Born Ready

About Born Ready

Penelope knows what he is. He's a boy. A ninja, too. The problem isn't who he is; the problem is getting the rest of the world—his family, his friends, his community—to see what is already true about him. Born Ready is a picture book about Jodie Patterson's son Penelope, who is transgender, and the specific frustrations and triumphs of a young child trying to live authentically in a world that keeps misreading him.

Published by Crown Books for Young Readers in 2021, Born Ready is illustrated with vibrant energy that matches Penelope's personality. The book is direct without being pedantic—it tells Penelope's story with warmth and humor, in the voice of a child who is not confused about himself and doesn't want anyone else to be confused on his behalf either.

Jodie Patterson is an activist, a mother of five, and the Chair of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation Board. Her adult memoir, The Bold World, tells the full story of her family's experience raising Penelope; Born Ready offers the distillation of that story in a form for the youngest readers—the ones who may need to see themselves in a book, or who may need a vocabulary for a classmate or sibling or neighbor that they don't yet have.

A Book for Children Who Need to Be Seen

The book does something simple and essential: it puts a transgender child at the center of a story that is joyful rather than difficult. Penelope's challenges are real—the book doesn't pretend otherwise—but the emotional register is triumphant. He knows who he is. The work of the book is helping the world catch up.

For children who are transgender or gender-nonconforming, a picture book like this one functions as recognition—the experience of seeing your own reality reflected in a story at an age when that reflection is developmentally important. For children who are not, it serves as an introduction to someone whose experience differs from their own, which is also a developmental good.

Why Born Ready Has Been Challenged

Born Ready has been challenged in 3 states and 3 districts tracked in this catalog, making it one of the most-challenged picture books on this site relative to its brevity and directness. Challenges uniformly cite the book's positive portrayal of a transgender child and assert that the subject is inappropriate for the age range. The book was written specifically for young children because that is the age at which children who are transgender begin to understand and articulate who they are. A book that meets children where they actually are is not inappropriate; it is precisely appropriate.