Ricardo Ramos — Author & Coach
A memoir and manual for the parent who is certain they are right, terrified they might be wrong, and with no map for what comes next.
The mission
By almost losing my child I learned the hard way that inherited beliefs can kill.
45% of transgender youth seriously consider suicide. Not because of who they are. Because of how we respond to who they are.
But parental acceptance changes that number by 82%. Not medication. Not therapy. You.
I paid a price for this knowledge. You don't have to.
Reduction in serious self-harm attempts when a parent accepts their transgender child. Not medication. Not therapy. You.
Ryan et al., 2010. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing.
Of transgender youth seriously consider suicide. The cause is not who they are.
The Trevor Project, 2023 National Survey on LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health.
I knew exactly what my child was. My child knew better.
— Ricardo Ramos
The story
My son stopped wanting to live, not because of who he was, but because of how I responded to who he was.
The journey between the father who was certain and the father who understood took thirteen years. This book is the map I did not have.
Read the full story23 years from uncertainty to unconditional love
Valentin played the role he was given. I believed it completely. A child learns early which version of themselves is safe to show. A father learns late what he was actually looking at.
The signs were there from the beginning. The summer Valentin stopped wanting to wear dresses. The art teacher who recognised something the school administration saw as a threat. I watched all of it and filed it away under phases.
Valentin calls. Non-binary. I have no map, no framework, no language for what I am being told. My first response, delivered with love and total certainty: this is a phase.
I researched. I came back with gentle but corrosive logic. The conversation I thought was open-minded was, in fact, the first brick in a wall I did not yet know I was building.
A father who would die for his child, doing everything wrong. Certainty as armor. The distance grew without either of us naming it. The damage compounded quietly, brick by brick.
I built elaborate theories. The mother-rejection theory. The cultural-contamination theory. Both made my certainty the solution and my son's experience the problem to be solved.
Valentin calls again. He feels like a man. He has felt this way since he was four or five. My answer: antidepressants, continue therapy, push through it.
Valentin complied, because he was a good son. Dad, I hate this. I feel like a zombie. I cannot paint. I insisted he stay on the medication. That is a sentence I still carry.
Valentin calls a third time. He has lost the will to live. I am 39, in Barcelona. This is the call I will spend the rest of my life being grateful I answered differently.
Something broke open. I ran out of moves and found, on the other side of running out, the only thing that had ever been available: presence without an agenda.
Shadow work. Self-forgiveness. Valentin's forgiveness. The slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone my children could actually reach.
No single moment. No dramatic turn. Years of reading, meditation, therapy, courses. The relationship rebuilt itself the way bones do after a fracture, stronger at the break.
Valentin gave me a clay sculpture for my fiftieth birthday. Inscribed with a sentence that took twenty-three years to earn: gracias por evolucionar conmigo.
He called it 10 Lustros. He made it himself, fired it himself, carried it himself. It sits on my desk now.
Valentin is 23. A working artist in Bilbao. He illustrated this book and made the cover sculpture. He is thriving.
This book is not about Valentin. It is about me, about the mechanisms inside a loving father that nearly made him the cause of the thing he feared most. It exists now.
Three ways to go further with this work, depending on where you are.
01
A memoir and manual. Thirteen years compressed into something you can read in a weekend and use for a lifetime. Coming 2026.
Read Chapter 1 Free02
A private conversation. Not a sales call. Not therapy. A father who was where you are, talking to a parent who is there now.
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Speaking, press, and the work beyond the book. If you are a journalist, event organiser, or someone who wants to spread this further.
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