Due both to their ability to denaturalize social norms and to their neurological differences, autistic individuals can offer novel insights into gender as a social process. Examining gender from an autistic perspective highlights some elements as socially constructed that may otherwise seem natural and supports an understanding of gender as fluid and multidimensional.
When you consider our honesty, our preference for truth and fairness, then gender identity is likely to be more fluid and less binary. Why do we need to fit into a mode of social expectation if we truly don’t believe this is who we are? The non-autistic world is governed by social and traditional expectations, but we may not notice these or fail to see them as important. This frees us up to connect more readily with our true gender.
Given the entwined nature of queer liberation and neurodivergent liberation, I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that Gwen Nelson, the original creator of Autistic Pride Day, is a trans woman.
Rainbows show us the beauty and variance within light. Our approach in this book is to combine different perspectives, moving from a focus on one aspect of identity (e.g., either being Autistic, or gender identity/sexuality, relationality) to explore the colors of our intertwining identities that each contribute to our unique way of being in the world. Focusing on only one aspect of identity means that we miss the beauty of the threads contributing to our lived experiences, how they entangle with each other, and the uniqueness of each person. By exploring what it means to live under a double rainbow, we invite readers to immerse themselves in the colors and multidimensional aspects of Autistic identity as it relates to diverse genders, sexualities, and relationality, exploring how each contribute to Autistic people’s embodied experiences.
LGBTQI+ people with an Autistic diagnosis have two separate rainbows — and two separate coming out stories. There are times when an autistic will not come out as LGBTQI+, and vice-versa. The challenges for each minority group are great, and being a double-social minority can be especially tough. Education and peer support goes a long way in helping to navigate these challenges, and make for a smoother trip on the social highway.
People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people are, according to the largest study yet to examine the connection1. Gender-diverse people are also more likely to report autism traits and to suspect they have undiagnosed autism.
“All these findings across different datasets tend to tell a similar story,” says study investigator Varun Warrier, research associate at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Autistic people are more likely than neurotypical people to be gender diverse, several studies show, and gender-diverse people are more likely to have autism than are cisgender people2,3.
We like to think of neurodiversity as a social model umbrella that, when opened to its broadest, includes Queer people.
Members of the neurodiversity movement adopt a position of diversity that encompasses a kaleidoscope of identities that intersects with the LGBTQIA+ kaleidoscope by recognising neurodivergent traits – including but not limited to ADHD, Autism, Dyscalculia, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Synesthesia, Tourette’s Syndrome – as natural variations of cognition, motivations, and patterns of behaviour within the human species.
“Queer,” in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.
Here comes the sun It's shining right through you On everyone It hits so hard with all the colors that there are You hit so hard with all the colors that there are
You hit so hard with all the colors that there are.
Genderpunk: a colloquial term for culture and resistance against gendernormativity; an identity that in and of itself is a resistance against gender norms, homophobia and transphobia, oppression and societal status.
Your gender has nothing to do with your eligibility to be genderpunk. If you agree with the mindset, no matter how you identify, you can be a part of the movement.
Here comes Dick, he's wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, y'know she's sporting a chain
Same hair, revolution
Same build, evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss?
And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous
Don't get him wrong and don't get him mad
He might be a father, but he sure ain't a dad
And she don't need advice that's sent at her
She's happy with the way she looks, she's happy with her gender
And they love each other so
Androgynous
Closer than you know, love each other so
Androgynous
Mirror image, see no damage
See no evil at all
Kewpie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at
The way you're laughed at now
Now, something meets Boy, and something meets Girl
They both look the same, they're overjoyed in this world
Same hair, revolution
Unisex, evolution
Tomorrow who's gonna fuss
--Androgynous by The Replacements
In line with a disability justice approach, one of the more positive recent developments is the theory and praxis of neuroqueering. Stemming from the work of Nick Walker and Remi Yergeau, neuroqueering focuses on embracing weird potentials within one’s neurocognitive space, and turning everyday comportment and behaviour into forms of resistance. This has provided a new tool for combatting neuronormativity from within the constraints imposed by history and current material conditions. By queering the social world, new possibilities are carved out for the future, helping us not just challenge aspects of the current order but to start collectively imagining what a different world could be like.
In many ways, the impulse to repress transgender people from expressing their true identity is rooted in the same impulse that makes people want to stop #ActuallyAutistic people from flapping their hands.
“The fascinating part to me was to observe persons with eyes and ears, teeth and toenails, walking around yet presenting few of the behaviors that one would call social or human,” he wrote. “Now, I had the chance to build language and other social and intellectual behaviors where none had existed, a good test of how much help a learning-based approach could offer.” He explained to Psychology Today, “You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense— they have hair, a nose, and a mouth— but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person.”
