I’ve never much resembled my biological family. There’s maybe a feature here or there, from the right angle, but most people would struggle to pick my parents out from a crowd of strangers. Even as a newborn, face framed by wisps of curly hair and my dark blue eyes—which my mother swore looked almost violet when I was born, as if I wasn’t human—I was so devoid of any feature that might indicate my father’s stock, that my grandfather accused my mother of things that I will not, here, repeat.

I could never quite shake the sense that I was both part and not a part of that family, almost vestigial. It was unspoken until it wasn’t. I don’t recall when my mother first called me her “changeling,” though it must have been in that hazy period of childhood, before memories fully coalesce. I mean to say, I have been called this name for as long as I can remember, but feel aware of a time before it was spoken in front of me. I didn’t understand, for years, the exact dimensions of what this term ascribed to me, only that it meant I was special and in some unwholesome way separate from my older brother. 

And I was entirely unlike my brother, an underweight and colicky infant who grew up dainty, sick, and neurotic—the runt of my family despite being a lanky 5-feet-10-inches. My brother is, put plainly, built like a brick shithouse. He was 2-feet-3-inches at birth and now stands a solid 6-feet-5-inches. The only health issue he’s ever had is bad vision, wearing coke-bottle glasses just like our father, from the time he was 12. 

My mother always claimed that calling me a changeling was our little “inside joke.” It wasn’t the only joke of its kind, far from it. My mother had a peculiar—and at times cruel—sense of humor. One of her frequently repeated gags, when I was younger, was to take me by the hand as I skipped beside her through the Walmart and make a beeline for the returns desk, explaining in line that, when she called, they hadn’t been willing to trade me in for store credit. Now, she would say, she just wanted them to send me back. Other times, she made comments about the stork dropping me off on the wrong doorstep. The subtext was always the same.

•

The origin of the changeling myth is unclear. Variations of it can be traced across Europe and throughout Britain. While many of the motives or logistics differ across cultures, on this all versions agree: From time to time, fairies would steal newborns away from their mothers, leaving a fey child in their place. 

Descriptions of these children vary. Sometimes, they are described as “skinny and always wailing,”¹ sometimes as a child who was beautiful and “perfectly delicate” yet “never spoke, nor cried, ate scarcely anything, and was very seldom seen to smile.”² Still other times the child is described as deformed, having unusually long limbs, an enlarged skull, or appearing far older than they should.³ Despite the differences between them, these historical descriptions all share one similarity—the child is marked.

The term changeling was first used in the mid-16th century, emerging as a more general English term for the various names across Europe. A combination of the Middle English chaungen, meaning “changed,” and the diminutive suffix –ling. If traced back further though, the root leads to the Latin cambīre, meaning “to exchange, or to barter,” and further to the Proto-Celtic kambos which means “twisted or crooked.” The human child recognized as changed, bartered for by fairies, and replaced with a crooked mirror image of the parent’s expectation.

•

Many contemporary historians interpret the ubiquity of the changeling myth in the West as a cultural metaphor for defining someone who is other—and thus perceived as non-human. While the changeling has been linked more broadly to children born with chronic illnesses, birth defects, and various other disabilities, there is one condition far more common in historical interpretation. The Archive of Disease in Childhood notes that the changeling is “characterized by unresponsiveness, resistance to physical affection, obstreperousness, inability to express emotion, and unexplained crying and physical changes such as rigidity and deformity. Some are unable to speak.”⁴ 

All of these signs line up neatly with the symptoms used in diagnosing Autistic Spectrum Disorder, leading some doctors to speculate a correlation between the two. One needs only briefly visit a forum for parents of autistic children to see the rhetoric of the changeling myth still echoing, with its fantastical elements stripped away. 

“Autism stole my child from me.” 

“She was fine when she was born, it’s like someone switched her for another baby while I was sleeping.” 

“It’s like he’s not my son anymore.”

