My kid was 18 when the first of his rainbow friends died

JK Rowling, opponent of trans rights, is writing a 900 page novel about a serial killer who dresses as a woman to lure his victims.

Now, I'm not high status or rich or influential. All I can write is Facebook posts. Not 900 pages. Not even 900 words.

My story involves a kid who just turned 19. He liked Harry Potter once, but these days not so much.

This kid is his own author now, but I wrote him first, his story beginning inside my body. I was offered the chance to know my unborn child's identity, boy or girl. I refused it. I knew I would be happy with either. In the years that followed, I learned I could be happy with both.

This 19 year old kid is trans.

He was at a Catholic girls' school, aged 13 or 14, when he understood he was a boy. Other kids were reading Harry Potter. Mine was crying because he was different; because, although some of them were kind, other teachers quietly ostracised him, in the knowledge that he and his parents would eventually lose their will to fight, choose self-preservation instead.

And all of this was rooted in another book, one I read as I grew up, about 900 pages, give or take. But it was not the Catholicism I knew - the creed of contemplating, deeply, what is the right thing to do; and then, when your mind and your soul tell you what right is, prosecuting it with the reckless no-f*cks-given of crazy martyrs and the damned.

What I'd thought about that old and dusty book turned out wrong, naive. Jesus died, apparently, for pink vs blue; for the choice of a girl or boy Happy Meal in the drive thru. You could say, a book is just a book - we must learn to read critically - but sometimes, for all its flaws, a book will have influence.

My kid was 18 when the first of his rainbow friends died. Rainbow kids bury their own. That is their rite of passage; a passage we must write. It is a fact.

Stories matter: this is mine. I've got a feeling it won't be a bestseller. No one will clamour for its release date on social media, rush to get my signature inside the cover, or bid for the movie rights. The plot meanders on, heroes not yet prevailing, the happy ending we've been taught to expect not yet within our grasp.

That's the problem with my story. It's not fiction.