A brief thread about why the fates of LGBTQ+ and #ActuallyAutistic people are intertwined (to say nothing of LGBTQ+ autistic people). This right here is Ole Ivar Lovaas, the father of modern-day Applied Behavioral Analysis.
For the first week of #Pride2022: a brief thread about why the fates of LGBTQ+ and #ActuallyAutistic people are intertwined (to say nothing of LGBTQ+ autistic people). This right here is Ole Ivar Lovaas, the father of modern-day Applied Behavioral Analysis. 1/
Lovaas ran a clinic at UCLA, where autistic children were slapped, administered shock therapy. LIFE Magazine profiled his practices in 1965, showing how one girl was taken to a “shock room” when she made little progress.
When children behaved well, they were given food and affection. Children were initially not given regular meals and only spoonfuls of food at first.
Lovaas had an extremely low opinion of his autistic patients. In a 1974 interview, he demeaned autistic people stimming (which we now know is a means of soothing). He also called them “little monsters.”
But Lovaas’s practice did not just end when it came to autistic children. As @stevesilberman wrote in his book #NeuroTribes, he also assisted with UCLA’s Feminine Boy Project, which sought to cure boys of atypical sexuality, including homosexuality.
Lovaas collaborated with a researcher named George Rekers and co-authored four papers on homosexuality and other behaviors. One of their main test subjects was a boy named Kirk Murphy, whom they called “Craig.”
Lovaas and Rekers’ practices bore stunning similarities to Lovaas’s practices on autistic children. Poor Kirk’s parents were instructed to use poker chips. Blue poker chips were used as a reward to get candy while red chips meant he would be spanked.
CW suicide: The red poker chips were given when he displayed feminine behavior. The whippings were so unbearable that Kirk’s brother would hide the red chips. Kirk later joined the US Armed forced before he later died from suicide.
All the while, Rekers and Lovaas’s research was used to show that conversion therapy worked. Rekers would co-found the Family Research Council, which opposes LGBTQ+ rights. More on Kirk’s tragic end here.
Poor Kirk Murphy and Pamela, the girl who was subjected to shock therapy shared a similar fate because the adults in charge of them punished them for who were.
People might wonder why I, a cisgender heterosexual from the suburbs of Southern California, included queer history in a book about autism. THIS is why. The same people who want to stop queer kids from being themselves are the same ones who want to stop me from flapping my hands
Conversely, when I first moved to Washington, the gay community openly embraced me and getting to know gay people helped me shed my own homophobia AND my internalized ableism. It’s why transphobia also bugs me so much.
Learning about the shared DNA of gay conversion therapy and ABA reaffirmed what Martin Luther King wrote in 1963 “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Lovaas’s crusade to “normalize” deviance was not limited to autistic children. In the 1970s, he lent his expertise to a series of experiments called the Feminine Boy Project, the brainchild of UCLA psychologist Richard Green. After interviewing one hundred men and women who applied for gender reassignment surgery, Green became interested in tracing the roots of sexual identity back to childhood. He teamed up with Lovaas to see if operant conditioning could be employed as an early intervention in cases of gender confusion to prevent the need for reassignment surgery in the future. The project’s most celebrated success story was Kirk Andrew Murphy, enrolled at UCLA by his parents at age five. Bright and precocious, Kirk would ask for his favorite snacks by their brand names at the supermarket.
But after seeing Green interviewed on TV about “sissy-boy syndrome”— his term for early-onset gender dysphoria— Kirk’s parents became concerned that he was exhibiting behavior that was inappropriate for a little boy. One day, his father caught him posing in the kitchen in a long T-shirt and saying, “Isn’t my dress pretty?” Children with this syndrome, Green claimed, often grew up to become transsexual or homosexual. Lovaas assigned a young graduate student named George Rekers to become Kirk’s behavioral therapist.
In a case report that would go on to become a classic in undergraduate psychology courses, Rekers and Lovaas wrote that Kirk (called “Kraig”) possessed “a remarkable ability to mimic all the subtle feminine behaviors of an adult woman.” They framed his “offer to ‘help mommy’ by carrying her purse” as an example of the boy’s devious manipulation of his mother to “satisfy his feminine interests.” Their descriptions of the little boy’s behavior, compared with the transcripts of Green’s intake interviews with Kirk’s parents, were decidedly more extreme, as if the boy were clearly a world-class drag queen in the making at age five. They claimed that he had an elaborate “history of cross-dressing” that included plundering his grandmother’s makeup kit for cosmetics and “swishing around the home and clinic, fully dressed as a woman with a long dress, wig, nail polish, high screechy voice, [and] slovenly seductive eyes.” (In family photographs, Kirk more resembles a Mouseketeer.)