•

I was nineteen, back home from my first year of college, and working fifty-hour weeks, when my mother first told me. It must have been a Sunday—my one full day off. I’d just finished folding a load of laundry, leaving it piled neatly in a plastic basket on my bed, while I helped my mother clear palm fronds from the back yard. When I walked back to my room, my carefully folded clothes were overturned across the floor, my work uniforms creased in the corner. 

I stormed downstairs to demand an explanation and found my soon-to-be stepfather waiting for me, the laundry basket balanced on one knee. He was angry that I’d left the clothes in the basket, unwilling to hear the reasoning that I left them because I’d been asked away on a chore. For a moment, I was convinced that we might come to blows over a $10 piece of plastic until my mother separated us. 

Hours later, I tried to push my mother for some explanation of his behavior. I wanted to understand why he would react with that kind of anger, over a seemingly trivial act in a house he didn’t live in. Exasperated at my pushing, she finally snapped, “I’m not going to listen to you complain about my boyfriend. Of course you two misunderstood each other.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re both autistic.”

•

In retrospect, it should have been obvious. As a baby, I cried once—on the day I was born—then not again till I was walking on my own. I didn’t speak aloud till I was nearly four years old, when my mother caught me practicing full sentences in a mirror, as if I had learned it all abruptly overnight. I rarely smiled, instead flapping my hands or blinking intensely when excited or happy; I punched my arms and legs or slammed my head against walls when I was upset. I’m practically a textbook case. 

“I never wanted a diagnosis to hold you back,” she said, as if to ameliorate the secret she had kept since kindergarten, when a concerned teacher referred me to the school psychologist for testing. She pulled me from school and had my grandmother homeschool me until they could enroll me in a magnet school for gifted students where my idiosyncrasies might be less noticeable. And certainly, after two years of homeschooling with my grandmother, most signs that might mark me as different had been trained out of me. I could finally imitate the social norms that were expected—but not made for people like me—well enough to pass as human. 

But the way I naturally reacted never vanished, just slid beneath the manufactured disguise of the good child. I learned young that a good child did not stim, made steady eye contact, and smiled wide. There is a name for this survival mechanism: autistic masking. A process wherein an autistic individual supplants their default affect with an imitation of a non-autistic person’s to blend in and compensate for the unexplained “rules” of a social situation.⁵ Long before I had language for any of this, I slipped the mask over my face each morning, only removing it at night after everyone was asleep. In this way, I suppose, I was something like a changeling hiding in plain sight.

•

There are many methods to find a changeling and force them out of their child-like disguise, differing by nation, era, proximity to religion, and who is telling the story. Some myths say to beat or whip the child until they break, admitting guilt. Others say to brew a strong pot of foxglove tea—steeping out the poison digitalis—and force it down their throat. Some myths say to bathe them in the poison instead. One Welsh myth suggests scooping the changeling up with a shovel and holding them over a fire or forcing them into an oven.

Another common method was to abandon the fey-child in the deep of the woods, in the hopes that the fairies would take them back, returning the human child. In other regions, this myth trades out the woods for the intersection of two rivers, or at the tide shore of the sea. If the child returned, they must be your own. If nothing returned, well, one less mouth to feed. 

Though it would be easy to assume that with the rise of Christianity, then science, these Pagan practices would have faded into the distant past, records show this is far from the case. Throughout Europe, though primarily Britain, these fears and practices continued, sometimes under the protection of the law. Last used during two major 19th century Irish legal cases, the so-called “fairy defense” allowed defendants to plead something akin to temporary insanity in cases where they believed a victim was a changeling and they had simply been trying to force the fairy out.⁶

In one case, from1826, Anne Roche was taking care of her four-year-old grandson, Michael. A sickly boy, despite his age, he was unable to stand or speak. Believing that he must be either a changeling or fairy-struck, Anne began to take Michael daily to the Flask river, at the border of their farm and two others, to bathe him. On the third day, she held him under until his body stopped moving. It’s said that when arrested, Roche told the police officers “it’s no matter,” and that “It died four years ago.” Her neighbor, Mary Clifford, who had witnessed the events would testify in court that Roche had “no intent to kill the child, but to cure it—to put the fairy out of it.” The jury acquitted Anne Roche of all charges.

