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A review by emtees
Queerly Autistic: The Ultimate Guide for LGBTQIA+ Teens on the Spectrum by Erin Ekins
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
I’m not in the demographic for this book (I haven’t been a teenager for a while), but I picked it up because I follow the author on social media and was curious about her work. This book is a really useful reference for queer and autistic teens and has value as well for allies, in particular queer teens who may not be autistic but want to be welcoming of autistic kids in their communities. The book is very straightforward and covers a huge range of topics, from different sexual orientations and gender identities to how to navigate social spaces and relationships to sex, coming out and online spaces. If it weren’t for the particular audience it is targeting, I might say it is actually trying to cover too much, encompassing the entirety of queer experience for teens in a fairly short page count, but Ekins is very clear in the ways she has adapted her material for autistic readers. Where other books might gloss over or skip entirely information that they assume the reader already knows or can get somewhere else, Ekins goes step-by-step through the process of discovering a queer identity and integrating it into your life, being careful not to make assumptions about what her readers already know. There are places where the same information is repeated because it is relevant to more than one topic and she wants to make that connection clear. Many topics branch out into tangents in the exact way that neurodivergent brains often do. When she isn’t an expert on a subject - such as trans identities or the experiences of non-white teens - she is careful to point that out. Every chapter ends with resources for further and deeper discussion.
It is also clear that Ekins is writing very specifically for teens, and that this is an audience she knows. There is no attempt to control or limit the information made available; she talks a lot about safety and consent, but she is also frank about subjects like sex. And the resources she references include YouTubers and other sources that a more scholarly book might dismiss but that a teen audience will value. (As a former teen who found out on lot about my own identity through fandom, I really liked that she has a whole section on fandom and fanfic!)
It is also clear that Ekins is writing very specifically for teens, and that this is an audience she knows. There is no attempt to control or limit the information made available; she talks a lot about safety and consent, but she is also frank about subjects like sex. And the resources she references include YouTubers and other sources that a more scholarly book might dismiss but that a teen audience will value. (As a former teen who found out on lot about my own identity through fandom, I really liked that she has a whole section on fandom and fanfic!)