Parenting

Focused on supporting parents and loved ones with good, practical, and encouraging information, you’ll also find answers to many tough questions. This guide can help a family become closer, more honest, and more connected by working through challenges together. It’s helpful for friends and family that ask you to educate them or readers who want to understand transgender but don’t.

Excellent book for developing good communication habits with your child, an essential skill as an LBGTQ parent.

A guide to the hidden dangers of “parentspeak”—those seemingly innocent phrases parents use when speaking to their young children.

This guide provides parents a framework for helping their LGBTQ child navigate through a world that isn’t always welcoming. It can be useful to siblings and extended family as well to provide information, insights, and suggestions how to support the child and find support themselves.

Coming Out

Focused on parents who are struggling to deal with or accept their questioning or coming out teenaged child. Tries to address questions or issues that arise for a parent after a child comes out.

Focusing on fifty average families―not people seen in clinics or therapy―the authors found a consistent pattern of change: first negative, then positive. Sometimes the news led parents and siblings to form stronger bonds with the child, with each other, and with other relatives and friends.

Drawing from over 150 interviews with teens, psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams seeks to separate fact from fiction in this survey of coming-out experiences. He illustrates the range of family reactions and the factors that determine how parents come to terms with the disclosure over time.

This guide provides parents a framework for helping their LGBTQ child navigate through a world that isn’t always welcoming. It can be useful to siblings and extended family as well to provide information, insights, and suggestions how to support the child and find support themselves.

Lesbian / Gay / Bisexual

A resource for parents, family members and LGB youth, providing research, practical suggestions, and coping techniques. One the whole family can read and share.

Written in Q&A format, the authors provide guidance on both emotional and practical topics. “A book kids wish their parents would read.”

Insightful, no-nonsense answers to hundreds of the most commonly asked questions about homosexuality. Offering frank insight on everything you’ve always wanted — and needed — to know about same-gender relationships, coming out, family roles, politics, and much more.

Betty DeGeneres, Ellen DeGeneres’ mother, relates her journey on the complicated path to acceptance, the deepening of her friendship with her daughter, the media’s scrutiny of their family life, and the painful and often inspiring stories she’s heard along the way.

Somewhat dated but notable for the many parent stories included.

Straight Parents, Gay Children is a survival guide for all parents who wish to help their gay children cope with the inevitable cruelty from which they cannot hide.

Transgender

Focused on supporting parents and loved ones with good, practical, and encouraging information, you’ll also find answers to many tough questions. This guide can help a family become closer, more honest, and more connected by working through challenges together. It’s helpful for friends and family that ask you to educate them or readers who want to understand transgender but don’t.

The story of a journey from childhood through coming out as transgender and eventually emerging as an advocate for the transgender community. This is not only Jeremy’s story, but also that of his family – of the siblings who struggled to understand the brother they once saw as a sister, and of the parents who ultimately joined him in the battle against discrimination.

A guidebook to the unique challenges that thousands of families face every day raising a teenager who may be transgender, non-binary, gender-fluid or otherwise gender-expansive. Written by the founder of the non-profit Gender Spectrum.

Written for parents by experienced researchers and counselors on gender issues, this book is an informative and essential first read for families of transgender children.

A fun and engaging workbook to help teens address the broad range of struggles they may encounter related to gender identity, such as anxiety, isolation, fear, and even depression.

Forty authors share their personal journeys from the initial shock or resistance when first learning their loved ones (or they, themselves) were struggling with gender identity, through the various feelings, to final acceptance.

Christian

Baldock uncovers the historical, cultural, medical, and political filters of discrimination through which the LGBT community is seen. With the foundation firmly established, she examines the most controversial filter of all: what the Bible says. This book also has a study guide available for group use.

Written in order to serve and inform the ongoing debate in many denominations over the questions of homosexuality, Brownson’s in-depth study will prove a useful resource for Christians who want to form a considered opinion on this important issue.

Torn provides insightful, practical guidance for all committed Christians who wonder how to relate to gay friends or family members–or who struggle with their own sexuality.

With empathy, journalistic rigor, and powerful storytelling, Lee unpacks the diverse and complex strands of this movement—and what it means for the rest of us. Given the clout that evangelicals still hold in national politics, Lee argues, this movement is important not only for the future of evangelicalism but also for the future of our country.

Armed with only six passages in the Bible—often known as the “clobber passages”—the traditional Christian position has been one that stands against the full inclusion of LGBTQ members. UnClobber reexamines what the Bible says (and does not say) about homosexuality and breathes fresh life into outdated and inaccurate assumptions and interpretations.

God and the Gay Christian

By Matthew Vines

The author combines a detailed mastery of a wide range of material from the ancient world and the Christian tradition, a clear and articulate writing style, a deep commitment to his Christian faith, and an incisive judgment that can cut through complex arguments and mountains of data, and identify the core issues and their implications for human life.

Space at the Table is a profoundly moving memoir, written with compassion, grit, and humor as a conversation between an Evangelical pastor and his gay son as they journey through the roadblocks that threaten to devastate families and the broader religious and LBGTQ communities.

Part memoir and part investigative analysis, this book explores the explosive and confusing intersection of faith, politics, and sexuality in Christian America by award-winning reporter Jeff Chu.

Jewish

This groundbreaking collection addresses transgender and gender identity issues in Jewish law and community from diverse scholarly, religious and personal perspectives.

A leading activist on behalf of LGBT people in faith communities provides an excellent resource for those struggling to reconcile their sexual feelings — or those of a loved one — with being a person of devout religious faith.

Twice Blessed

By Balka & Rose, Editors

A book, not only for Jews who are gays and lesbians, but for family members, partners, and friends of those who struggle to unite both worlds and to discover how to live lives based on the wisdom of two cultures.