•

The whipstitch that threads most of these methods together is their two potential outcomes—kill or “cure.” In this way, they are not at all dissimilar to the medical history of treating autism. Not every method was fatal, but most of them were, or are, adjacent to harm. Only 10 years after Eugen Bleuler coined the term autism, in 1911, the first of many radical treatments was instituted—electroconvulsive therapy. In its early forms, the treatment involved passing high doses of electricity through the brain—without anesthesia—to trigger brief seizures. This often resulted in broken bones or teeth, torn muscles, and trauma of the heart and brain. Though other methods were, of course, tested, ECT remained in vogue for the next thirty years.

In 1950, Bruno Bettelheim proposed a theory for the causes of autism which suggested that it was a psychological disturbance, traceable to the distant behavior of an apathetic Refrigerator Mother who was cold and uncaring toward the child during a formative period of brain development. It’s from this idea that psychologists first conceived of a radical treatment method that lasted nearly into the 1970s—the parentectomy. Literally, the removal of a parent, or rather the removal of the child from a parent. Their logic was as follows: If the root of the child’s dysfunction is the “refrigerator mother,” then removing the child from her for long periods of time would allow the child to bond with the other parent, curing their symptoms. Some took this further, removing the autistic patient from both parents for long periods of time. Contemporary research shows that this bears a high likelihood of causing suicidal depression.

Even the less deadly methods of treatment have often been underpinned with violence. Consider holding therapy, supposedly also based on the notion that autism can be traced to some dysfunction in a parent-child relationship, but more likely the result of a deep discomfort with autistic children’s difficulty in making eye contact. Despite the deception in its gentle name, this therapy involves restraining a child and forcing them to make continual eye contact with a caretaker or an eye-tracking camera. Sometimes, breaking eye contact is punished with a loud noise, sometimes with a smack across the knuckles, or in some cases even with electric shock. Despite the American Psychiatric Association condemning this treatment, it has never been banned, and is still practiced widely.⁷

I write this and remember my grandmother sitting across from me at the dented wood of the kitchen table, painted over in layers of barn red latex paint. How she snapped at me—her voice seeming too loud, too large for her body already shrinking inward with age—each time I broke eye contact, or stimmed, or showed a facial tic, or picked that red paint. The way she would sometimes balance a spoon between two fingers while telling stories of her own mother, prodigious at the art of wielding one like a weapon, lashing it like a whip to strike her children when they misbehaved. I wasn’t restrained, not physically, though fear did the trick.

These are, of course, not cures. They do not rid a child of autism any more than closing your eyes makes it night. These treatments are either abuse or operant conditioning meant, through the repeated application of negative stimulus, to eradicate autistic behaviors.

•

In the last several decades, a closet industry has developed around selling parents on a “cure” for their child’s autism. These range from mostly harmless, such as special semi-restrictive diets, to potentially life-threatening. One of these cures includes giving the child high doses of B6 and magnesium, which can cause ataxia, muscle paralysis, painful and disfiguring skin lesions, or even putting the child into a coma.

The most infamous of these is MMS (or Miracle Mineral Supplement) peddled by Jim Humble of the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing. Purported to cure nearly every disease, disorder, and ailment—including autism, HIV, cancer, and COVID-19—the misleadingly named substance is actually a mixture of sodium chlorite and hydrochloric acid, creating chlorine dioxide. At even low concentrations, the mixture can be dangerous, causing nausea, vomiting, and severe low blood pressure. In amounts of over one gram, it can cause kidney failure, shedding of the intestinal mucus lining, and rupturing of the red blood cells. One “reverend” of the church, Leon Edwards, recommended to an undercover BBC reporter in 2015 that he administer 27 drops daily to an infant—the equivalent of 1.5 grams.⁸ 

Investigative reporters uncovered that there are entire networks of parents organized around sharing tips for “treating” their autistic children with MMS, often taking the dangerous side effects as a sign that it is working. This isn’t the only supposed cure, though. Other parents in these groups have touted the benefits of substances such as lead, mercury, and nicotine, or of abstaining from vaccinating their children. Even when these methods land their children in the hospital, the propaganda for “alternative” cures is so effective that many parents continue undeterred. 

