Uncomfortable Labels

by Laura Kate Dale

  Once, when I was pretty young, a friend’s little brother mistakenly added the letters ‘any’ to the end of my birth name, because that was how they thought names worked. They had a sister Bethany, Mummy, Daddy, and I just ended up with this ‘any’ sort of sound added to the end of my name. While it wasn’t an explicitly gendered act, to me it made me feel like my name was being made more feminine, less male. I used that altered version as a nickname for probably a decade or so. I was just so enamoured with the idea of a feminine nickname that I had an excuse to start using.

  On top of this, my biological father, who I did not live with, put a lot of pressure on me to fulfill the role of son if I wanted to achieve his love and support. He may not have meant to, but he did. At the age of six, for goodness knows what reason, my biological father, when driving me home to my mother and stepfather one day, told me that before I was born he had sex with a married woman behind her husband’s back, she got pregnant, and that he believed that this woman’s first-born son was biologically his child. Not only did he drop that bombshell but he informed me that my middle name was actually this child’s forename. My father had literally named me after a potential older brother I might have somewhere in the world. As you can imagine, that was a lot for six–year-old me to take on board. My mother supported me a lot through that incident, and it ultimately instilled a strong moral compass point within me that ensured I would never cheat on any romantic partner in my life, but it did forever shape the way I saw my relationship with my biological father. I wasn’t for certain his first-born child; I might be the second child, named after and living in the shadow of this older boy somewhere out in the world. My father was into football, sports, F1 racing and other traditionally male interests. If I wanted to live up to my namesake, I thought I had to be the son he had clearly wished he had raised. I thought I had to be male if I wanted his love.

  Spoiler alert: unsupportive dads remain unsupportive dads, even if you try to fake an interest in all the things they like. He still didn’t really seem to care for me, but I had to give it a shot.

  When you combine both autism and dysphoria

  Having autism, but being trans, medical staff looked past my autism symptoms because I didn’t fit the extreme male brain mould of individuals with autism popularised in the early 1990s. By acting more in line with expectations of femininity, and more in line with female presentations of autism, there’s a risk of falling under the radar as an odd but well-behaved child whose issues are not enough of a nuisance to those around them to be of concern. If you’re trans but also live with autism, you’re likely already a target of bullying, and parental/adult advice that rejecting gendered norms will result in increased harassment is taken very much to heart.

  What you’re left with is a child who knows they’re unhappy with their gender, but afraid to say anything. A child who takes things incredibly personally and experiences the world at the extremes of highs and lows. There’s a real clash, and for me, it was enough to dissuade transition and prevent diagnosis for well over a decade.

  Theories that miss the mark

  In recent years a few theories began to be floated around (often by those not on the autism spectrum) about why transgender status and autism diagnosis tend to be correlated with one another, and as someone who lives with autism, I’d like to take a little time to pick apart some of the ones I personally feel make the least practical sense.

  One of the biggest theories posited over the past few years by non-trans medical professionals who do not live with autism has been the idea that people with autism are trans more often than the general population because people with autism often develop obsessive specialised fixations and interests, and that perhaps in some of us that area of specialist interest is gender, leading us to believe we are beyond the boundaries of gender itself or something to that effect.

  Now look, I’m not going to try to deny that I sometimes have obsessive interests and that they can be a bit all consuming. Some of my first successful social experiences were a result of me having an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon, and I spent many years of my life dedicating my social life to organising and sorting trading card collections. But there’s a big difference between how it feels to have an obsessive autism area of interest, and to be trans. When I obsessively fixate on a topic, I find myself dedicating my time to reading up every possible fact about it. Data, numbers, facts, solid unchanging information I can learn, and that won’t change. I have a free moment and my mind will just shout a short four- or five-word sentence about that topic on loop, like ‘exodia decks need card advantage and high turnover’, obsessively thinking the same thought over and over and over and over to the point I’ll make charts and write essays and re-read the same list of stats over and over.

  I don’t feel that way about my gender identity. It’s not a repeated, obsessive compulsion. It doesn’t grab my head and shout, loud and frantic, repeating like a broken record, demanding to be fed, demanding to be allowed to show itself to the world. My gender identity is private and personal. It’s calm, quiet and innate. It’s a thing I know without research, and honestly a thing that in spite of its importance in my life has never demanded my obsessive looped fixation. I know I’m a woman, and day to day I don’t think about that; I just know it. I’ve never read a book of stats about women, and I don’t have any interest in knowing all the numerical data and points of information there are to know. It’s just not the same as an obsessive area of interest. One of those is who I am. One is my brain looping and fixating and shouting until I’m full of static. Both are uncomfortable if ignored, but in such fundamentally different ways that the comparison only makes sense when made by someone looking at symptoms listed on paper.

