Abstract
Butler's And the dragons do come is part memoir, part survival guide, and a complete testament to how national political shifts shape rural queer life. The narrative illuminates the political weaponization against trans childhood and highlights the heavy pressures that parents in the United States face as they try to keep their children safe in a world increasingly hostile to gender nonconformity. Amidst escalating national debates on gender-affirming care, school policies, and religious fervor, Butler demonstrates that love is louder than isolation.
The core theses are clear and consistent: rural America is not a monolith, transphobia is not inevitable, and advocacy does not solely occur in cities or on college campuses. Mainstream media outlets often depict rural communities, particularly those in the South, as hostile or incapable of acceptance. Butler's memoir is a counternarrative to those assumptions. Dragons are deployed as a literary device to represent the imagined threats conservative political movements project onto trans youth. The use of mythic figures and fiction provides the reader with insight into how “dragons” are mobilized in rural communities, as well as into why these rural communities may be susceptible to them. By personifying these imagined threats, Butler invites readers without lived experience in rural America to build a more nuanced analysis of rural life.
Emotionally, the book is anchored in grief, ferocity, and steadfastness. Butler writes about the grief parents experience when letting go of the future they once imagined for their children. When his daughter divulged her shifting gender identity, Butler found himself torn between protecting his child's autonomy and balancing her safety amidst shifting tides of acceptance. Though he longed to honor her gender discovery and sense of self, he struggled to encourage her desire to come out, knowing how quickly people's curiosity could turn into cruelty. Explaining this to his daughter proved especially painful. While many in her life had embraced her, others would not, and the warm affirmation she often experienced was far from guaranteed for most trans youth. Nevertheless, he ensured that her childhood was full of opportunity and laughter, refusing others’ politeness when it icily threatened his child's dignity.
For social workers, this book serves as both a mirror and a call to explore rural healthcare and educational realities more deeply. Transgender youth in rural communities shaped by the political right are especially vulnerable, faced with limited affirming health care, an increased lack of local peer networks, school systems perpetuating gendered enrollment opportunities, and community surveillance, making privacy a rare luxury. The author illustrates how these constraints compound each other, placing undue responsibility on families to navigate exclusionary, hostile systems alone. In the book, resilience is built upon intercommunity support, and Butler's family finds strength in church acceptance, intergenerational support, and advocacy exercised at the policy level. The book provides an important demonstration of how efforts toward trans liberation can and must occur outside of urban environments.
While Butler excels at storytelling and is rooted in careful research concerning transgender children's narratives, his book would benefit from deeper structural and historical analysis of rural American life. His descriptions of systems depict them only as obstacles, rather than as pillars of power, and a deeper interrogation of rural policy networks and power-building strategies could strengthen the book's contribution to feminist social work praxis. Furthermore, the book over-relies on personal resilience. Justice cannot depend on parents being exceptional, nor on their financial capacity to secure affirming care. Social work educators may consider pairing Butler's memoir with additional perspectives on collective mobilization to emphasize that oppression is dismantled not only through individual endurance or privilege, but also through policy intervention and resource redistribution.
Despite these limitations, And the dragons do come makes a significant contribution to social work education. It disrupts narratives that imply that rural spaces are incompatible with gender liberation, illustrates the emotional and political labor of trans-affirming parenthood, and exposes the consequences of policy hostility and neglect. Most importantly, it humanizes the premise that social work theory too often abstracts: the right to exist safely as a trans child should not depend on one's geographic location. Butler asks readers to go where the dragons loom, so that children do not face them alone. Social workers committed to anti-oppressive practice, particularly in schools, pediatric health, and rural community settings, would benefit from reading this book to understand the layered challenges their parenting clients face in securing safety, dignity, and a future for their children.