According to data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers, in the five years from 2015 to 2019, there were 16,521 cases of poisoning by chlorine dioxide in the US. Of those cases, around 2,500 involved children under 12.⁹ It is impossible to prove how many of these cases were attempts by parents to “cure” the child. Despite multiple injunctions filed by the FDA, as well as outright bans in Canada and Ireland, the Genesis II Church continues to sell MMS, and no leading members have been arrested. Because the two active ingredients are both legal, it’s possible to go after the church for false advertising, but not the actual damage their “miracle cure” has done, or will continue to do.

•

Not every historical method for forcing a changeling out of hiding is violent, although the mileage of these methods varies. One involves boiling or poaching a tiny meal inside of an eggshell, which is so absurd it will supposedly force a silent changeling to laugh, then speak, giving themself away. Another, which an ex-partner once threatened me with when I revealed my mother’s decades-old assertion, is to scatter beads, rice, or seeds on the ground in front of the changeling. According to the folktales, they will be powerfully compelled to not only pick up every dropped object, but count them all as they are collected.

Myth is, most often, a mechanism of comorbidity. According to a 2015 study, “Individuals with OCD ha[ve] a 13 times higher risk of having a comorbid autism spectrum diagnosis compared with individuals without OCD.”¹⁰ The other morning, I spilled a bottle of estrogen, pills scattering wildly across the cold linoleum floor. If you do not experience severe compulsions, any description of the force that gripped me as my medication skittered across the ground would be worthless for capturing it. 

I could gather all the pills, shards of a broken robin’s egg, or surrender my day to panicked prayers. One by one I collected them, counting, then, once the bottle was full, counting them again. Three times. I want to say this was to ensure I had them all, but in truth, I had no idea how many doses remained when I began. No, it was more like penance. My own compulsion closed around me like a trap.

•

In the bulk of English literature written about changelings, the singular pronoun used to refer to the changeling is “it.” A subject, or direct object, It refers to a thing, an animal, an idea, but not a person. I couldn’t tell you the first time someone fit me neatly inside of this word, the tiny slur of it, or why. Maybe it was second grade, on the playground, as children chased me and pelted me with rocks, before cornering me and kicking me in the stomach over and over until they were caught. Or maybe it was earlier, the kids who lived across the street jeering between games of pickup basketball. At a certain distance, the specifics of my memory warp and ripple, like a mirage bending the horizon.

I could tell you the last time, though, and exactly why. Walking home, late, from the grocery store past a South Minneapolis dive bar—now months burned down—a drunk outside sneered the word. Not at me, but to his friend, as if to mark me and make me known. There are many myths where to tell a fairy your own name is to give them power over you, but to name them is to hold the same power. It stands to reason that this act of speech could reveal a changeling, the way that his harsh growl, “Well, will you take a look at it,” was also intended to reveal a perceived imposter—a man, painted and cinched into a woman’s shape. 

Trans women and changelings are both a longstanding fascination of the horror genre, because of this status as imposters. Within the logical frameworks of horror, they are mechanically one and the same: a changeling is a fairy passing itself off as a human child; a trans woman is a man passing, or passing himself off,as a woman. The fear of both is a fear of deception, a fear that they could be something monstrous hiding in plain sight. Professor Elaine Graham describes this relationship in popular culture as follows, “The monster, that which refuses to abide by axiomatic orderings, carries a terrible threat to expose the fragility of its defining categories and thus the fiction of normality itself.”¹¹ The trans woman and the changeling are not just threats to the individual, but to society in the way they disrupt its rigid social structures—heterosexuality, binary gender, the nuclear family.

•

Not unlike the plethora of toxic forums for parents of autistic children, there’s a large and growing internet community for non-supportive parents of trans youths. Their discourse is identical in some ways, warped in others, like two funhouse mirrors pointed back into each other. 

“The trans agenda stole my child from me.” 

“He was fine when he was a kid, it’s like someone put these ideas in his head while I was sleeping.” 

