Use Your…

This page provides a high-level overview of how adults using their senses and resources can support queer and trans youth. As an adult in the life of a queer or trans young person, you have access to resources that they don't, either at all or not to the degree you do.

These resources include senses you can leverage in your support: your hearing, sight, and speech. These senses are as often figurative as they are literal. Someone who is blind or has low-vision can read a website as easily as a sighted person, depending on the website design. Similarly, someone who is Deaf/deaf can access videos with the presence of captions.

And likely to a greater degree than young people, you have money, passion, time, and calm, although certainly not everyone has equal access to all of those.

(Thanks to Page at the Common Goodness Project and their community of practice participants for helping me think through everything below.)

Since belonging to a social group increases youth sense of agency, one of our challenges is to design and build those kinds of spaces for queer and trans young people. This is an even more intense challenge for those living in hostile areas of the US. In those situations, the best approach may be to create spaces that appear neutral but that, in reality, attract a disproportionate number of queer and trans youth members.

This section of Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens offers adults concrete suggestions for how you can use the resources you have because, at the end of the day, it's adults who have the agency to change or leave untouched the power structures that so deeply shape the lives of queer and trans tweens and teens.