Finding Lara

My name is Quentin H Young, author of Mystic Visions: Black Elk's Great Vision Clarified. I met Chris Dennison when I was fifteen, and he was eleven. Chris is Lakota (Sioux) from his mother's side of the family and is related through my mother's Lakota side of the family which makes Chris my third cousin.
In the late winter of 2022, I had the rare privilege of recording an interview with Chris and his wife, Marlena. Afterward, I began writing Finding Lara: From the Other Side. This story follows Chris through puberty, his teenage years, and into adulthood.
In writing this book, it is both Chris and my desire to help people, who might be suffering with gender identity, to find peace and balance in their souls.
When I began writing Finding Lara: From the Other Side, it's accounting accurately tells of Chris's life's journey, as a winkte. These writings have challenged me as an author, it required me to step out of the safe place of spiritual writing and into the dark corners of rape, child abuse, and prejudice thinking. I am not talking about racial injustice; it is about how society treats people who are physically different. Example: Being winktay (wink-tay; a Lakota word for hermaphrodite. No human is a true hermaphrodite (being both female and male). These people are generally referred to as being an intersex person. Traditional Lakota people see the winkte as being sacred whereas, non-traditional people might see them only as being gay. Both Chris and I understand being winkte is not by choice, whereby if a winkte chooses to be a part of the gay or lesbian community; it is by choice