About a girl

When Georgie Stone came home from school, she often rushed straight to the toilet, tears welling up in her eyes. Georgie, who had been telling her mum, Rebekah, she was a girl since she was two-and-a-half years old, had stopped using the boys’ toilets, instead holding on all day till she got home. From there, she’d be in her mum’s arms, weeping quietly. “It’s so hard trying to be a boy,” she’d say sometimes, between muffled sobs.

School was a distressing place for Georgie. Children pointed and laughed at her. When her primary school realised she wasn’t prepared to broach the boys’ toilets, they insisted she use the disabled ones. She wasn’t allowed to wear the girls’ uniform and teachers called her “he” or “George”.

“That hurt,” Georgie says, “but they didn’t know any better.”

For Rebekah, the whole experience was heartbreaking. In a new book, About a Girl, she gives a mother’s perspective on raising a transgender child.

She remembers when Georgie first began to tell her that she was a girl. “You might be the most ‘woke’ person in the world but when it’s your kid, statements like this can challenge