You might think this strange, but I like the Gilmore Girls, too. It used to be part of my Saturday night viewing 21 years ago, and I'd watch The Bill at 8:30pm. I don't have a close relationship with my mother, in part because I don't think she knew how to handle having someone assigned male at birth who preferred shows that were typically aimed at females or "chick flicks". I do, however, have a good, if at times fractious relationship with my father. My mother was a tomboy when she was a child, and my grandmother made her boy's shorts and t-shirts. I remember, she had a clay rabbit that carried a flower, and I used to play with it. My grandmother was a good influence on me, sadly, she died when I was 6.

I moved when I was 8 to a different city and it was traumatic as I finished at the old school on the Monday, moved to the new city on the Tuesday and started the new school on the Wednesday. I later told someone about it who brushed aside my trauma. In retrospect, it's a pity that one of three situations hadn't occurred. One, a girl from school hadn't been a boy, I hadn't been a girl, or sex and gender hadn't mattered friendship wise. I remember, about six months after we moved, my mother told me that she thought she saw that girl's mother in the bank, and I was surprised. On my second day of high school, I saw the girl, and she said, "I remember that face." We talked, but I was badly let down by my old high school. That way, if her mother and my mother had talked that we were both moving to the same city (we went to second primary schools in the same area) and the two of them had down a recce of the schools and said, "Okay, we both like this school," and we'd had a principal who could have said, "Okay, I understand that changing schools can be challenging, especially for an autistic student, so I'll make a concession, and I'll put them both in the same class and I'll brief the teacher and say, "Right, you have an autistic student and a neurotypical student. They both went to the same primary school in another city, so I want you to let them sit together in the classroom. Some consistency is important."