Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network


The Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, originally founded as the Autism Women's Network, is a nonprofit advocacy organization in the autism rights and neurodiversity movements based in Washington, D.C. Its focus is empowerment and support for autistic women and nonbinary transgender people, both groups that have faced historical exclusion by male-dominant discourse on autism.
AWN hosts two projects focused on intersectionality in the disability rights community: Divergent, a project focused on disability and feminism, and the Autism, Race, and Ethnicity Committee.
AWN also manages its own small publishing house, DragonBee Press, which has published two anthologies on autism-related topics. The first anthology is What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew edited by Emily Paige Ballou, Kristina Thomas, and Sharon daVanport, which received the Autism Society's Outstanding Literary Work of the Year Award in 2017. The second anthology is All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, edited by Lydia X. Z. Brown, E. Ashkenazy, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu.
AWN changed its name in April 2018, releasing a statement in which it said that the name change was meant to promote inclusivity and encourage nonbinary transgender people as well as transgender women to join AWN's community and access its resources.