  There’s also a theory that states that perhaps trans status isn’t actually more common in individuals with autism than the general population, but only appears to be because autism causes people to lack awareness of social norms. The theory goes that, if lacking in social norm awareness, a person with autism who happens to be trans will have an easier time coming out, and that the rate of trans people in the autism community is actually more reflective of the general population percentage, if people were not afraid to come out.

  As someone with autism who came out as trans, I’m personally not a fan of this theory, because it really downplays how tough coming out as trans when living with autism really is. As an individual with autism, I faced decades of bullying and isolation as a result of the world being able to tell I was different, and I had seen the consequences of nonconformity first hand. The problem is that when you’ve already been harassed for not being normal, the idea of coming out as trans, another mark on you that will label you as abnormal, carries a terrifying weight: the fear that past harassment will occur again. I was brutally aware from media depictions how people react to gender nonconformity. I didn’t want to repaint a target I had spent years trying to learn to hide. Coming out as trans wasn’t any easier just because I was living with autism.

  Let’s also set something straight while we’re here: I honestly can’t work out how there are still people out there who believe in the extreme male brain theory of autism, in a world where so many trans women live with autism. How are there people who simultaneously think autism is real, and occurs in trans women, but occurs because those people assigned male at birth have brains that are too male? Are we so male we go all the way around to the other end of the gender spectrum? I don’t think that’s how any of this works. I do not believe I am so male that I feel female as a result.

  Autism as a spider chart

  One aspect of autism spectrum conditions that is often misunderstood is what it means for autism to be a spectrum condition. When many people picture the autism spectrum, they picture it as a straight line – from ‘doesn’t have any autism’ to ‘having all of the autism’ – a strong to mild line that people fit on, and that binary line allows people to label the condition’s severity neatly as ‘severe’ or ‘mild’. W
hen we talk about people with autism in terms of them being high functioning or low functioning, we run into a couple of issues. It overlooks the fact that there are people like me who might be able to function well in society for the most part, but some days I just have to curl up in a ball and rock and cry and I can’t get anything done. I have high-functioning days and low-functioning days, and to distil my condition down to just one or the other side of that has its own issues. During the times I am read as high functioning, I am denied help and support for a lifelong condition I live with. When I am read as low functioning, I am denied agency over my life, and told I am not in a position to be trusted to make my own choices. Most notably, as will be discussed later in this book, gender transition healthcare specialists often attempt to limit access to transition-related treatments for patients known to be on the autism spectrum.

  Autism’s spectrum is far more like a spider chart, specifically the kind of spider charts you’ll see if you google image search ‘Persona 5 Stats Screen’. Don’t worry if you don’t know what it is, it’s a video game; it’s just the example I like to direct people to in order to visually illustrate my point. I’m on the autism spectrum, and when talking about my condition, you might explain it by way of a number of varying factors, each ranked one to five, mild to severe on that specific trait. I might be a four on audio processing difficulty, a one on speech difficulty and a five on difficulty eating multi-textured foods. Someone else might be a four on needing weighted blankets to sleep, a two on needing tags removed from clothing and a four on sleep issues. Rather than the severity of the condition being a single comparable number, it’s a whole host of varied data points, which could be higher or lower from person to person. Sure, they might add up to a higher or lower number, but that fails to paint an accurate picture of the whole condition. Being nonverbal might weigh more highly than colour sensitivity in terms of hampering life, but that’s not to say that a colour sensitivity wouldn’t be terribly limiting to a person who loves artistic creation.

  It’s far too easy for people to visualise autism as a line from mild to severe, but it’s ultimately a unique spider’s web of difficulties and areas of ease which are hard to directly compare.

  CHAPTER 2

  Being the Weird Kid

  From the ages of roughly 5 to 15, I was undeniably ‘the weird kid’ growing up. As mentioned previously, starting school, things were a little bit mixed for me. While getting a daily routine and structure to work within, and the consistency that was brought along with it, was initially helpful at getting on top of some of my autism-related struggles, that same environment required me to quickly adapt to a new level of social survival which I was certainly not prepared for.

  So, let’s start with the autism. It’s no secret that children who grow up with autism spectrum conditions are often labelled by the adults around them as being ‘a little different’ or ‘a bit odd’. Both of those phrases are couched in the politeness and softened edge of adulthood, trying to spin it as something not inherently bad. But, as a kid who grew up with those labels attached, I can assure you that other children are not nearly so nice, optimistic or forgiving in their outlook on the situation.

  As I described in Chapter 1, there were a few years at the start of school where I managed to fit in okay, primarily thanks to an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon, which made me a valuable social commodity. The problem was that the fad level status of Pokémon only lasted a few years, and when it faded, my social status quickly faded with it and the other kids started to back away socially. At age nine, one of my teachers described me as ‘being very aware of [their] limitations, including being forgetful, being distracted, difficulty with writing, and the many little habits [they] display’. That same year, I ate most of my lunches in the bathroom because I was afraid of being mocked by my peers. I was laughed out of friendship groups, and spent most of that year sitting alone by myself, watching other kids play, but not being invited to join.

