“Kite Runner” author has “never been prouder” as his transgender daughter comes out

Khaled Hosseini, acclaimed Afghan-American author of The Kite Runner, announced on social media that his daughter has come out as transgender.

“Yesterday my twenty-one year old daughter Haris came out to the world as transgender,” Hosseini posted to Instagram. “I have known about Haris’ journey since last year and I’ve watched her navigate some very trying personal times. Transitioning is such a complicated undertaking—emotionally, physically, socially, psychologically—but Haris has met each challenge with grace, patience and wisdom.”

Haris, who grew up with her sister and parents in San José, California, was a national debate champion in high school and the Founder and President of the Tech Museum of Innovation’s Student Board in San José. She was the lead organizer of the 2018 Youth Climate Action Summit in the Bay Area.

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Haris has served as a media director for her father’s Khaled Hosseini Foundation. As an activist, she has focused on gender roles, toxic masculinity, and how societal and cultural problems – including mass shootings, campus rape culture, and anti-LGBTQ hate crimes – are rooted in the American upbringing of boys.

She studies political science and human rights at Columbia University.

Hosseini shared a picture of his 21 year-old daughter, and another with the pair at the beach: “As a father, I’ve never been prouder of her. I am delighted to now have not one but two beautiful daughters. Most of all I am inspired by Haris’ fearlessness, her courage to share with the world her true self. She has taught me and our family so much about bravery, and truth. And what it means to live authentically. I know this process was painful for her, fraught with grief and anxiety. She is sober to the cruelty trans people are subjected to daily. But she is strong and undaunted.”

“I love my daughter. I will be by her side every step of the way, as will our family. We stand behind her. It’s a privilege to watch her enter the world as the beautiful, wise, and brilliant woman she is. May God bless her.”

Khaled Hosseini’s novels The Kite Runner, And the Mountains Echoed, and A Thousand Splendid Suns have been published in over 70 countries and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

A stage version of The Kite Runner opens on Broadway July 21.

 

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