To nip the little boy’s inappropriate behavior in the bud, they devised a program of total immersion based on Lovaas’s work on autism. This time, instead of hand-flapping, gaze aversion, and echolalia, the behaviors targeted for extinction included the “limp wrist,” the submissively yielding “hand clasp,” the notorious “swishy gait,” the girlish “hyperextension” of the limbs in moments of exuberance, and prissy declarations like “goodness gracious” and “oh, dear me.” At home, Kirk’s “masculine” behaviors were rewarded with blue chips that could be redeemed for candy and other treats, while his “feminine” behaviors were punished with red chips that were subtracted from the total. In interviews conducted by blogger Jim Burroway, who undertook a thorough investigation of the case in 2011, Kirk’s brother, Mark, recalled their father punishing the boy— with Rekers’s approval— by converting each red chip into a “swat.” Mark broke down sobbing as he confessed to hiding red chips from his brother’s pile so that Kirk wouldn’t have to endure the abuse.
…plenty of autistic people are LGBTQ and experience a double portion of discrimination. The desire to eliminate the traits that make autistic people unique is rooted in the same impulse to suppress people from affirming their gender identity or sexuality.
#ActuallyAutistic people reject ABA. None of the autistic people in our community support it. Some of us have been harmed by it.
Protecting queer kids protects also neurodivergent kids—and vice versa. The fight is for inclusion and acceptance—for all operating systems, for all of our different ways of being human. Supporting our kids means supporting all of their possibilities and expressions.
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are entwined.
It’s no secret that Queerness is a significant intersection with Autistic experience. Aside from anecdotes from within the community, studies such as Janssen et al (2016) and Strang et al (2020) indicate that not only are we more likely to be gender-diverse, but that Queer communities are more likely to contain Autistic people. Strang in particular speaks of the lack of research looking into experiences over the lifespan and the need for such longitudinal study to be carried out.
With so much Queerness in the Autistic community, one might wonder why this intersection is so significant. I think the answer is quite simple. Albeit somewhat theory heavy.
Neuronormativity is pervasive, and if you think that it only effects neurodivergent people you are wrong. Both BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities have fallen foul of the belief that there is a standard of neurology we should all achieve. It was not so long ago that being gay or transgender was listed in the DSM as a psychiatric disorder.
Autistic people naturally stand queer neuronormative standards. In this sense, queer is a verb. It is the subversion of societal expectation. Through our rejection of neuronormativity, we create space to explore our gender and sexuality (or lack thereof) unencumbered by the chains of bigoted standards of being.
When we begin to dismantle neuronormativity, we also begin to dismantle heteronormativity. Our experience of ourselves and attraction (or lack of attraction) to others is built upon the experiences we have of our environment. Experiences that we have through the lens of being Autistic. You can not separate autism from our queerness any more than you can separate a person from their brain. They are part of us, and without them, we would be someone different.
Why the ‘treatment’ of autism is a form of conversion therapy. The only government-funded therapy for autistic children is called Applied Behaviour Analysis, an approach developed in tandem with discredited anti-LGBTQ2S+ practises.
Both gay conversion therapy and ABA were built on behaviourism—the scientific belief that human behaviour is determined by conditioning from our immediate environments, and should be controlled through manipulating those environments. Behaviourist psychology has always seen queer and autistic identities as deviant, and so the pathologies around both were constructed at the same time, and from the same body of research. This is why many autistics today argue that ABA is actually its own form of conversion therapy.
New and old ABA share the same goal, and the same end result: converting autistic traits. And in doing so, ABA also acts as a form of queer conversion, says Negrazis, because “[autistic] genders and sexualities are inherently pathologized as abnormal.” This means ABA sees nonconforming autistic children as being socially confused about appropriate dress or play styles, and aims to condition them toward their assigned gender.
“It’s all about policing unruly bodies,” says Negrazis. “Lovaas actively constructed gender and sexual divergence as disabled, which created an inherent disableism in the emergence of queer identities.”
Lovaas himself made this comparison in his writings on the Feminine Boy Project, calling gay or gendernonconforming males “socially handicapped individuals.” He spoke of queerness and transness having “serious disabling consequences for adults … [that] may range from interference with normal heterosexual relationships, to a continuing sense of shame and fear.”
