Coming back here because one of my friend, that i haven’t seen in a while is going to transition. I’m going to see him again soon, and I’ve just realised I knew nothing about it, and never talked about it with someone who identifies as such. Therefore I’d like to educate myself without reading misleading articles or straight up hatred disguised into data and fancy words. So any books, magazines or videos that yall think are relevant and well written are welcome! And again shalom to all queer skaters who are all waiting for more glue footage, I’m sure (I know I am )
It's awesome that you want to support your friend and learn more about what they might be going through.
If you're up for reading study summaries (you have to pay for the full study) check out
this one. It more or less is data showing that transitioning greatly reduces anxiety and depression.
Here's a lot of good info about how transitioning helps people. It's not a topic that has been studied a ton until recently, and older studies were often inadequate and/or offensive, or outright exploitative.
Luckily ENIGI and ENIGMA are changing that and are doing long term studies to determine what long term effects transitioning might have for different people, such as whether they more susceptible to certain type of cancer. Treatment is usually based upon the judgement of the doctor and varies widely from doctor to doctor, with some avoiding treatments because they've been told it could increase the risk of say ovarian cancer if a trans man were to keep their ovaries and uterus, but there's no studies or data to actually back this up. These two consortiums are hoping to actually gather the data so that we can know what treatments are safe and what treatments are risky, and overall provide more standardized methods of transitioning that can then be tailored to the individual based on the body of data.
If you're looking for more what some people have gone through, check out
this article[url=http://and [url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinekee/people-talk-about-transitioning-and-mental-health]this article] and [url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinekee/people-talk-about-transitioning-and-mental-health]this article. They cover the issues a lot of trans people have to deal with. What's really awful in my opinion is that outside of the lack of acceptance from a large part of society, there are still 21 states in the US where you can be denied housing or be fired for being trans and really have no recourse.
Planned Parenthood has a lot of good information about the process.
As for how to behave with trans people, they're people, so treat them with the respect you would treat everyone with and don't ask about things you wouldn't ask anyone else about unless they've made it clear the subject is ok to bring up. For more specific stuff,
this article from Healthline covers a lot of that stuff, but I'll try to summarize it briefly.
Their gender is their own call and you should respect that and refer to them by that gender, including pronouns. You should also not "deadname" them, or refer to them by their birth name/identity if they've taken on a new name. If you slip up on either of these, just apologize, correct yourself, and move on. As I touched on, don't ask improper questions that you might be curious about. If you wouldn't ask a cisgender (people who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth) person the question, don't ask them either. Don't refer to cisgender people as "real" or "normal". Don't "out" them to someone else by deadnaming them or mentioning that they are trans. Basically just treat them with respect.
There's plenty more information, but I think this is a good starting point. I haven't read any books on the topic or I would suggest those as well.