“She’s not my daughter anymore. She says she’s my son.”

This kind of misgendering is constant and shapes the contours of how these parents discuss their children. There’s a shared obsession with the idea of deception, that either their kids must be lying to them about their experiences, or that someone has manipulated them into believing they are trans. 

Occasionally, I imagine the potential of my mother, who I haven’t spoken to in three years, finding solace in these spaces. In the feedback loop of other parents who, in the absence of some uncontrollable force to blame like vaccines or fairies or the devil, have chosen to scapegoat peer pressure or YouTubers or therapists or liberal education for this fact about their child which they cannot come to terms with. It’s not uncommon for these forums to dedicate space specifically for parents mourning the “death” of their child, as they were born, now replaced by the trans child. 

If all my mother’s years of reminders that she saw me as a changeling cast doubt over the fact that I was her child, I am the one who finally severed that thread by refusing to be her son. By, as she frequently reminded me, killing him. In Meredith Talusan’s essay about her father’s complicated and hurtful reaction to her own transition, she frames the dissonance this way: “Grief as a reaction to transition is a form of transphobia; it reduces a person’s very being to their gender, and reveals that a loved one cares more about a phantom image than for the trans person they supposedly love, who is right in front of them.”¹² I’ve never been able to reconcile this idea—that I buried my mother’s son—with the fact that coming out when I did kept me alive, in a sense because it finally allowed me to live.

•

Another all too common assertion—and one my mother also claims—is that there were no signs of the child’s transness before they came out. That this occurred completely out of the blue, or that there were, instead, a plethora of signs to the contrary. You can scroll past post after post saying things like “my daughter never minded wearing dresses when she was younger,” or “he always played with cars and action figures, the boy toys,” without ever seeing a parent question the social pressures exerted on their children, and how this shapes early childhood behavior. 

A week after a fight that ended with me walking out on Christmas Eve, locked out to sleep in the back seat of a friend’s car, my mother sent me an email titled “Correction with Love.” In the email, she detailed what she felt were the signs I couldn’t possibly have been exploring my gender identity years before I came out. “You did not spend a year as a girl at 15,” she wrote “you were busy trying to work out and get bigger muscles and dating Jessica.” There’s something almost comical about the evidence chosen to refute the facts of me; as if a varsity athlete wouldn’t need to work out, as if me dating a girl had any bearing on the fact that I am one. I think that this vitriol, and rejection of the child’s experience, is often motivated by guilt. After all, how could they not have noticed the signs if they were there?

This guilt and anger has led to many parents clinging to the unsubstantiated theory of “rapid onset gender dysphoria.” Proposed by a study conducted out of the Brown University public health department, this term is intended to describe a phenomenon wherein 80% of the trans children in the study announced their identity to the parents “out of the blue.”¹³ It’s worth noting, however, that this study included no data gathered from transgender children, instead basing its findings on just 256 multiple choice surveys completed by parents of trans children or “gender skeptical” parents. The study was also later republished with retractions stating that ROGD is not a formal diagnosis, and that the methodologies of the study were under review. Despite this, the study, with all its entangled confirmation biases, is still touted by parents across the internet as evidence for rejecting all the potential signs their children showed of being trans before coming out.

•

And there were, of course, signs. Like my favorite song as a kid being “Lola” by The Kinks, a passionate—if deeply flawed—love song about dancing with a trans woman in an underground club. Or the fact that I spent several years of my childhood in choir as a soprano, then quit suddenly and without explanation when my voice began to drop. 

In pictures of me at 15, with my near-waist-length hair, thick pencil eyeliner, deep v-neck, and pink skinny jeans, I look no different from every other awkward, lanky, scene girl in my freshman year. It was that year that I insisted on beginning to buy all my own clothes, and I purchased women’s everything. This wasn’t something out of nothing. As far back as I can remember, on every trip our family took to a thrift store, I would wander through the dresses, running them between my fingers—cashmere, silk, velvet—slipping them off the hangers and onto my tiny shoulders. 

