Unriddling the Sphinx: Autism & the Magnetism of Gender Transition
When people note that “trans children” tend to have autistic traits and that children with an autism diagnosis (particularly natal girls, but also boys) are massively overrepresented in the population that is referred to assessment and treatment for gender dysphoria, many trans people’s (and allies’) response is that it is a kind of dehumanization and denial of agency to claim that autistic people cannot be transgender, do not have the right to seek gender transition, or that they may be vulnerable to being exploited by the transgender healthcare system. Most recently, this claim has come up again with regards to a recent piece by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, where among many other things she notes the enormous increase in child referrals to gender clinics, including a disproportionate number of autistic children, to explain her reticence to endorse the political stances of modern transgender movements.
This is my response as an autistic woman, who was once an autistic child, who is a lesbian with experiences of gender dysphoria and who once wanted to transition to male.
Recognizing our vulnerability to social predation and to cultural systems that we do not understand because they were not made for us is not offensive. As autistic people, it is key to claiming our autonomy as a particular kind of disabled person. We often do not recognize our limitations in reference to greater social systems not because we are “too stupid” (i.e. cognitively or intellectually limited) but because we have different value systems than neurotypical people and hierarchical institutions built for their benefit. Autism is a pervasive developmental disability, and it is a way of being. It is not merely being a “regular person” minus various clinically defined psychological capacities or skills. It is a difference across all domains of life, and as a disability that causes differences in our social and sensory perception it is also a disability that causes differences in what we want and what we care about.
Both those who exhibit condescending “concern” for autistic people and those people who naively defend our right to do whatever we see fit miss this component of being autistic. It is not that we are merely vulnerable because we are missing parts of our decision-making or social skills apparatus. It is not that we are merely being unfairly denied what we want to do, and our autism is immaterial, just some excuse for the denial.
It’s that we aren’t recognized as having wants, only “special needs”. It’s that we aren’t given the skills to know what it is that we want, or that it might be different from those around us. It’s that we are never told how to get what we want in safe and healthy ways, or that there is even a potentially safe and healthy way to get it. It’s that we are deemed automatically pathological and empty of internal experiences as autistic people. It’s that we’re not given any help on how to navigate our deep differences from others and how to navigate being deprived of social resources and networking in a way that doesn’t tell us to just cover it up and deal with it. It’s that most people who dedicate their lives to “helping” us do not care about any of these things, merely that we can be trained to act in a way that doesn’t disrupt the lives of neurotypical people.
Given this context, it is far more insulting to me to insist that having autonomy renders us somehow invulnerable to exploitation than to correctly perceive that we are in fact an intensely vulnerable people. By nature of our disability, we are always on the margins of social resources and social networks, and exercising our autonomy unfortunately often puts us even further outside social acceptability and social protection rather than somehow shielding us materially from the consequences of living a self-actualized autistic life. Few autistic people are prepared for this when they begin trying to make decisions “true to self” in adolescence.
I believe nearly every autistic person is traumatized from the consequences of living in this world and what others do to us. Clinicians do not usually recognize that autistic children and adults can be traumatized, that there is even anything there to traumatize. (Why else could they feel so comfortable shocking us, shackling us, or feeding us bleach?)
I think because we are not neurotypical we often struggle to understand just why a neurotypical person would feel ok excluding us, or maybe even anyone. Many of us autistic people have little impulse to do such things, and if we do, we rarely have the social power to make someone that we’ve cut out of our lives unemployable, unable to access medical care, food, housing, and so on. But neurotypical institutions are set up, from top to bottom, to create hierarchies of value with extreme material difference between the top and bottom. They are set up to stratify the “worthy” people from “unworthy” people.
Autistic people are almost universally considered “unworthy” in these systems, and to the extent that we can curry favor from them we must consent to our exploitation: to entering into a transaction on neurotypical terms, where we can get some sort of worth through providing a “benefit” to this hierarchical resource system which is not made according to our value system or for us whatsoever. This is common to all marginalized people. But it is often particularly poignant to autistic people, who struggle to find community with any social group of human beings. There is no “elsewhere” for us, there is no “home”. We are stuck, as they say, on the “wrong planet”, and the spaceship was destroyed.