Just like queer and trans people, autistics do not have a disease that needs to be treated. Instead, says Negrazis, “[autistics] need supports to help them identify how trauma has impacted them in their learning, relationships, ability to work and even their self-concept.”
“The psych industry has done so much harm to both [autistic and queer] people,” they say. “The very foundations of psychology and counselling need to be dismantled and rebuilt by queer and autistic people themselves.”
But I don't need a cure for me I don't need it No, I don't need a cure for me I don't need it No, I don't need a cure for me I don't need it I don't need it
“Cure for Me” is very much inspired by conversion therapy.
I just wanted to make an anthem for people to sing along with that they know they don’t need a cure.
It doesn’t take much before the world tells you that you’re different, and that you should change yourself to be the same as everybody else, which is very sad.
I think in the context of gender and being trans, autonomy is heavily connected to what we do or don’t do with our bodies, because a lot of people don’t want to, or don’t care to, transition medically. Either because they’re nonbinary and they’re comfortable with their bodies, or even if they are binary, they don’t have physical dysphoria.
It’s so different for everybody. It’s getting to do what we want with our bodies, how we want to do it, at the pace that—hopefully—we get to set without other people putting judgment on that, and still being respected.
People might try to change your gender or sexuality. They might send you to a doctor or therapist to try to change your gender or sexuality. This is called conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy is wrong. Conversion therapy does not work. You have the right to not have to do conversion therapy.
You have the right to be in charge of your own body. You have the right to decide who touches you. You have the right to decide how you want to be touched. You have the right to tell someone to stop touching you.
Research that aimed to preserve autistic perspectives (Kourti & MacLeod, 2019) found that autistic perceptions of gender identity are far more diverse, and put interests, rather than gender identity, at the core of autistic people’s identity perception. Furthermore, autistic people often state repeatedly in their accounts how confusing and emotionally taxing ‘doing gender’ is for them, explaining why they may explicitly reject being confined to traditional and binary gender norms (Davidson & Tamas, 2016).
Children on the autism spectrum are more than seven times more likely to show signs of gender variance, according to a study led by New York University. The study, published last month in Transgender Health, recruited the parents of 492 autistic children ages six to 18. When the researchers asked these parents whether their children often “wish to be the opposite sex,” a little over five percent of participants said yes, compared to less than one percent of the general population. Bolstering these findings is the fact that a previous study from the Children’s National Medical Center in 2014 found almost the exact same results. The NYU study found that 5.1 percent of children on the autism spectrum showed signs of gender variance. The 2014 study put that number down at 5.4 percent.
Both studies show that counselors working with autistic children should ask about their gender identity. Being both autistic and gender non-conforming, some children face a double-challenge in responding to society’s biases.
Ollie’s parents wondered if his gender nonconformity — behavior that doesn’t match masculine and feminine norms — might have something to do with his autism. Ollie had been diagnosed with sensory processing disorder at age 2: An extreme sensitivity to sounds, light, the texture of some foods or the feel of a particular fabric can send children like Ollie into a meltdown. He also had difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep. It would take his parents four more years to find a doctor who recognized the classic symptoms of Asperger syndrome — above-average intelligence combined with social and communication deficits, and restricted interests. (Ollie was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome before the diagnosis was absorbed into the broader category of autism spectrum disorder in 2013.)
Ollie’s parents are not alone in pondering this puzzle. A handful of studies over the past five years — and a series of case reports going back to 1996 — show a linkage between autism and gender variance. People who feel significant distress because their gender identity differs from their birth sex — a condition known as gender dysphoria —have higher-than-expected rates of autism. Likewise, people with autism appear to have higher rates of gender dysphoria than the general population. Between 8 and 10 percent of children and adolescents seen at gender clinics around the world meet the diagnostic criteria for autism, according to studies carried out over the past five years, while roughly 20 percent have autism traits such as impaired social and communication skills or intense focus and attention to detail. Some seek treatment for their gender dysphoria already knowing or suspecting they have autism, but the majority of people in these studies had never sought nor received an autism diagnosis. What’s more, roughly the same numbers of birth males and females appear to be affected…
Over the past decade, people with gender dysphoria have developed new ways of expressing their sense of self. Whereas many once identified as transsexual or transgender, some now call themselves ‘genderqueer’ or ‘non-binary.’ Rates of autism and autism traits appear to be higher in those identifying as genderqueer. Like Ollie, these people generally say they don’t feel fully masculine or feminine, and explicitly reject the notion of two mutually exclusive genders. The word ‘trans’ is often used to encompass all of these identities and the phrase ‘affirmed gender’ to convey a person’s sense of self.
