The gender thing wasn’t what surprised me. A huge percentage of the homeless teens I’d met had been assigned one gender at birth but identified as another, or they felt like the whole boy/girl binary didn’t apply to them. They ended up on the streets because – shocker – their families didn’t accept them. Nothing says ‘tough love’ like kicking your non-hetero-normative kid to the kerb so they can experience abuse, drugs, high suicide rates and constant physical danger. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