  The issue was that I didn’t understand most of the nuances of social interaction beyond directly stated truth, with no hidden meaning behind it. I struggled to understand sarcasm or humour based on implied double meaning, causing me to take anything said to me very literally and at face value. I would routinely be bullied by kids who recognised this unquestioning nature and used it to their advantage. I remember being told by a fellow child that it was trade lunches day and I was supposed to give them the nice things from my lunch, and I did, because I didn’t see why someone would make that up. There were kids who told me to eat dirt because that’s how you got to join ‘the cool group’ and be friends with them, then laughed about it for weeks afterwards. I was coerced into doing things I did not want to do, because I felt cripplingly alone, and was too willing to believe what was told to me. The concept that I might be being deceived just didn’t seem to occur to me.

  On top of this, you have to consider that my disconnect with my gender impacted things too. When trying to socialise with girls, who I felt more socially connected with, I was largely shunned as a result of presenting at the time as male. Society builds up a set of gendered expectations around the way girls should treat boys as children, and those expectations prevented me ever being able to build those close female connections during childhood. These are all generalisations, but they’re ones pushed by media, against children, that play a role in setting the barriers we place. Boys have cooties, boys are gross, boys are not to be trusted, boys are dangerous. Boys are not to be invited into the inner circle of a friendship, they’re not to be invited for sleepovers, or sat with, or encouraged to think they belong. Any close relationship with a boy is romantic, and that’ll be a point of ridicule, so don’t get too close.

  I really didn’t fare any better when trying to socialise with the boys in primary school. Mostly, I was perceived as being too soft, bookish and overly emotional to fit in with what the guys around me were doing. I didn’t have the right temperament, the right attitude or the right type of confidence. I didn’t hold myself in the same way they did, and they could smell it a mile off. Over the years, there were boys who took advantage of this lack of confidence, assertiveness and support structures, most memorably when I was around ten years old a boy called Daniel. Daniel was the kind of boy who fulfilled a lot of the more traditional masculine stereotypes of what people imagine a young boy is meant to be. He was boisterous, energetic and knew how to work social situations to get what he wanted out of them. Daniel didn’t live in the same town as me until moving there around age ten. Due to my clear struggles socialising, and my gentle welcoming nature, when this new kid transferred to our school the teacher assigned me as Daniel’s first friend. I was told that he was going to be lonely, and I was mature enough to look after him, and that I had to make sure I made friends with him. Due to being on the autism spectrum, I took my teacher’s command that I had to be his friend incredibly literally. I fully believed that, if I ever stopped being his friend, I would be breaking a school rule from a teacher. That’s the groundwork for a lot of what came after.

  Teachers and parents who talked about my friendship with Daniel often used the comparative phrase ‘like chalk and cheese’, a phrase meaning we were as different from each other as it was feasibly possible to be. We had nothing in common, and his energetic, rule-breaking attitude clashed deeply with my own personal values in a way that made me incredibly uncomfortable. In the early weeks, the only thing keeping me in the friendship was the insistence that I had to be his friend. Over time, the friendship shifted, into a form where Daniel took a far greater degree of control over my actions. The shift began a few weeks in, when Daniel began trying to test the boundaries and see what he could convince me to do on his behalf. He was the kind of kid who got into trouble on a regular basis, testing and breaking rules just to see where the boundaries lay, always to great discomfort on my part. That discomfort seemed to amuse Daniel. He enjoyed watching me fight to do what was correct and right. At first he was simply content to w
atch me squirm, refusing to break rules and getting uncomfortable. He would after a while lay off me, pat me on the back and insist it had been a joke, or some kind of test of friendship.

  Over time, his approach began to shift. Daniel began to ask me to break school rules, and when I refused, to hold the threat of social isolation above me as a threat. I’d confided in him that I didn’t have any other friends, a fact he manipulated over a period of around eighteen months. He would repeatedly state that he was my only real friend, and that if I didn’t do as he said, I would be back to being alone. And the problem was, I was afraid of going back to being alone. He had given me a taste of social support. As tiring as Daniel was for me to spend time with, he was a person who told me that they liked my company. It was someone who made me feel like I was understood. Someone who made me feel wanted. That was hard to let go.

  He took advantage of my fears of abandonment and isolation to strip me of my own name, referring to me only as ‘stick’. He made me repeat a mantra, ‘I’m as thin as a stick, so that’s my name’, over and over. I wasn’t supposed to introduce myself by name to people if I was in his presence. He would demand I give him my possessions, and trade them for things he personally wanted. He would physically and verbally attack me, then afterwards tell me it was a joke, tell me that if I couldn’t take a joke and told on him, I would be back to having no friends. Over a year and a half, he completely warped my view of social situations, by virtue of being the only person willing to offer me their social energy at school. He was the only person who made me feel reliably wanted.