Do You Like Me?
Love, Parenthood, and the Fight for an Ordinary Life
A memoir by Denise E. Brogan-Kator
A story of family, identity, law, rupture, repair, and the human need to be accepted without surrendering oneself in exchange.
The Story
Do You Like Me? is a memoir about family, identity, law, rupture, repair, and the human need to be accepted without surrendering oneself in exchange.
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.