphobic, pure and simple. Like a phrase I kept seeing repeated over and over again was “Trans men are men and trans women are women.” A sure unshakable truth. But I don't think that I am a boy. I don't feel like a boy that everyone thinks is a girl.

I just feel like an uncomfortable, misshapen, squishy humanoid. And sure, maybe if I got to look like a boy and everyone thought I was a boy, that would make me feel better. Like, if I looked more like Griffin, if my clothes fit like his did, if people looked at us and saw two boys together.

I mean, of course I'd like that. But trans people are their genders. I just want something which is different. I wonder what it must be like to know something like that about yourself, know it clearly and truly, but not be able to live it. And then my legs go limp and rubbery and I almost fall off my bike at the side of the road.

Suddenly I'm sitting on the dirt crying, because the truth hits me all at once, and it's so, so awful.

BLAIR HODGES: And the truth that Bug believes at this moment is that Uncle Roderick was trans. So Bug, at this point, is still pretty convinced that they're not trans. And they'll kind of shift on that.

Talk about the decision to have Bug wrestling with it this way instead of having just one scene where it's really revealed. This is a nice twist for the sake of a story, but also maybe in some people's actual experiences of reckoning with their gender identity.

KYLE LUKOFF: I mean, that's fairly close to my experience and of a lot of my friends. And then also, many readers that I don't even know have come up to me and said, “Oh, my God, you got it perfectly.”

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

KYLE LUKOFF: So, for me, I had this moment where I suddenly knew that I was trans. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and he was telling me about how he figured it out about himself. And I was like, “Oh, that sounds like me.” And then, “Oh, no, that sounds like me!”

And I spent a couple years really wrestling over what to do with this. And one of the thought processes I had was, I'm not trans because I'm not really a boy. I just desperately want to be one more than anything, and that's different and somehow less real.

And, you know, I wrestled with that for a couple years, and I wanted to show I don't necessarily want to save someone from that same process, because I think that however your journey takes you, it's worth walking down, no matter what sort of, like, twists and turns it takes.

But if someone is thinking to themselves, “I'm not really trans because I just desperately want to be this thing I wanted there to be.” This message of desperately wanting to be something is reason enough to do it. There's no threshold of authenticity or reality that you have to ascend. Just wanting it is enough.

Practice Makes a Person – 31:41

BLAIR HODGES: I wondered if it was difficult to write a story that didn't just seem like some kind of object lesson. Did you feel pressure to make a story that would work as a story itself and not just as a way to help trans people be seen or more visible? Which are fine goals in themselves, but talk about how you made those negotiations about like, the quality of the story versus being overly didactic or trying to have the outcome in hand first.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, I mean, there's nothing I hate more than a didactic novel. I have a special burning hatred for books that I agree with politically and that I agree with technically, but that I don't find to be an enjoyable reading experience. And so I simply did not want to do that.

BLAIR HODGES: How do you avoid it, though?

KYLE LUKOFF: I don't know. I just did. I hope! I think what helps is just caring deeply about stories being good and knowing that any message or lesson will not work if the story itself isn't working.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's fun to see Bug—so Bug's a book nerd too, like you are. And we actually get to see Bug reflect on this. I'll have you read this, too. This is on page 117. There's a section where Bug is just about books and lessons and morals.

KYLE LUKOFF: A lot of books have a moral. Some lesson about how you have to stay true to who you are, how it doesn't matter if you're different, you don't have to act like everyone else, and that the most important thing is to be yourself. But those books never tell you how to figure out what your “self” is.

They seem like you know already and are pretending to be someone else for a while to fit in. I don't know what my “self” is, though.

Maybe that's true for everyone. Maybe no one is really sure of who they are. I probably have to try out a bunch of different selves until I find one that fits.

BLAIR HODGES: So good.

KYLE LUKOFF: One thing that's funny about that is that a small handful of readers have proposed to me that Bug and also Annabelle, the main character for my second novel, are both autistic because they see a lot of their own neurodivergence in that, and that is not something I have ever officially known about myself.

But the more people who tell me that, the more I'm starting to ask myself if that is something I just have not been aware of until now.

But I do remember as a kid and a teenager and even through now, just not really knowing what my true, authentic self is, and just trying on a bunch of different things to see what seemed right.

BLAIR HODGES: And Bug says that a little bit later on, I've highlighted this line that says, “Practice makes a person.”

Some people might look at that and say, well, that means it's artifice. That means that there's something unauthentic or unnatural happening. But if you zoom out far enough, I think it's—personally, I believe that's just what it is to be a person. Like, we are figuring out who we are. Practice does make a person. The ways that we live, the choices we make, the things culture impinges on us, the things we're happy to receive from culture, the things we're not comfortable receiving from culture, and we get to make decisions about that.

Practice makes a person.

