Both Juliet and Jude live with social anxiety. In her early teen years, Jude’s friendships were almost entirely online, in gaming and queer communities of kids her age.  Jude looks to her older sibling for strength and comfort. “They know how to calm me down when I'm having anxiety, because they know how it feels. They give amazing hugs.” Years before Jude began hormone therapy, Juliet helped her with her makeup, and braided her hair. “They made me feel comfortable in my own body,” Jude said.

As a duo, Juliet makes up for Jude’s shyness by being blunt and matter of fact, something they attribute in part to their autism. Their neurodiversity proved to be a challenge in their high school classes. “I guess it's kind of late to figure it out, but school never worked for me. Like, really nothing about it. Academically. Socially. It's just not for me.” 

Jude calls Juliet one of her biggest role models. Their tastes have evolved together, from video games to music, ranging from K-pop to eighties and nineties sounds, with a shared wardrobe to match—their slumped stances modeling grunge fashions that have come back around some thirty years later. 

Elliot, their camera-shy, younger cisgender sibling, is “our little brother but he's our little protector.” Juliet said. The first to acclimate to Jude and Juliet’s pronoun choices, he would correct the rest of the family, and has not been afraid to push back against extended family who are not as accepting.

Autumn, a small business owner and community organizer, describes herself and her kids as sensitive types. She encourages them to be themselves and mature at their own pace, but is realistic about how the outside world may view them—and prepares them for it. 

Autumn’s wife and business partner Monica is the lone extrovert of the family, and Autumn appreciates how she works around all of their sensitivities. “She just rolls with the punches, and the kids see that tenacity in her,” Autumn said. “Monica has given them a safe space to be exactly who they are.”

“They are very much all momma’s kids…My role is support and to be a cheerleader,” Monica said.

Autumn’s former husband and the children's father, Lee Brown, admits that he has had to put in the most work to understand the changes that the kids are experiencing. “I’m not going to pretend to put myself in their shoes and know exactly how they feel,” he said. “I’m just going to stand back, listen, and learn.” As Jude began the path towards hormone therapy, Lee would ask, “Are you sure this is what you want? Even after the Lupron shots began, even after the estrogen began. I always asked her that question.” Lee believed her, but he wanted to make sure she was checking in with herself, and was certain about her choices. “And she’s always saying, ‘Yes, this is absolutely what I want.’”

Autumn, Monica, and Lee are a unified front. “People are often surprised that we all get along or all spend time together, but I would not have had it any other way,”  Autumn said. “This was the only way our family was going to be when Lee and I split. We're bonded forever through our children.”

At age seven, around the time that she was playing dress-up with Juliet’s fairy wings and tutu and her mother’s boots, Jude asked Autumn to buy her a skirt from JCPenney. 

Juliet: It was like this striped black-and-white, striped skirt. She wore it all the time.

Jude: I wore it to school and everywhere. I didn’t want to take it off.

Juliet: And she had this little pixie cut. That was like, shaved on the side and she’d wear the boots that are too big for her, but I couldn't get her to take them off. They’d fall off her feet.

Autumn: And then when she asked to wear [the skirt] in public, I did say, “You know, when you wear it out…I want you to understand that there may be some sort of reactions that I don't have control over, and I just want you to be aware that there are people that will not be comfortable with this. But no matter what, I’m going to be there for you.” And I just wanted her to understand that dressing outside of these boxes, outside of these gender norms, was going to create discomfort somewhere. Probably not in Seattle…but at some point.

Juliet’s coming out as non-binary has been a more recent development.

Honestly, coming-out kind of stuff was never really a huge deal to me. Because of my autism, I think of everything differently than other people, I'm pretty sure. So I never really made a big deal out of coming out as non-binary or bisexual or whatever. But I'm sure somewhere in the back of my brain, like, watching Jude grow up trans and be cool with herself probably did help. I probably would have kept it all to myself if I hadn't seen her like that.

I just randomly came out to my mom one day like, “Hey, I'm gonna use they/them pronouns.” And my friends were all like, “How did you do that?” And I said, “I don’t know. I don’t care.” I just knew that I didn't like the feeling of being called a girl. And then I stopped thinking about it.

In the beginning, the photoshoots with the family often felt stilted, like a largely “observer and observed” arrangement. I acted as a fly on the wall, trying to unobtrusively capture what I was witnessing. Over time, the shoots became more conversational, and portrait-centric. The two posed together with little direction. In one photoshoot, Jude smiled as I showed her a photo where the wind had blown through her pink-colored hair. “I look like Beyoncé,” she laughed. On another shoot, we listened to Blondie, and Juliet seemed to enjoy trying out different angles and poses.

As the months passed, their parents took note of the incremental, and sometimes broader leaps in maturity in the kids. “Jude has grown into her identity more and more as someone who is gentle and kind, and an advocate for marginalized folks and fellow LGBTQ peers,” says Autumn. “I’ll overhear some of the ways she’s listening and talking to people her age online. She’s so positive and encouraging.”

“We’re hoping sometime soon she can take the next step and have the same kind of relationships in person,” Lee said.

The pandemic made Juliet’s social anxiety even worse, but their perspective changed as they approached eighteen. A few years ago, they couldn’t make eye contact with others, and didn’t go outside. “I was always at home, and I wasn't doing good in school,” Juliet said. Then they began working towards their GED at home, started their first job as a barista at the cafe that Autumn and Monica own, and is now looking at continuing their education out of state. “Juliet has become a lot more independent,” Monica said. They “have their own income. Pay rent. Have a car…They’ve just grown up a lot.”

“It all happened at a good time,” Juliet said. “I just went through a big change and in a really small period of time, you know.”

I made my last photographs of Juliet, Jude and their family in the fall of 2022. In those final months, I asked what advice Juliet and Jude, now eighteen and fifteen, would give their younger selves.

Juliet: Stop caring what people think would be really helpful to a younger me. 

Jude: Yeah, I would say the same thing for myself. 

Juliet: I cared so much what people thought when I was in school. 

Jude: I still care about what people think about me, or comment. And I know I shouldn't care too much about what people think about me, or literally care at all, because I should just be myself for myself, not for other people. 

And I still need to work on that, but I would tell my younger self to start working on that early.