Do You Like Me?

The Story

When I was a child, I learned early that belonging could depend on following the rules.

Decades later, after marriage, children, military service, and a successful business career, questions about gender that I thought I had put away returned with increasing force. Coming to understand myself would change nearly every part of my life—especially my relationship with my children.

At one point, I was advised by my own lawyer not to see them after my former wife sought to terminate my parental rights because I was transgender.

Years later, after becoming an attorney myself, I would work to change some of the very institutions that had once exercised power over families like mine.

Early Praise for Do You Like Me?

“An honest—at times brutally so—story of reckoning and redemption: the truths concealed, the self not yet understood, and the damage done on the journey toward belonging and authenticity. Brogan-Kator invites readers into her deeply personal story of identity, love, and family, helping them understand and connect more deeply with the trans community.”

—Jim Obergefell, named plaintiff in Obergefell v. Hodges and co-author of Love Wins

“Do You Like Me? is honest about what one woman’s fight for authenticity cost: almost everything. Then Denise Brogan-Kator turned that price into a fight for her family, and for all our rights. It belongs on the shelf of anyone who cares how rights are won, and why they still need defending.”

—Bree Fram, Col, USSF (Ret.)

“I was honored when Denise asked me to read her book, and amazed when I finished it. Denise has lived through so many ups and downs that it seems she has lived enough for three full lives. Her gender identity is woven through her story like the thread joining the panels of a quilt: each panel distinct, each connected, and each necessary to make the quilt whole. Some pages will make you laugh; others will make you cry. She asks, Do You Like Me? I say yes.”

—Monica Helms, U.S. Navy submarine veteran and creator of the Transgender Pride Flag"

"I met Denise as she handed me the baton at Family Equality, and in these pages I found the same courage and grace that drew me to her from the start. Wife, father, Gram, sailor, and movement leader, Denise Brogan-Kator teaches us that falling isn’t failing. Her lifelong question, Do You Like Me?, is one we all carry. I hope this book reaches not only LGBTQ+ people and our allies but also those who still seek to erase us, because in Denise’s story they may recognize themselves."

—Jaymes Black, CEO, The Trevor Project

“I know the weight of military service and the honor of wearing dolphins. I also know what it’s like to have all of it questioned because we are transgender. Denise’s memoir is a moving account of the extraordinary fight for something entirely ordinary: the freedom simply to live our lives.

—Blake Dremann, Commander, U.S. Navy (Ret.); qualified in submarines aboard USS Maine (SSBN-741), 2012”

"I worked alongside Denise Brogan-Kator at Family Equality for years, and I thought I knew her story. I didn't. Do You Like Me? is about a father who ate fast food in secret with her teenage daughter because a court might treat love as evidence; a submarine veteran and CFO who rebuilt her life from an empty apartment at forty-eight; an advocate who learned to pick up a bullhorn because waiting politely wasn't working. It is also about grandchildren, and a marriage that made room. Denise writes with the same disarming humor and plainspoken decency she brought to every room we were in together—and with no interest in making herself look good, only in telling the truth. What emerges is a life in full: funny, painful, stubborn, generous, and entirely her own. The child in these pages kept asking the adults around her, 'Do you like me?' By the last page you will love her, and you will understand what it cost her to become the woman who could finally answer that question herself."

— Shannon Minter, Legal Director, National Center for LGBTQ Rights

Follow Do You Like Me? to publication

I’m preparing my memoir, Do You Like Me? Love, Parenthood, and the Fight for an Ordinary Life, for publication in January 2027.

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