What you’ll find here

This part of Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens contains the thoughts and feelings shared by those who took my survey. They responded to a variety of questions (PDF) about the role of straight, cis, and LGBTQA+/SGL adults in their lives.

Queer and trans young people, you may find your own experiences reflected here.

Adults, you will find candid, honest, and sometimes conflicting opinions on how adults have been helpful and how they can do better.

• Some of what you read here may echo what you’ve heard from the queer or trans tween or teen in your life. Other sentiments may be things your young person has thought but not shared. And others will be things that they wouldn’t be able to identify with at all.
• Use this section as a way to gain further insight into the lives of queer and trans young people. It may help start a conversation with them or with other adults.

In pulling this section together, i began with survey-taker responses to questions about straight, cis adults and started mostly summarizing their comments, with an occasional direct quote . In the early summer of 2023, i took a break from this part of R2T2 to send sections of the draft website out for review by people i know who have relevant, lived or professional experience.

When i returned to this part of the website, i’d forgotten how much paraphrasing i’d been doing. So i started using mostly direct quotes. This process took a lot less time and, more importantly, is a lot more powerful.

As a result, you'll find fewer direct quotes in most of the straight/cis adult section. Once Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens is launched, i'll go back and fix this.

All direct quotes are in quotation marks; my paraphrasing is not.

I’ve made some changes to what my survey-takers wrote to make things more readable. I don’t want what someone says or how they say it to take away from their message. Here’s what I’ve altered (with some exceptions, which i've described in the next section):

• Spelling mistakes
• Grammar errors
• Punctuation problems
• Homonym errors (e.g., "are" instead of "our")

Here are the other changes i made:

• I deleted all of my initial brackets and ellipses where I’d removed part of what someone wrote. So my "footprint" here is invisible. But things are way more readable that way. "My drama teacher is so supportive" is much smoother than, "My […] drama teacher is […] so supportive […]."
• If needed, i added periods at the end of each thought. Sorry, young folx! I didn’t know that not using periods was a thing until i looked it up online when i realized that about two out of three responses ended with no period. But it was too late by then. And, at least in this format, a period helps signal the end of a sentence. (Or maybe that’s just because i’m middle-aged.)
• I grouped responses not by the question being answered but by the kind of adult being addressed or referred to: straight, cis adults or LGBTQA+/SGL adults. So if something was in one section and seemed to belong in another, i moved it. I took this approach instead of keeping responses "attached" to each individual question. It's much easier to organize this content in themes this way.
• I intentionally kept most comments on intersectionality separated in their own section to give those with intersectional experiences a "voice" that is easier to find.  (See more on intersectionality in this part of R2T2.)
• When a thought was unclear or something need to be anonymized, I clarified it by inserting bracketed information (e.g., "I live in [a Midwest state].").
• In other situations, i summarized part of a thought outside of quotation marks before picking up mid-sentence with a direct quote (e.g., Helpful adults "listen and don't blow off my feelings and they try to be understanding.")
• I replaced some generic third-person pronouns with the person or people the survey-taker was referring to. For instance, "She made me really mad" doesn’t make much sense on its own, out of the context of the person’s story. In cases like this, i changed the quote to something like, "My mom made me really mad."
• When clarifying descriptors about queer- or trans-related hate, i used the more common "homophobic" or "transphobic," since most of my survey-takers probably wouldn’t have used "queer" or "trans-antagonistic" (which you'll find defined in the glossary).
• In some situations, survey-takers mentioned their age. Where relevant, I pulled that information from another part of the survey and inserted it in parentheses. In this situation,"I’m an older teen," becomes "I’m an older teen (I’m 18)." This gives the reader additional information on where that person is coming from.
• I removed "also," "too," and "however" from quotes where i’d removed what those words referred to. "I really appreciate him, too," doesn’t make much sense by itself if you don’t know who else the writer is referring to.

• The gist of each comment or thought.
• Details provided by the quoted survey-taker, unless it was to remove specifics of where they live.
• Spelling or grammar errors that don’t interfere with the thought and that are easily understood.
• Intentionally mis-capitalized acronyms, like "lgbtq" or not using a capital letter at the start of a sentence.

I’ve also left some bracketed statements where i didn’t want to change the respondent’s words but wanted to make them clearer. For instance, one person talked about "odd." For clarity, i appended "[oppositional defiant disorder]" but didn’t change the respondent’s use of the acronym and the capitalization they chose.

I left not quite a dozen common abbreviations (which may or may not be capitalized):

• abt: about
• bc: because
• BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, and other people of color
• lmao: laughing my ass off
• merch: merchandise
• POC: people of color
• ppl: people
• r: are
• rn: right now
• tbh: to be honest
• u: you