I was five when my parents were first separated. Every other weekend, my father and his girlfriend would pick up my brother and I and drive us to their dingy apartment. When we arrived, they would scrub the nail polish my teenage aunts had fussed over from my hands. I remember once, when he was dropping us back off, my father accused my mother of trying to make me into some kind of faggot. 

She never shared his distaste for the things I enjoyed, and often even encouraged this behavior, sometimes letting me try on her dresses at home, or teaching me to walk in heels. She said “every little boy should experiment with gender.” As I learned in school, any well-executed experiment—all other steps aside—should end in drawing a conclusion. I suppose she expected me to experiment when I was young, then shuffle all I’d found into the back of the closet, like a science fair project once the school year’s done. Instead, I stretched out and found comfort, before arriving, years later, in the conclusion of this body. It’s not my fault she disagreed.

•

The most damning of these signs, though, were the ones my mother marked herself. Like her childhood nickname for me, which stuck well into adulthood—Tinkerbell, sometimes, Tink for short. This name, a strange ligament stretched between fairy and femme, though my mother would never admit it. I wonder, occasionally, if this name was some small way of her reaching toward the daughter she wanted, the little girl the ultrasound said I would be. It wasn’t lying, I was just born before my body could catch up with herself. But, I know that this idea of my mother is only wishful thinking. 

The term Tinkerbell refers to more than just a character from Peter Pan. It’s also a homophobic slur, from the lineage of fairy—first used to connote queerness in 1895. A gesture toward the effeteness of its target. Both terms originate in Northern England, and given that this is where my mother’s family is from, I doubt that she was unaware of this second definition. 

I was a gentle child, in love with small animals, soft fabrics, gardening, costume jewelry, the way that nail polish could make my hands into something precious. But also dainty, sickly, so prone to crying when I injured myself that my mother would frequently accuse me of being histrionic—inducting me into that complicated history, the women’s illness. The word effete itself has a complex history. Before coming to mean a decadent or effeminate man, it was derived from a lost Latin verb; Efferi, meaning “out of,” and fetus meaning “childbearing.” The literal translation is exhausted from the act of giving birth. 

I don’t know that there’s a different way to tell this story. My mother claims she never knew, or suspected I was a girl, but every piece of language she gave me has led back somehow to woman. Tinkerbell, changeling, fairy-child, faggot. 

•

I couldn’t hazard a guess as to whether the beating I received in second grade, on the playground, was because I failed to mask my autism or, despite not coming out for years, because I was gender-nonconforming enough to make myself a target. Maybe the difference doesn’t matter; according to a 2014 study on the link between neurodivergence and queerness, autistic youths are nearly 8 times more likely to express “gender variance.”¹⁴ In my own life, passing and masking have always been something like synonyms. Each of them, a way of moving safely through the world without attracting danger. Each of them, a way of concealing these two things about me, inseparable, and unwanted by the world.

There are few kinds of cruelty as exacting as the inherited cruelty of children, as though it’s somehow sharpened by their innocence. But as we age, ignorance dulls its edges, it begins to tear more than it cuts. I was beaten at 15 too, this time incontrovertibly for being trans, though neither of us would have had the language to name this at the time. I was walking back to the locker rooms after PE, when I heard a piercing wolf-whistle from behind me, and turned to meet the eyes of the whistling boy just in time to realize the danger I’d put myself in. What he saw, until I turned, was a the body of a woman. When I turned though, he clocked me. 

There are two possible definitions of “clocked” in the previous sentence, and both of them are correct. Clock as in to “detect” a trans person who intends to pass as cis, and clock as in the way he left me bloodied against the concrete while a school security guard watched and did nothing. The difference between the fantasy horror movies present and our reality, is who does the killing. In movies, it’s always the changeling, the trans woman, the imposter, hiding in plain sight; in reality, this fear of deception makes us victims.

