Raising a transgender daughter has been no easy task for Jake and his wife, Anna. The couple has spent the past five years educating themselves on how to best deal with a set of unexpected challenges since their second child, who was born a boy, expressing her real gender identity even before she was 18 months old. Since then Jake has committed himself to unflinching support and love for his daughter, and he’s come to serve as a model for fellow parents dealing with the same circumstances.

The names and identities of the real people in this episode of Paternal have been replaced for the sake of anonymity, but everything else is real. “I felt all kinds of stuff,” Jake says. “I was like, ‘I’ve done something wrong.’ But I don’t think I did anything wrong. I just let the kid be the kid.”

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