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Want to Know What Your Transgender or Autistic Kid Needs? Ask them.
Adults don’t hold the keys to understanding your marginalized child.
“My kid has been asking a lot of questions about gender lately,” someone wrote in an email to me recently. “Do you have any picture book recommendations that would explain transness to them?”
“I’m doing research on the experiences of Autistic girls in elementary school,” wrote a teacher in my Twitter DMs. “Can I pick your brain for my research?”
“Your article about sensory meltdowns helped me empathize with what my daughter is going through,” said someone else. “Can we talk sometime about her?”
I receive a lot of questions from parents of Autistic and transgender children in my comments and DMs. I hear from teachers who work with trans or neurodivergent children, too. These well-intentioned, stressed out adults want my advice on things like diagnosis procedures and educational accommodations, or how best negotiate with ignorant doctors and bullying peers. They tell me that my writing helped them finally understand their kid’s needs, or respect their sensitivities and dysphoria triggers. Quite frequently, they write very long, detailed letters, asking for highly individualized recommendations.