As I wrote earlier about the “fairy defense,” it was impossible not to draw a long thread out to another, contemporary legal defense. First traceable to a case in 2004, the trans panic defense allows a defendant to claim that they were provoked into a violent rage, a temporary insanity, by the discovery that a person is transgender. These assaults and killings are so inseparable from the fear that we are imposters, as well as the fear that being attracted to us might make a man secretly gay, that even the law cannot extricate it from the language of subterfuge. During the trial for the murder of Gwen Araujo, her killer’s lawyer asserted that, at its core, this case was about “the tragic results when her deception and betrayal were discovered.”¹⁵ 

These violent crimes—primarily committed against Black trans women—have become so common that in June 2019 the American Medical Association declared them a public health epidemic. As it stands now, the trans panic defense has been banned in 20 states. Most of them introduced legislation after the AMA statement was released, after years of inaction on this front. When I first came out in 2016, though, it was a viable defense in 49 states, with only California banning its use. 

•

Sometimes, the word changeling gets stuck in my mind, circling, and I repeat it to myself again and again; it’s as if, years ago, my mother said the word and it’s been trapped inside of me—like a moth between window panes—ever since. An estimated 75% of autistic people experience echolalia, a condition that causes them to repeat the vocalizations of other people. Less commonly discussed is its sister condition, echologia, in which words or sound are repeatedly mirrored internally, within the person’s thoughts. In more profound cases, these echophenomenon are automatic and uncontrollable. It is a compulsion to twist the word changeling around in my head, to pull at its edges—even this sentence is a symptom. 

However, when traced back to its roots, echologia takes on a different meaning. From the Greek—echo and logia, derived from logos—literally meaning to study an echo. All that I’ve written, a study of my mother’s words echoing since childhood through my mind. An attempt to make sense of this name she gifted me, and why I’ve never abandoned it.

Maybe this is what draws me back, over and over, to the changeling myth: that if the world will always see me as monstrous, I can make my monster—the monster my mother named me—a mirror. I can use it to see myself reflected back unwarped. After all, the changeling exists and moves between the worlds of human and fae, the same way I’ve survived constantly shifting, caught between the worlds of trans and assumed cisgender, autistic and passing for neurotypical. There’s something kindred in the changelings’ imposter nature, their life itself being a form of deception. Their fragile bodies pressed up against the fragile borders of the world. In knowing that their survival too depends on staying hidden.

—winner of the Editors’ Prize in Prose

End Notes:

1. William of Auvergne, “De Universo,” in Guilielmi Alverni Episcopi Parisiensis . . . Opera Omnia, facsimile ed. of 1674, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1963), I, 593-1074.

2. Waldron, George. Description of the Isle of Man. Edited by William Harrison, vol. 11, Chadwyck-Healey, 1974.

3. Jacob Grimm: Deutsche Mythologie. Wiesbaden 2007, p. 364.

4. Leask, J & Leask, A & Silove, Natalie. (2005). Evidence for autism in folklore?. Archives of disease in childhood. 90. 271. 10.1136/adc.2003.044958.

5. Hull L, Petrides KV, Allison C, et al. “Putting on my best normal”: social camoflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. J Autism Dev Disord. 2017;47(8):2519-2534.

6. Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

7. American Psychiatric Association. Position Statement: Reactive Attachment Disorder. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association; 2002.

8. Davey, Ed, and Guy Lynn. “‘Miracle Autism Cure’ Seller Exposed by BBC Investigation.” BBC News, BBC, 11 June 2015, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-33079776.

9. Zadrozny, Brandy. “Parents Are Poisoning Their Children with Bleach to ‘Cure’ Autism. These Moms Are Trying to Stop It.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 21 May 2019, www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/moms-go-undercover-fight-fake-autism-cures-private-facebook-groups-n1007871.

10. Meier, Sandra M, et al. “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorders: Longitudinal and Offspring Risk.” Plos One, vol.10, no.11, 2015, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141703.

11. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Rutgers University Press, 2002.

12. Talusan, Meredith. “Celebrate Your Kid’s Transition. Don’t Grieve It.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 18 Oct. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/gender-transition-death-grief.html

13. Littman, Lisa. “Parent Reports of Adolescents and Young Adults Perceived to Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria.” Plos One, vol. 13, no.8, 2018, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202330.

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