Inspired by the Dutch study, Strang and his colleagues approached prevalence from another angle. Instead of measuring the incidence of autism among gender-dysphoric children and adolescents, they assessed gender variance — defined as a child “wishing to be the other sex” — in children with autism. “We found rates that were 7.5 times higher than expected,” Strang says.
Still, she cautions that sometimes, what looks like autism may actually be untreated gender dysphoria. “So much of the experience of being trans can look like the spectrum experience,” she says. People who don’t want to socialize in their birth genders may seem to have poor social skills, for example; they may also feel so uncomfortable with their bodies that they neglect their appearance. “That can sometimes be greatly alleviated if you give that person appropriate gender support,” she says.
Others agree with these insights. A 2015 study by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital reported that 23.1 percent of young people presenting with gender dysphoria at a gender clinic there had possible, likely or very likely Asperger syndrome, as measured by the Asperger Syndrome Diagnostic Scale, even though few had an existing diagnosis. Based on these findings, the researchers recommend routine autism screening at gender clinics.
Gender norms should not be imposed on people with autism to make the rest of the world more comfortable. Why teach girls with autism how to apply makeup, dress in a feminine manner and shop? Therapists, educators and parents only consider these to be important goals because our society imposes strict gender norms.
As a member of the LGBTQ community who is also autistic, I encounter inequality based on my gender identity, my sexual orientation and my disability. Societal barriers in housing, employment, transportation, healthcare and education systematically exclude queer, gender-queer, transgender and disabled people; outdated and negative attitudes about gender, sexuality and autism affect our social relationships. Queer environments don’t often account for our sensory processing issues or social differences, whereas autism services don’t often recognize that we may identify beyond the gender binary or have queer relationships. Shifting the focus from the tired narratives of delayed diagnosis and sex differences can help the autism community take responsibility for improving our day-to-day quality of life, whatever our age at diagnosis or gender identity.
Nearly a quarter of young persons diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or who are transgender, screened positive for Asperger syndrome, a form of autism, according to a new paper in the academic journal LGBT Health. The study was a small retrospective review of intake files of 39 children at Boston Children’s Hospital. Lead author Dr. Daniel E. Shumer explains, “We found that 23 percent of kids fell into the ‘possible, likely or very likely category’ when using the evaluation tool to screen for Asperger’s.”
“Having autism is a burden; a lot of things in the world change when you have autism,” says Strang. “But adding transgenderism, or maybe some of them aren’t transgender but they are just exploring gender, that is complicated in itself.”
“Knowing how to navigate in a world that is not really friendly with people who are trans can be tricky when you are missing social cues.”
Shumer says it is important that parents and medical providers be aware of the increased possibility for co-occurrence of autism and gender variance. If treating patients for one condition, they should screen for the other and be prepared to treat it. “There also may be implications for how to provide informed consent for things like hormonal interventions,” he adds.
The intersection of being both autistic and transgender is more common than one might think. While the dialogue around autism and gender identity is expanding, I have a bit of trouble figuring out where I fit into the whole picture. So, I decided to do my own research, and while this subject is a fairly new field of study, I found some pretty astounding statistics: In 2014, a U.S. study of 147 children (ages 6 to 18) diagnosed with ASD found that autistic participants were 7.59 times more likely to express gender variance than the comparison groups. Another study, conducted in the UK in 2015, involved 166 parents of teenagers with Gender Dysphoria (63% were assigned female-at-birth.) Based on parents’ report of their children on the Social Responsiveness Scale, the study found that 54% of the teenagers scored in the mild/moderate or severe clinical range for Autism. The relationship has only begun to be explored in research in recent years, but I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of autistic trans people out there in the world. As someone who very much values human connection and simultaneously struggles with it, I have to say that looking at those figures provided me an amount of comfort. I discovered that there are a lot of people just like me. Being autistic and being transgender certainly each has their own respective challenges, though one that they share is a lack of societal acceptance due to stigma. Many people still believe that who I am as a transmasculine person is inherently invalid, just like many other people still believe autism is some kind of tragedy that is to be cured. In contrast, I feel very strongly that who I am as a person is heavily dependent on both my trans and autistic identities, and that they are beautiful things.
According to Garcia-Spiegel, autistic people often don’t pay attention to the same set of societal norms as everyone else, and with that freedom comes a vision. “We can see that a lot of the social rules around gender are”—he paused, trying to find a way to put his thoughts delicately—“bullshit, basically.”