The idea that exercising our autonomy would protect us from this world rather than render us more vulnerable because we are refusing to transact correctly or refusing to provide a benefit is utterly absurd. Our autonomy is perfectly compatible with our continued social ostracization and exploitation. It usually coexists with our continued social ostracization and exploitation.
In social skills classes– or just the wild, wild world– you are not taught how to deal with the fact that everyone will hate you for being you. You are taught to be someone else. You are not taught about your native autonomy. You are taught about how to put your hands here or here, how to choose between actions that are condescendingly and ridiculously normal. You are not taught how to take responsibility in a way you understand, that is harmonious to your own values and others’. You are taught to hold yourself accountable for your abnormality.
So forgive me if I do not believe for one second that impersonal, well-funded medical systems that were built off of medically experimenting on intersex children and adults (the nightmares wreaked by John Money at Johns Hopkins) or psychologically experimenting on behaviorally aberrant children (UCLA, where behaviorist torturer of autistic children Ivan Lovaas tinkered with gender nonconforming children alongside conversion therapist George Rekers) have autistic people’s self-defined well being in mind.
And forgive me if I do not think informed consent clinics have autistic people’s self-defined well-being in mind when they’re more interested in rubber stamping hormones while shielding themselves from legal liability than assisting autistic adolescents and adults, who have an intrinsically different way of understanding gendered social norms, navigate the enormous complexity of how to interface with the single most fundamental social fixation of the neurotypical world as someone who will always and automatically fail.
I do not think most gender clinicians even have the first understanding of what it means to be autistic and what this does in and of itself to your understanding of gender and sexuality. What J.K. Rowling said in her piece– a straightforward accounting of facts– is far, far less insulting to me than what Diane Ehrensaft– one of the premier “experts” in the United States on pediatric transgender cases– published in a peer-reviewed journal on autism. In a 2018 letter to the editor reading remarkably like new-age material on Indigo Children, she writes that she likes to call autistic transgender children “Double Helix Rainbow Kids” and declares us “freed” from the restrictions of gender as “more creative” individuals. This article ends with an anecdote about an eight year old autistic female child with limited language use who begins speaking, making eye contact, and relating more appropriately with clinic staff after she is socially transitioned by her family. Ehrensaft muses, ““Could gender be an alleviator for the stressors of autism?”
She is not the only one to pontificate about the magical changes a gender transition brings on autistic children. Norman Spack (the first clinician in the US to use GnRH agonists on gender dysphoric children as puberty-suppressing drugs) claims in a coauthored, peer-reviewed 2012 paper (insults upon insults, in the Journal of Homosexuality) that in his clinical experience the symptoms of comorbid diagnoses–including "problems with social competence”– “decrease and even disappear” with gender treatment. In the same paper, this passage appears:
Although the question of whether gender dysphoria is simply a symptom of an autism spectrum disorder has been raised by mental health clinicians in the field, we feel it is equally worth questioning the validity of an autism diagnosis among transgender youth, particularly of those diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder. Perhaps the social awkwardness and lack of peer relationships common among GID-Asperger’s patients is a result of a lifetime of feeling isolated and rejected; and maybe the unusual behavior patterns are simply a coping method for dealing with the anxiety and depression created from living in an “alien body,” as one patient described it.
Do autistic trans people– who rightfully protest against mainstream autism organizations focusing on a “cure” for autism rather than respectful accommodations for our differences and medical needs– know that very well-connected, very respected, and very powerful gender doctors are claiming that gender transition cures the symptoms of autism? Do autistic trans people– who rightfully discuss the implications of denying that someone can both be autistic and hold a meaningful gender variant identity– know that it is an active clinical debate as to whether or not their disability and all its struggles is “just” a result of somehow ending up in the “wrong body”?
If they do not, they should know that this is how doctors are perceiving the pervasive issues that the children in their care are having: not as the result of a life-long, stigmatized, but eminently livable disability, but as the result of a mystical gender failure that can be medically corrected. That essentially, the disability “goes away” so long as outsiders no longer perceive a problem with a child’s conformity to gender norms. That either an autistic girl somehow is transfigured into a non-autistic child through transition, or more likely, an autistic girl’s autistic behavior is unfitting for her as a girl but not for her as a boy. That the “proof” of pediatric transition’s effectiveness and standard of an autistic child’s happiness is how much the child wishes to participate in neurotypical society on neurotypical society’s terms.
