Want to Know What Your Trans or Autistic Kid Needs? Ask them.
Adults like me don’t hold the keys to understanding your marginalized child.
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.
I think it’s all pretty misguided, them considering me an expert on such matters. Sometimes I find it downright othering and offensive. But up until now, I’ve avoided articulating why. I was worried about biting the hand that feeds me, and driving off would-be allies by refusing to dispense information and resources. But the more I think about it, the more I have come to believe that there is a deep problem with them assuming I’d be a good parenting resource — and it all ties back to a lot of assumptions people make about who is a trustworthy resource, and which kinds of disabled or queer people are permitted to voice who they are.
One reason that parents and teachers reach out to me is because I’m a psychologist. I can’t fault them for presuming I know more about child development than I actually do. After all, folks think I’m a therapist or clinician all the time, too. But there are as many types of psychologists in existence as there are social and mental processes under the sun, and none of us are experts in all of it. So while I can talk to you about the science of attitude change all day long, or take a deep dive into how mental health stigma is linked to white supremacy and capitalism, I have never been and never will be an expert in the psychology of children.
The other reason people ask me for advice about their Autistic and trans kids is because I am a nonbinary, Autistic adult myself. Even more than that, I have a respectable job and a decent voice as a writer. I write a lot about being Autistic; my forthcoming book is about masked Autistic people like myself. I have written quite a few essays about transgender and LGBTQ issues. So it’s reasonable for a parent or teacher to think that someone like me, who can render my own experience pretty compellingly, would be able to unlock a new understanding of their kid’s perspective, right?
The fact is, I know next to nothing about what an Autistic or transgender child growing up in 2021 might need. My history diverges from theirs so wildly that it would be arrogant to claim I know what’s best for them, or how their interior life looks. I didn’t openly identify as either trans or Autistic until I was in my late 20s. Most of my life before that was spent in a state of ignorance and repression. I am still recovering from the wounds of hiding myself like that for so long. My queer cowboys were the buried gays of Brokeback. Today’s children have Lil Nas X. In terms of Autism representation, I had Rain Man; today’s kids have Julia, Renee, Symmetra, and Entrapta. We are not the same.
Sharing an identity label with a trans or Autistic child doesn’t mean I know who they are as a person, or what makes them happy or uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean my opinions or ideals line up with theirs, or that I know what will help them thrive. And all too often, I think asking me for advice is a way for caregivers to avoid asking their trans or Autistic children themselves about what they might want. They can’t or won’t trust their kid’s words, so they reach for mine instead.
My friend Kelly is neurodivergent, nonbinary, and a parent to two young children. They know firsthand what it’s like to be an inscrutable child, and how it feels to parent children that are at times inscrutable. They explained the phenomenon to me this way:
“I know from personal experience that when your kid is doing something you can’t wrap your head around, you start looking anywhere you can for a translation key. If you can just plug the right codec in, you will be able to parse it. But people don’t respect kids to be truthful to their own experience.”
We live in a profoundly adultist culture, where children are granted almost no control over their own lives. Minors have almost no way of redressing harm done against them, or of advocating for themselves. Legally and socially, they are essentially the property of their parents. Any complaint a child makes (whether it be of abuse, gender dysphoria, hearing loss, or depression) must first be filtered through a series of adult medical, educational, and legal systems to be validated as legitimate. Even when a child’s pain is taken seriously, the child has no say over how to address it. If they live in a state where youth gender affirmation treatment is banned, or if they have caregivers who view disability as a shameful weakness, they have no right to access the care they need.
Adultism is the reason that my own Autism was not recognized when I was a child. I did not present a hassle to the adults around me, so nobody examined why I was so uncoordinated, socially awkward, and obsessive. I was productive in school and well behaved, so no one viewed my loneliness or “sensitive”outbursts as serious problems. And when I identified as something other than a woman, adults brushed me off on that too. It was the 90s, and there were no respectable, adult authorities vouching for the existence of nonbinary kids.
Children are not trusted to name how they feel, and are not permitted to chase after the things that they want. They’re seen as fundamentally incompetent. It is for this reason that even supportive, well-meaning parents reach out to adults like me, instead of just asking their kids what might help them learn or how they’d like to care for their own bodies. I can speak the language of adults, and present my inner turmoil in a way adults find easy to believe and to respect. Yet I’m sure if parents looked closely, they could recognize many clear-cut, believable expressions of distress in their children. If they listened, they would hear their children express many desires and needs that are downright simple to parse.
Behavior is communication. So is shutting down, staring off into space, bursting into tears, or leaving the room. Children know which kinds of toys they like to play with, and which clothing they’d like to wear, and they also know when they need to hide such yearnings from unsupportive grown ups. Their tantrums tell you what they are feeling, and their faked smiles tell you what they believe they need to hide. The minds and identities of children are ever-shifting and unfinished, it’s true, but that’s true of all of us. Their youth doesn’t make their humanity any less legitimate, or their interiority less real.
If a child can’t sit still in class, it’s self-evident they need physical exercise or stimulation, or that they are anxious. If a kid repeatedly fails to complete an assignment correctly, it’s clear you didn’t provide clear enough instructions. If a child seems listless and unmotivated, it is obvious they lack the freedom to joyfully pursue the activities that matter to them. But instead of investigating these reactions and experimenting with solutions, adults often view children as obstinate and impossible to understand. So they enlist the help of an adult expert to translate or correct the kid’s behavior instead.
I don’t want to be a party to that. I’d much rather center the kid’s perspective instead.
Every transgender person is different, and every Autistic person is too. I would never walk up to a random cisgender adult on the street and ask them for advice on how to raise a cisgender child. I wouldn’t assume that the psychology of a random neurotypical adult would accurately reflect how a neurotypical child thinks or feels. It would be absurd to look at groups as massive and diverse as those and assume that any one member could possibly represent the whole.
Yet when supportive parents seek out random Autistic or trans people for advice, that is exactly what they are doing. They’re flattening a massive community into a single data point. They’re also assuming that every member of the group is so desperate for the support of allies that we will gladly dispense advice, resources, and attention any time that they ask.
I’m a horrible parenting resource. I have no children and no desire to have them. Interacting with kids puts me on edge. In general, I lead a very child-unfriendly life. I know nothing about what is best for children, except that they deserve far more respect, social support, and autonomy than they’re currently given. So it’s always baffling to me when a parent expects me to understand their kid’s mental state simply because we’re both in the same marginalized group. It feels quite tokenizing and objectifying as well.
Thankfully, there are many parents who are themselves transgender or Autistic who have relevant expertise to share. Tiffany Hammond of the page Fidgets and Fries just wrote a series of fantastic ebooks about how to travel as an Autistic family, and how to prevent and recover from Autism meltdowns. Jen White Johnson is the founder of the Black Disabled Lives Matter movement and routinely creates content about raising her Black Autistic son. Zoe Knox is a transgender mother to a transgender kid; she and her wife Amanda write frequently about both her and her kid’s transitions.
There are a whole host of resources available online that are made by Autistic and trans parents, with the needs of Autistic and trans kids in mind. Would-be allies need only seek them out, instead of asking the first (or only) marginalized person they encounter for parenting advice they aren’t equipped to give.
As disability rights activist James Charlton famously said, nothing about us without us. If you have the power to make decisions about the course of another person’s life, you must center their perspective. So if you are raising an Autistic kid, or a trans kid, and you find yourself floundering and uncertain, don’t seek out an adult expert who you presume has more authority than your own loved one. Stay curious and perceptive. Stay present. Read the writing of parents who are Autistic or trans themselves. But more than anything else, listen closely to your child — and believe everything that you hear.