And research supports the idea that a large swath of genderqueer people are also autistic. In 2014, a survey in the Archives of Sexual Behavior showed that “gender variance was 7.59 times more common in participants with ASD than in a large non-referred comparison group.” Gender variance is defined as “an umbrella term used to describe gender identity, expression, or behavior that falls outside of culturally defined norms associated with a specific gender,” according to Pediatric Annals. Another article published in LGBT Health in 2019 found that children who were diagnosed as autistic were four times more likely to experience gender dysphoria.
“When we’re forcibly distanced from social rules anyways, a lot of us kind of look at them and see, ‘Oh, these social rules shouldn’t really have an impact on how I carry myself through the world, and what my relationship to my body is,’” Garcia-Spiegel said. The large contingent of transgender autistic people is like the large amount of gay autistic people (to say nothing of autistic people who are queer and transgender): discovering one’s gender identity can offer a road map to understanding one’s autism. Learning that they are autistic can show people that they are not wrong for living outside prescribed social rules and norms, including ones for gender and sexuality. Once they accept that they are autistic, they realize that a lot of social norms are constrictive and should be questioned
Bobbi, an Autistic nonbinary person in their mid-thirties, says, “I wasn’t raised or ‘socialized’ as an Autistic girl. I was raised as a weird kid, and a gender failure.”
Masked Autism and being a closeted gender minority often go hand in hand, and the experiences share a lot of features. The baffled families of transgender people and adult Autistics alike tend to claim there “were no signs” of these identities when the person was young. In actuality, there were often many signs, which the child’s family either did not know to look for, or didn’t wish to see. Signs of nonconformity were likely met with admonishment, “helpful” condescending corrections (“you look so unhappy, please smile!”), or by freezing the child out until they conformed. Bobbi was sarcastically complimented quite often, not just for their hair, but for how they carried themselves, spoke, thought, and for the comfortable, practical ways that they dressed. As they grew older, they began to figure out what was expected of them, and shifted their gender presentation to be more feminine so they could be seen as fully human.
If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman
My mother once told me she would have named me Laura
I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her
One day, I’d find an honest man to make my husband
We would have two children, build our home on the Gulf of Mexico
Our family would spend hot summer days at the beach together
The sun would kiss our skin as we played in the sand and water
We would know we loved each other without having to say it
At night, we would sleep with the windows of our house left open
Letting the cool ocean air soothe the sunburned shoulders of our children
There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve There is an ocean in my soul where the waters do not curve
No one in young Bobbi’s life could see them as they truly were. When your belief system teaches that disability and gender variance are embarrassing and disgusting, it’s hard to look at your child and recognize those traits. “We have to make society over again from the ground up,” they say. “Our own little neuro-queer microsocieties. Because no one else will think to include us.”
Our Dual Identities Are Not Competing; They Are Complementary
Don’t use this information to “blame” trans identity on autism. Don’t threaten identity or reduce agency.
To blame trans identities on autism is to say that autistic people cannot understand or be aware of their own gender. If an autistic person cannot know they are trans, how can they know they aren’t? How can they know anything about themselves?
When a person’s gender is doubted because they are autistic, this paves the way for removing autistic people’s agency in all kinds of other ways. If we can’t know this central aspect of our identity, we surely can’t know how we feel, what we like, or who we are. In short, it implies that we are not truly people, and that our existence, experiences, and identities are for other people to define. This is just another facet of dehumanising autistic people, and gender is certainly not the only area in which this happens.
In itself, the very urge to find a ‘reason’ that someone is transgender is a result of believing that being transgender is a problem, and that it would always be better not to be. The fact that clinicians like Zucker are focused on why someone is transgender, instead of focusing on what kind of help they need and how to best provide it, demonstrates clearly the belief that it is fundamentally bad to be transgender. Not only that, but the belief that it’s even theoretically possible for anyone besides the individual in question to know what someone’s gender is. That’s just not how gender works! No-one really understand what gender is, or what it means, or where it comes from. The only thing we know for sure is that it’s internal, subjective, and personal. You can’t prove or test someone else’s gender any more than you can prove or test their favourite colour. The idea that it can be tested is constantly used to invalidate trans people. Our genders are doubted or disbelieved if we fail to adequately ‘prove’ ourselves to everyone else – if we express too many or too few gender stereotypes, if we are too old or too young, if we claim to be nonbinary or our description of our identity is too complicated or confusing.
The best option is to allow someone to explore their feelings, support them in gaining self-understanding, and accept their identity whatever it turns out to be. It is not complicated, and it’s only scary if you are still holding onto the belief that being either autistic or transgender – or, perish the thought, both – is a terrible thing to be. Which it’s not. I am, along with countless others like me, living proof of that.