I cannot pretend that this isn’t ludicrously disrespectful to autistic people, or that it isn’t a total erasure of our experience as human beings. To these gender doctors, the fact that a girl might see the world in a different way and care about different things and thereby struggle in a world not made for her does not matter whatsoever, except maybe as a tokenistic “journey” she can go on alongside her wonderfully progressive and affirming doctors. What “autism” is for them is a particularly severe and inconvenient social adjustment problem which can be forcibly corrected through body modifications, should an autistic child or adult rightly note that they can’t do gender right and this is causing problems for them. They are more interested– like in a long history of abusive and even deadly “treatments” for autism– in correcting the problem for them than for the autistic person. How convenient for neurotypical people both the gender incongruous behavior and the social noncompliance goes away once you medically modify a child to look like the other sex.
I cannot be anything but sick that “increased eye contact” is a sign an autistic child needed medical meddling in the intimate process of navigating and negotiating their sexual and gender development. I cannot trust that these doctors aren’t missing enormous parts of their autistic patients’ experiences, if this is what they are so gleeful to report as a positive transformation and their justification for disrupting and surveilling children’s bodies. What do they think of autistic people and those who are gender non-conforming if they are so willing to believe that existing as a person with a stigmatized disability is actually just a misdiagnosis for the pseudoscientific condition of being a man in a woman’s body, or vice versa?
It takes many, many years and quite a bit of luck and support for most autistic people to fully understand and come to terms with how their autism affects them and sets them apart from both individual neurotypical people and neurotypical society at large. It takes years– often far, far into adulthood, especially for those abused under a medical model or for those who went decades undiagnosed– to understand the differences between social and non-social aspects of this disability.
It takes years to not resort to chalking up all of your own distress and difficulties to being a “retard”.
I have not met an autistic woman yet who did not have extreme difficulty integrating her autistic differences in values with a broader sense of self that includes whatever version of herself she uses to navigate a world in which women’s values are simultaneously invisible (since she has no right to determine them herself) and nitpicked to death (since it is important she complies).
In a world like this why would it not be difficult for autistic people to know when it is they are being fooled or exploited while participating in transgender communities or while seeking transgender health care? Autistic people– especially those who are dependent on caregivers or health systems for basic care, as well as those who depend on the goodwill of their families, employers, or welfare benefit institutions to remain as independent as they can– have to make continual compromises just to maintain enough acceptability to communicate with the outside world nonetheless do things like “make a friend”, “go to the doctor”, “find a job”.
I do not think neurotypical people understand or care that when I speak or write it is always with a similar effort as with a second language. Language– whether it is verbal or nonverbal, with all the extensive symbology of the neurotypical world– does not ever get to be something other than “translation” for me. As someone with an Asperger’s-profile of abilities who has studied the neurotypical world intensely for years, I have the opportunity to translate in a way that allows others to understand me at least some of the time. Many autistic people who are more affected live in the world which gives “autism” its name, where nobody cares to do the translation for us and we are left totally and utterly alone.
The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was likely autistic) was fixated on questions about the meaning of communication. About whether a language of one could make any sense, about what it would mean to speak about something hidden from everyone else or perhaps even ourselves. In a famous passage debated vociferously, he wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”
Many have resolved the question posed by this statement by claiming that for fuck’s sake, a lion is a lion, and has nothing to say.
Gender transition appealed to me because it was cloaked in the farcical notion that there was some version of me and my body that could finally speak directly. I never quite understood the whole Adam and Eve story as an autistic child– just don’t eat it!– but if there truly were a serpent’s apple for autistic folks it would consist of this promise: that there was a world where the glass and the fog would dissolve, that we weren’t covered in a repulsive and bumbling slime made of our own desires to understand, that instead of our words and hands glancing off the skin of everyone around us we could do that magic everyone else could and hold someone’s heart in our hands.
