What’s so scary about a transgender child?

When Mae Sallean was a teenager, her body and mind began to slip away from each other. Her body and face began to sprout thick hair, her voice dropped, and she felt dissociated from her physical form. Something had gone wrong, and she could not reconcile the person she was with the person the world perceived her as. The disconnect left her profoundly depressed and deeply lonely.

Mae knew, somewhere deep down, that she needed to be a girl. She lacked the language for it. In Mae’s heavily religious Texas community,...