Misperceptions about what it means to be transgender or about autistic people’s ability to understand their gender or make decisions about their bodies often prompt service providers or family members to stand in the way of transgender autistic people’s attempts to live life with authenticity and dignity. This can include denying transgender autistic people access to transition-related care, subjecting them to “normalization” treatments aimed at suppressing their gender expression, or placing them in guardianship or institutional settings that restrict their decision-making power. While research suggests a large overlap between transgender and autistic communities, trans autistic people often lack access to services and supports that understand and respect all aspects of their identity.
“Too frequently, autistic people are denied basic rights to make decisions about our own bodies and health care, including when it comes to expressing our gender identity,” said Sam Crane, Legal Policy Director for the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. “Whether we’re transgender or not, autistic people’s gender identities are as real as anyone else’s and should be respected and supported, not dismissed based on baseless stereotypes.”
“A common misconception is the assumption that gender and sexuality are irrelevant to autistic people, or that our sexuality and gender identities are symptoms of our autism,” said Bascom. “These beliefs are not only inaccurate but also profoundly harmful to autistic people and are often used to prevent autistic LGBT folks from accessing LGBT spaces, authentic relationships, and transition-related health care. The reality is that autistic people can have a beautiful diversity of gender identities and sexualities, and we have the same right to self-determination as anybody else.”
I am an AAC user. I am also queer and trans. I knew that before I ever had the words to say so. I knew that before I had ever heard the words queer or trans. I knew that before I had effective means of communicating such concepts with anyone around me. I was still queer and I was still trans.
We talk about presumption of competence. We talk about how part of presuming competence is recognizing that people know themselves best. We talk about how presuming competence is important for AAC users, for people who have never been presented with a communication system that works for them, and for all people with communication disabilities. Why doesn’t presumption of competence get applied to gender as well?
Part of presuming my competence includes presuming I know my own gender. I am trans. If you do not believe me, you are saying I am incapable of knowing myself well enough to know my own gender, something inherently personal.
Part of presuming my competence includes believing that when I was a child who did not know the word trans — and as such didn’t have any method of telling anyone I was trans — I still knew myself. It means believing that child who had to actively think where to go when told we were splitting into “girls” and “boys” groups. Splitting into groups this way did not make sense to me, because I did not belong in either. Part of presuming my competence includes believing that my nonbinary reality was true, despite not having a way to explain or express it.
…the report selectively mobilises neurocognitive, neurodevelopmental, and psychosocial disabilities including autism, emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD) and Tourette’s, to undermine the credibility of transgender people’s testimony about gender-related distress.
Autistic subjectivities of gender and sexual identity are collapsed in terms of impairment, and recall the harmful rhetorics of Theory of Mind discourse. Theory of Mind frames autistic people as deficient in their understanding other people’s desires, mental states, and beliefs, but also in terms of self-awareness. As autistic researcher Remi Yergeau, writes, ‘god theories’ such as these, ‘transpose facets of autistic personhood into sterile symptom clusters’ (2017:11). Such facets, they explain, are viewed in terms of totalising defect: ‘intent, feeling, sexuality, gender identity, and sensation […] all of that which might be used to call oneself properly a person’ (4). In discrediting trans people by pathologising non-normative emotional responses to gender-related distress, the Cass review is both ableist and transphobic in its gatekeeping of how gender identity ‘should’ be expressed.
It positions neurocognitive, neurodevelopmental, and psychosocial disabilities as pathological causes of gender-distress, rather than as legitimate intersections of human experience. As a result, trans youth, and adults up to the age of 25 seeking affirming healthcare are stuck in a double-bind. They are obliged to story their experiences of gender-related distress in neuronormative ways, at the risk of being discredited. Yet, this ideal cannot be grasped if gender-related psychological distresses are, in turn, pathologised as ‘symptoms’.
Few people listen to autistic transgender people or ask them their reasons for transitioning. Their dual identities are not competing; they are complementary. The acceptance of each affords transgender autistic people new freedoms they otherwise would not have. A lot of the bias against this population is also rooted in the idea that autistic people cannot understand what is in their own best interests. This pernicious ableism compounded with transphobia implies that autistic people cannot understand their own gender identity. Still, autistic people know what they want and need. They are the ones who know best about their identities and how to ensure that their bodies line up with what is in their minds. The only thing they need from other people is affirmation and support.
Due both to their ability to denaturalize social norms and to their neurological differences, autistic individuals can offer novel insights into gender as a social process.
Examining gender from an autistic perspective highlights some elements as socially constructed that may otherwise seem natural and supports an understanding of gender as fluid and multidimensional.
