excellent essay, friend. I especially appreciate the callouts of the autonomy of children, and the need to take action and not just assume others will. Kids, especially teens, while they may need protecting at times, are definitely autonomous individuals, and desperately need to be treated as such and not infantilized further

I need to figure out what sorts of networks there are in my area for housing trans youth. I know at least one person (about my age, so not exactly youth) who's experienced housing instability for being trans, and I did offer my fold-out couch, but she found other alternatives thankfully. But I'd like to be more proactive in the future, I just don't know how. It seems legally fraught, though ofc having a squatter or conflict with my own landlord is still vastly preferable to letting someone go homeless or worse. Assuming my job survives the next economic downturn I might buy a house that would have more space than my apartment. I am not in favor of living in a place way bigger than I need "just in case" someone else wants to crash with me, but if I were already involved in organizing around the issue and knew the shape of things I could totally justify it... I live somewhere where I imagine there are already networks in place but they may well be under the radar. I guess that's my homework for tonight.

If anyone has concrete suggestions or knows of orgs in major metros that we should get involved with, I'm all ears. I'll try to post any non-doxxing results I find as well