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah. Like someone, a child recently asked me what I saw as sort of an overarching theme of my work as a whole. If I could, like, sew up my entire body of work, which is now nudging up into, like, 22 books once everything is done. And I said, “I think overall, my books are saying that it's really hard to be a person.”

And then they said, “Do you mean, like, a marginalized person because of oppression?” I was like, “Nope. I think being a person is hard. We are mostly made out of meat, and our brains have some electricity in them, and we also have defense mechanisms because we're also animals. And you also have to be nice to people when you don't want to. It's really hard to be a person.”

Yeah.

BLAIR HODGES: This is where I personally appreciated Bug, because I haven't experienced gender dysphoria or questions about that, but I have experienced gender discomfort or social pressures about what it is to be a man or what masculinity needs to look like. And seeing Bug wrestle with that, I could easily find commonalities between what Bug was experiencing and what I experience in my life.

Like, this is not a book that's just here to help understand a trans kid. I think this is a book that also will help people who read it get a better grasp on their own relationship with gender, even if they're cisgender.

KYLE LUKOFF: Good. That would be nice.

BLAIR HODGES: But again, it's funny because that's a moral, that's a lesson. But I think you really thread that needle of letting the story lead, and that the best lessons come as side effects to the story. Or as things that emerge because the story is powerful, not because you figured out what the moral is then wrote a story to teach it, create some characters to tell it to people. It didn't feel like that's what you had done.

KYLE LUKOFF: I mean, I would also say, that comes from having respect for both the reader as an individual and readers as a class. As a librarian, and then as a bookseller, before that, I had countless experiences of a kid or a person coming to me and say, “I loved this book because xyz,” or “I hated this book because xyz,” and what they were naming were elements of the story that I hadn't even picked up on or that didn't resonate with me.

I really believe a book is a relationship, and that I give you half of it and that you provide the rest.

Imagine a World Without Transphobia – 37:14

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, this reminds me, I wanted to ask you about this. Bug's experience didn't include any people around Bug freaking out about it, as Bug is deciding, like, transitioning and going into middle school is kind of the perfect time for it because they can show up after the summer, people have new haircuts, and people have grown up in some way. So this is kind of a point of transition anyway.

But we don't see Bug's friends being angry or confused. We don't see Bug's mother grieving or wringing her hands about it. So, you know, that was a choice you made. You could have gone another way and had someone really be forceful and push back.

There's sort of a smooth transition for Bug in certain ways. And maybe for some trans kids who face family opposition or pain there, that could be a tough pill for them to swallow. Or maybe it's just comforting for them to see a character that didn't have to deal with that kind of pushback? What do you think?

KYLE LUKOFF: I made that choice for a lot of reasons. And it is one choice that I got the most pushback from pretty much everyone who read this book and everyone, like, everyone who read this book before it was published, and then a lot of people who read it post-publication.

There's a lot of complaints that it's not realistic. And I got a lot of notes to just add a little bit of antagonism, like, maybe Moira, maybe Moira's mom, maybe some random kid. Just, like, someone has got to be a jerk about it. And I obviously pushed back against it because for me, including an element of transphobia or trans antagonism would turn this into a story that I was not interested in telling because I just don't think transphobia is interesting.

There is nothing there that I want to engage with, like intellectually or emotionally. It is something for me to ignore as much as possible, dismiss as thoroughly as I can, and create no space for in any part of my life, because there's just nothing there for me.

And I also wanted to have this novel in some ways be a challenge, because I've had people say to me how unrealistic it is that Bug’s coming out experience was so positive. And my answer to that is, it is only unrealistic if you want it to be. Every response Bug gets is a choice that somebody made and everyone has the same choices. And I wanted to present a world that is very possible. We just have to make the right decisions.

BLAIR HODGES: Did people push back at all about the reveal too? Because the thing that really pushes Bug to connect the dots is a sleepover incident where the haunting becomes manifested in Bug's head getting shaved. This really would be a traumatic scene. But Bug sees himself in the mirror and was like, oh, so it takes a visible change then for Bug to connect the dots?

KYLE LUKOFF: Yeah, I mean, honestly, part of that was just my own limitations as a storyteller. Writing my first novel back in 20-whatever-teen, I knew that something big needed to happen to finally, like, push Bug over the edge. And I just went for a good old fashioned head shaving.

I know trans men who have long hair and I know that hair is not necessarily a signifier of gender, but as someone with incredibly long hair experience who is now bald, it just—it also felt like a fun way to really push the border of, “Is there actually a ghost or is this just Bug's like, emotional state that is making all these manifestations happen?” I still try to leave it a little bit open ended at the end, but I just needed something dramatic and that made the most sense to me.