Neurodivergent people are more likely than the general population to be gender non-conforming.
LGBTQI+ people with an Autistic diagnosis have two separate rainbows — and two separate coming out stories.
People who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people are.
Autistic people are more likely than neurotypical people to be gender diverse, several studies show, and gender-diverse people are more likely to have autism than are cisgender people.
Members of the neurodiversity movement adopt a position of diversity that encompasses a kaleidoscope of identities that intersects with the LGBTQIA+ kaleidoscope by recognising neurodivergent traits as natural variations of cognition, motivations, and patterns of behaviour within the human species.
“Queer,” in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.
In many ways, the impulse to repress transgender people from expressing their true identity is rooted in the same impulse that makes people want to stop #ActuallyAutistic people from flapping their hands.b
Autistic and queer folks share some dark history—and some bad actors.
Learning about the shared DNA of gay conversion therapy and ABA reaffirmed what Martin Luther King wrote in 1963 “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
Plenty of autistic people are LGBTQ and experience a double portion of discrimination. The desire to eliminate the traits that make autistic people unique is rooted in the same impulse to suppress people from affirming their gender identity or sexuality.
ABA and its conversion therapy kin are with us still, all too alive and well.
Protecting queer kids protects also neurodivergent kids—and vice versa. The fight is for inclusion and acceptance—for all operating systems, for all of our different ways of being human.
Queer and neurodivergent liberation are entwined.
I don’t need a cure for me.
Conversion therapy is wrong. Conversion therapy does not work.
Autistic perceptions of gender identity are far more diverse, and put interests, rather than gender identity, at the core of autistic people’s identity perception.
Autistic people often state repeatedly in their accounts how confusing and emotionally taxing ‘doing gender’ is for them, explaining why they may explicitly reject being confined to traditional and binary gender norms.
Children on the autism spectrum are more than seven times more likely to show signs of gender variance.
Being both autistic and gender non-conforming, some children face a double-challenge in responding to society’s biases.
People who feel significant distress because their gender identity differs from their birth sex have higher-than-expected rates of autism.
People with autism appear to have higher rates of gender dysphoria than the general population.
Rates of autism and autism traits appear to be higher in those identifying as genderqueer.
Gender norms should not be imposed on people with autism to make the rest of the world more comfortable.
Knowing how to navigate in a world that is not really friendly with people who are trans can be tricky when you are missing social cues.
We can see that a lot of the social rules around gender are bullshit basically.
Learning that they are autistic can show people that they are not wrong for living outside prescribed social rules and norms, including ones for gender and sexuality. Once they accept that they are autistic, they realize that a lot of social norms are constrictive and should be questioned
Masked Autism and being a closeted gender minority often go hand in hand, and the experiences share a lot of features.
When your belief system teaches that disability and gender variance are embarrassing and disgusting, it’s hard to look at your child and recognize those traits.
We have to make society over again from the ground up, our own little neuro-queer microsocieties. Because no one else will think to include us.
When a person’s gender is doubted because they are autistic, this paves the way for removing autistic people’s agency in all kinds of other ways.
Trans autistic people often lack access to services and supports that understand and respect all aspects of their identity.
Too frequently, autistic people are denied basic rights to make decisions about our own bodies and health care, including when it comes to expressing our gender identity.
Part of presuming my competence includes presuming I know my own gender.
Our dual identities are not competing; they are complementary.
#Autism#Acceptance: Be aware that some 30% of #actuallyautistic people are LGBTQ. A significant number do not identify as either male or female, but may be non-binary or other preferred terms. Please ensure that autism acceptance & info includes all genders. Many thanks.
Now I am home I can feel wind on my skin Feel true love from within battle scars Now I'm reborn Can occupy space in my body Surgery gave me freedom
How long can you put up With doctors making decisions about your life My body, my choices I am so fed up Of asking for approval and being doubted Seen as abnormal
Now I am home I can feel wind on my skin Feel true love from within battle scars Now I'm reborn Can occupy space in my body Surgery gave me freedom
No more waking up at 3 o' clock Panic mode, trying to accept this body is yours Seeing in the window of a crowded street 'I'm still not as flat as the boy next to me' Your binder in the closet, it gave you too much pain But mentally this is suffocating too in a way There's no one here, no one there, No one that looks like you, Your life is the joke in a hollywood cartoon
Home I've been searching for it Like a snail, lost without it Home I've been searching for it Now I have found my
Home I can feel wind on my skin Feel true love from within battle scars Now I'm reborn Can occupy space in my body Surgery gave me freedom
