I Hardly Knew Me
Following Love, Faith, and Skittles to a Transgender Awakening
by Nia Chiaramonte
Lake Drive Books, 2025. 212 pages.
Review written January 27, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review
I Hardly Knew Me tells the coming-out journey of a Christian transgender woman. She tells her story with warmth and humor.
This isn’t a theological treatise defending her decision to come out, but it is a story explaining and showing how much her life is better, how much more authentically she presents herself, how much deeper her relationships, because she did come out.
We also see how difficult that path was. Her parents refused to acknowledge her as female, and she tells us the way different people responded, often in hurtful ways.
The book is presented as one person’s story, and it’s a story with heart.
I do think a strength of the book is giving insights on what is the most helpful way to respond when someone comes out to you.
Once I got to a point where I needed to come out to everyone, and I started coming out to more people who were emotionally unsafe, one thing was very clear to me: they didn’t know they were emotionally unsafe. Because felt safety is in the eye of the beholder – in this case, me. I told a couple of family members that they didn’t make me feel safe emotionally, and where I was able to, I told them why. It typically didn’t go over well. They thought they were creating a safe environment from their perspective.
The problem is that felt emotional safety has a very hard time existing in the presence of judgmental behavior, which you see when people start talking about religious or cultural or social rules instead of just listening. It’s judgment of someone for a life that is perceived as wrong, living a life as a trans woman in my case, and it is judgment of someone’s being. That creates an environment where emotional safety cannot exist. Thinking I know what’s best and having a judgmental attitude toward someone decimates any hope of emotional safety as it demolishes trust.
People I have come out to who have responded well and created safety for me have responded by first listening, then trusting. They trust in who I am and they trust that I know myself better than they know me. They create expanding spaces for us to find ourselves together. People who have hurt me emotionally haven’t trusted me and my own story, and in fact have projected their own insecurities about their story onto me, further destroying the possibility of building a safe space where both of us can be ourselves.
I also appreciated her insights on healthy and unhealthy boundaries:
For those who refuse to respect my boundaries, such as calling me by my actual name, they’ve in turn accused me of not respecting their boundaries. I say I can only be in a relationship if they respect and honor me by using my name and pronouns; they say they can only be in a relationship if they’re able to call me by whatever name and pronouns they choose.
This gets tricky because while these two things sound the same, there are major differences. My boundary says, “This is who I am in relationship to you, and I get to define me in that relationship. I will determine how I exist and behave in the world, and this is what I need from you.” The boundary from the one refusing to use my name says, “This is who you are in relationship to me; I get to define you and how you exist and behave in the world, and this is what I need you to be for me.” The unhealthy boundary essentially says, “My belief about you is more important than your belief about yourself, and I get to define your story so it fits with mine.” Whereas the healthy boundary says, “My belief about me and your belief about you are both important, and we each get to define our own stories.”
So you’ve got a warm coming-out story, insights into what it feels like to be transgender in today’s society, wisdom about how you can relate to transgender people in your own life – and a story that will give you a hankering for freeze-dried Skittles. (Well, it did me – I’d eaten them just before I read this book.)
Oh, and Skittles? She makes a good point: Freeze-dried Skittles and regular Skittles are both wonderful in their own way. But if you have one, expecting it to be the other, you’re going to be disappointed.
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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.
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