And then we got to see a cute little scene of like Uncle Rodrick in full face and in her little outfit. We got much more of a sense of her at the very end, which I appreciated.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And hey, I appreciated the shaved head representation as a bald man myself. So I was fully on board with it. [laughter]

That's Kyle Lukoff, and we're talking about the book Too Bright to See, a finalist for the National Book Award and a Stonewall Book Award winner. It is a great middle grade novel about a kid named Bug who lives in a haunted house.

Call Me Max and Book Bans – 41:28

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, let's go back to Call Me Max, for a minute. I didn't want to spend a ton of time talking about book banning, but we should take a second to touch on it because it's definitely on the rise right now. Call Me Max is one of the books that's come under fire again.

It tells the story of a young trans boy. It was written for first and second graders. And having read the book, I want to say I think it's brilliant. It's also funny, which I didn't expect. There's moments of real humor.

KYLE LUKOFF: I mean, something that's really interesting to me is that that I think of myself as a very funny person. I'm not a standup comic or anything, but my general modus operandi is to make jokes all the time about everything. And people usually laugh. I'm usually good at getting room to laugh with me.

But my books tend to be much more somber and serious. Or at least my books tend to be earnest and sincere in a way that I'm generally not in my day-to-day life. And I'm always trying to put a little bit of humor in.

I mean, a couple of my books are just plain funny. But even in my not-funny books, I'm trying to put just a little bit of humor because that is a more authentic representation of who I am and how I move through the world. But I also tend to write about topics that require a somewhat serious, earnest, and sincere register.

BLAIR HODGES: When schools are looking at this and saying, we need to pull this out of school libraries because this topic”—and they'll usually refer to it generically that way, calling it a topic or an issue—“is inappropriate for young kids. And they tap dance around saying the word trans.

You wrote back to one of these schools, a school that had banned it. They called it “sensitive material” and they apologized to their students. They acted as though this was some sort of traumatic experience, that this book had been read to kids and that we're gonna provide counselors for kids to like, meet with counselors in case they were traumatized. And you wrote back to them. Tell me about your response and whether you ever heard back.

KYLE LUKOFF: Oh God, I was so mad! I will say that my response is on my website, which is kylelukoff.com, you can find my response.

Yes, I remember when that letter came out and my blood was just boiling at the implication that reading a book about a trans child was a traumatic experience. And the first draft I wrote was very angry and very prescriptive.

I said, “You're saying this, you're doing this, you're wrong for these reasons.” And I wasn't quite getting across what I wanted to get across. And I realized there is nothing more damning than a rhetorical question. And so I reframed it, asking them questions, making it clear that I already knew the answers.

I was very proud of that letter. I highly recommend checking it out if you're curious.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I loved the part where you said, “I noticed you won't use the word ‘trans.’ Why? Why are you only calling it this?”

It sounds like you didn't hear back from the school.

KYLE LUKOFF: I think I got a random DM on Twitter from someone in the district saying, “We don't want to get into a Twitter fight with you.” And I'm like, “Yeah, because I won.” [laughter] But I never got a formal response to that letter that I am still very proud of today.

BLAIR HODGES: So what's your basic boilerplate response to the book banning that's going on right now? What's the message you want to give people about what we're seeing and what it means? I mean, you've been a librarian as well, so.

KYLE LUKOFF: I mean, I have talked about this topic ad nauseam for the last three plus years. But I would say for me, what it comes down is, it is complicated because book banning affects many different kinds of books and authors. But in the case of queer and trans material specifically, I believe that it is part and parcel of a larger movement to erase especially trans people from any semblance of a safe public life.

Because if you are saying that learning about the existence is harmful for children, you are then saying children who have trans parents are being harmed by the existence of their parents. And you can also extend that to the idea that if a child comes across a trans person in any walk of life, they will be harmed by that.

So you're having us pulled from our jobs as teachers, as librarians, as gas station attendants, as wait staff, as nurses. Like, if you believe that children coming into contact with a trans person is harmful to them, what you are saying is that we need to be removed from public life by any means necessary.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, and I think that extends to the whole bathroom debate, too. The idea that trans people are somehow a threat in bathrooms and need to be restricted from those facilities.

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 46:07

BLAIR HODGES: Well Kyle, we're gonna end things today with “Regrets, Challenges, and Surprises.” This is a time when you can reflect on anything you would change about the book now that it's been out a while. And it was your first book, so you've probably learned a lot since then, and we've touched on some of that stuff as we've gone.

You can also talk about what the hardest part about writing it was, what challenged you about writing it, or if there are any surprises in the process of creating this book. Personal surprises, surprises in how the book was received, surprises of realizations you had. It can go any kind of direction.

KYLE LUKOFF: Regrets, challenges, surprises. I might ask you to repeat that after I finish regrets, but we'll see.

