In Lydia Conklin’s “Sunny Talks,” the world knows forty-seven-year-old Lillia as a frumpy, asexual, boyish woman, but in truth, Lillia is nonbinary, inhabiting a middle ground between the genders—a secret they’ve been keeping all their life. The problem is, Lillia doesn’t want it to be a secret, but they’ve never worked up the courage to come out to anyone.

Enter Sunny, Lillia’s exuberant fifteen-year-old nephew. Sunny is also gender non-conforming—a trans boy—and when he invites Lillia to a Philadelphia convention for trans YouTubers, Lillia intends to finally tell him the truth.

But things don’t work out quite as planned. While finding inspiration in the Gen Z kids at the conference, Lillia is also pained by a generational divide. Lillia grew up at a time when you were more or less stuck with the gender you were assigned, whereas Sunny and his peers came along in an era when early medical intervention was an option. In Lillia’s childhood, to be gender non-conforming was to be ostracized, whereas Sunny and his friends celebrate their gender identities with thousands of YouTube followers.