I was fooled because like many struggling autistic people, I wanted the problem to be me. Because then it was fixable. I would let them take my only body (which was such a sensory drag) to convert me into one of these blessed transponders that normal people were, receiving and sending all these messages like shooting stars blazing through the unimpeded vacuum of space. Without my femaleness and without the Difficulties That Should Not Be Named, I could send whatever message I wanted to whoever I wanted and it would be received, I could be gregarious, important, sexually compelling; my will and autonomy wouldn’t be stifled by 140 pounds of dumpy, itchy flesh with an overbite and slack hands.
When I imagined myself as a man I didn’t imagine myself like most of the childhood boys I managed to ingratiate myself with, who lisped, repeated themselves, and tripped over their own shoes. I imagined myself as a musician who was absolutely magnetic, I imagined myself as a writer with a legacy, I imagined myself telling other guys they were stupid shits and they could fuck off. I imagined being able to hold onto a football without dropping it, being able to smoke weed without getting a migraine, being able to talk without squeaking or letting out a little drool.
I thought I would finally be a human being with no embarrassments and nothing that could get me bullied in the bathroom between class. I thought when I would say “no”, other people would listen. I would enter whatever mystical world it is that Ehrensaft names, made of messages and meanings, where every twist of word and piece of clothing said something, connected by a fine filament back to that Necronomicon filled with the runes of social symbology. And it would make sense.
I would become a lion, not a house cat. And the lion would speak. And we would understand him.
It is a neurotypical narrative that this is what transition can do for you, because it is what someone else’s transition does for neurotypical people. A gender transition is magical because it decodes the lion. It unriddles the sphinx. The autistic person must be happier now, because the neurotypical person is happier now. (And who has an empathy deficit?)
But if I have learned to be afraid of anything as an autistic person it is not my own neuroticism and fixations, but those of the so-called “normal people”. Forget double helix rainbows: being an autistic person is like your DNA is a converted school bus trundling through the world in spray-painted glory and the whole world has an HOA. I understand why autistic people who see themselves as transgender see “concern” as the busybody stupidity of the neurotypical world. They aren’t wrong. But it exists alongside other mundane and brutal busybody stupidities, such as grant funding, progressive saviorism, and psychiatric god-complexes.
To understand and resist what the neurotypical world communicates to us about our worth is not to protest back to them in their own language. I am an autistic woman and like many other autistic women I am tired of not only making myself more palatable but translating my existence into something intelligible to outsiders, who are both men and the non-autistic. Radical feminists miss one of these; trans activists and allies miss the other. But I am irrevocably othered from both.
When you are autistic you are taught only one symbolic structure. It is not your own, but it is the only medium you will ever have to communicate with any complexity. More sinisterly, it becomes the only medium we have to communicate to ourselves, the only medium we can use to work around the silent and jumbled parts of our bodies and minds. Am I hungry? It is not always obvious. To ask the question I find myself translating, even when alone.
My fantasy about lions and men was that whatever world a lion lived in and whatever he had to say, he did not need to translate, and especially never to himself. When a lion says something he does not stop to ask if he means what he says or who is saying it. When a lion looks into the water hole and sees his own reflection, he does not need to reconcile anything. The lion does not need to speak to understand himself. A lion is made of teeth and blood and claws and the lion just does.
I do not use the symbolism of transgenderism to explain the little gaps and incongruities that are my problems with gender, with my sexed body, with sexuality. It is not only a language born of neurotypical neuroses and regulation, but it is always and forever fundamentally a translation.
As an autistic woman I have spent my whole life avoiding these dual facts, through both my time thinking of myself as trans and while trying to understand this whole thing afterwards: I am my body and I am not my body. Because I speak, but I do not understand. Because I understand, but I do not speak.
I will, unavoidably, always have to translate to speak and understand. But my autonomy requires that at bottom I must respect the native communication of my own body and mind. I refuse to use force or coercion to get it to talk, to interrupt its silence, to confabulate stories on its behalf, to speak for it using assumptions it cannot confirm or deny. I have to make peace with the fact that sometimes the blanks of my body or the redacted corners of my mind will say nothing. I have to make peace with the fact that translation is always inaccurate, that something is always beyond that constellation of symbols and words. The autistic body and the autistic mind have their own boundaries, and I refuse to believe that exercising my autonomy requires breaking them.
I do not know if J.K. Rowling knows this. I hope you do.
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