So regrets. Ffor now, I would say with Too Bright to See at this remove, I can't think of any regrets. I'm very proud of this novel. I have not yet gotten any critiques that made me wish I could go back and change something.

And that is not the case for many of my other books. For this one, I don't think I have any real regrets for it. Although I will say I think that would be different if I actually went back and read it from start to finish. Because I also know that no book is ever done and I'm sure that there are sentences that I would want to change!

BLAIR HODGES: Oh, yeah.

KYLE LUKOFF: I know that there's a couple parts where I use like the same adjective twice in one paragraph, and I hate it when I do that. But aside from those minor sentence level changes, I think on the whole, I remain very proud of this book.

In terms of challenges, I have to say the biggest challenge was finishing it. Like I said, I started this novel back in, I want to say, 2015, probably. I was working with a different agent than the wonderful Saba Sulaiman who's representing me now. And that agent did not really believe that this book was really going in a good direction. I got a lot of pushback for pretty much every choice I made.

And I must have given up after five chapters. And then I think a few months later, I was like, well, let me see if I can write a little bit more. And in sort of a halting stop and start kind of way, I finished, I want to say, half to two-thirds of it.

And then I fully gave up. I must have given up for at least a year, if not two. And it wasn't until I found out that Call Me Max was getting published that I thought to myself, you know what? Maybe I actually can make a go at this whole writing thing. The Call Me Max books were my fourth, fifth and sixth books, respectively. All picture books or early readers.

And I thought to myself, let me go back and reread this middle grade thing, because I remember it as being clunky and awkward and hard and bad. Like I was banging my head against a brick wall to get it finished. And I went back and I started reading it and I thought to myself, you know what? This isn't terrible. This is not the worst start to a middle grade novel that I've ever come across in my career. I could see myself giving this to a kid someday.

So I challenged myself to finish it by the end of the summer. And then I sent it to one agent that I'd previously been in conversation with. And she wasn't even signing new clients at the time, but she loved it and signed with me almost immediately upon finishing it.

BLAIR HODGES: Wow.

KYLE LUKOFF: So I would say this is neither a regret nor a challenge nor a surprise, but it does feel tied in more generally to the overarching themes of those questions. Is that the very first novel for young people I ever wrote and ever tried to publish was a young adult novel that I wrote way back in 2012 that I revised for a couple years, that I sent to a million agents, including my current agent, and nobody wanted to sign it.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that if that novel had actually sold or signed with an agent and sold to a publisher back then, my guess is that it would have gotten a two-book deal and that my second novel would have been poorly received and that I probably either would never have published again or it would have taken me a very long time to come back.

And I feel really grateful that my publishing experience looked more like a couple smaller picture books. A Storytelling of Ravens and Explosion at the Poem Factory. And then when Aidan came out, When Aidan Became a Brother, that put me on the map more thoroughly. And I think the success of Aidan is part of what led to my confidence and readiness for Too Bright to See to come out.

So even though my career had some stops and starts and like 180 degrees, I cannot say that I regret any of it because I'm very happy with where I am today.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for that window into your process and your career.

Speaking of which, do you have any other projects? What are you working on right now? What can people expect?

KYLE LUKOFF: Oh, I have so many more projects. I'm very tired. [laughter]

I have two more picture books coming out this year. There's one called Just What to Do. And then there's another one called I'm Sorry You Got Mad. And I'm very excited for both of those picture books.

And then my third novel is coming out in February. That one is called A World Worth Saving, and it is my first fantasy/adventure kind of situation. It is my first novel with a Jewish main character because that's I'm Jewish and that's something that I have not found a way to write about yet. But I'm really excited to finally have a Jewish main character and it is absolutely my most, I would say, ambitious project to date.

I have a lot more books coming out, including one that I'm not really allowed to talk about, but I will say that fans of Too Bright to See are gonna be excited about that one. Intriguing. A bunch more picture books in the works too.

BLAIR HODGES: Oh great. I can't wait to read more of your work, Kyle. And in the meantime, thanks for joining me on Relationscapes. This has been a really fun conversation.

KYLE LUKOFF: Thanks so much Blair.

Outro – 51:49

BLAIR HODGES: That's it for this episode of Relationscapes. Thanks for being here. Like Kyle mentioned, his brand-new novel A World Worth Saving is available now. It just came out two weeks ago and I can't wait to dive in with my kids.

I also want to give a shout-out to “avidreader883.” They added a review of the show to Apple Podcasts.

They said they especially appreciate how we cover a variety of topics because it embodies compassion for the wide range of human experience.

And that's exactly what we're going for. Thanks for that review, avid reader 883.

If you're out there listening and you haven't reviewed yet, please take a second and review. You can also rate the show in Spotify and PocketCasts. Just add some stars.

Mates of State provides our theme song. Relationscapes, as part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges and I'll see you next time.

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