He vanished one day out of nowhere. I heard his mother who he did not live with had taken him away in the dead of night. While I’ve reconnected with him as an adult, and he’s apologised for the way he acted, his actions stuck with me for a very long time. I ended up using my relationship with Daniel as my model for healthy relationships for a while, and it kind of messed with me. Being socially isolated as a trans child with autism, it’s incredibly tempting to take unhealthy sources of support, company and desire where you can find them. It’s the reason I stayed friends with Daniel for years in spite of him beating and insulting me. It’s the reason why I would often end up sitting across from my deputy headteacher, crying because I’d been bullied, and refusing to tell them who it was. I was afraid of being alone and unwanted. It’s also the reason that, before I hit my teen years, I was on two separate occasions the victim of sexual assault from adults.
Without going into great detail about the specifics of either event, both were with older men who had reasons up front to spend time in my company, but manipulated my trust in them in order to do things that I look back on with horror. There was an adult who offered to learn to play the trading card game Yu-Gi-Oh, so that I would have someone to play with rather than playing imaginary games against myself. He later encouraged me to play ‘strip Yu-Gi-Oh’, which he very much led me to believe was a normal thing for a prepubescent child and someone above the age of sexual consent to do together. He was eventually caught in possession of child pornography, something that took me a long time to process. My awareness of my own obliviousness took a long time to accept.
There was also a much older child on a trip away, one of the older kids who stayed with the group to help act as a responsible adult for group trips. He encouraged me to show him my genitals, in spite of the wide age gap before performing a sexual act which he insisted at the time was some sort of best friends bonding activity. He told me that, if he did it, then we would end up best friends forever. I’d never had a best friend. I felt deeply uncomfortable, but as he was the adult I was supposed to bring my worries and concerns to, I didn’t know how to respond, and so I never told anyone. I just ignored him and hid from him as best I could the rest of the trip.
Both offered me companionship; they made me feel wanted, they threatened I would end up forever alone if I refused their desires and they made me feel like if I told anyone, I would lose them forever. I believed them, because as someone with autism I have always taken things very literally. Often, the idea someone might have lied to me doesn’t even occur, and it’s not until someone else points it out, or I get plenty of space and distance, that I can see I’ve been messed around with. When you’re constantly alone, struggling to make friends but desperate not to be alone, you’ll take any source of comfort that’s offered, particularly those that manipulate you based on their knowledge of your isolation.
It took me a while, but I eventually found a support structure to replace those bad relationships in the form of my cats Ellie and Smudge. I’ve always liked cats; I feel like I have a lot in common with them. A gentle, feminine energy; a desire to initiate physical and social contact on their own terms; a comfort with being alone; but a need to have occasional social contact. Cats and I have a lot in common, and I’ve found them a pretty perfect level of social contact. Even today, my cat Smudge comes into my office in the morning, curls up on my lap and spends most of the day there. She provides warmth and pressure on my lap, which help keep me calm. She moves and interacts with me, offering a small living touch that just can’t be replaced by non-living objects. She is okay with me taking time away without explanation, and she’s there when I need to talk about the things I’m too scared to tell the world.
My first cat, Ellie, was the first living being I told out loud that I thought I might be trans. She was also the only one I wanted to spend time with in the immediate aftermath of getting my Asperger’s diagnosis. She’s a silent companion who doesn’t make me feel odd, or weird, or abnormal. Ellie and Smudge offered me the comfort and support I needed to start growing away from some very unhealthy relationship patterns. It’s thanks to Ellie and Smudge that I learned I could walk away from people who made me uncomfortable, or who hurt me, and I wouldn’t be left alone and abandoned. I would always have my cats.
That sense of security is really important when growing up and later living at the intersection of two situations that often cause difficulty socialising and being accepted in social situations. They’re a reliable constant, one that’s not concerned with whether or not you’re like the people around them. If you offer them love and support, they’ll offer it in response. Sometimes, that’s all a person needs.
Secondary school
These issues only got worse the longer I was in the education system growing up, as my sense of self-image became more solidified. I was a kid who was obsessed with specific niche topics that people didn’t want to hear me obsessively waffle on about. I was a kid whose stimming actions to avoid becoming overwhelmed by sensory information started off as cute quirks, but over time became socially inappropriate coping mechanisms that were deemed optional voluntary actions that distracted other students. Sports were gender segregated, further solidifying the idea that I was not, nor was I welcome to be, with the people I felt more at home with. Bullies became more empowered and learned new methods to control and manipulate those they wanted to upset.
Bullies at the advent of secondary school started to target my coping mechanisms and take advantage of my obsessive nature. They would steal specific pens or items from me, and taunt me with the knowledge that they were mine but I could not get them back into my possession, and that they still existed but not in my company. They would steal or break stimming tools I had fashioned for myself, like a trio of magnets I would obsessively switch from a cluster to a line and back. They would tell me I was heading towards the wrong room or the wrong class, or that I was running late, in order to play with my obsessive anxieties. They would deliberately tighten my tie as I passed, making it incredibly distressing in its tightness, but simultaneously incredibly difficult to remove. They would spray water at my crotch alleging that I had wet myself, not to embarrass me, but because they knew creating a lie about me, and refusing to acknowledge the truth we both knew, was more distressing than anything else they could do. They mocked that I was too manly to be a girl, but too girly to be a boy, and that as a result I was never going to fit in anywhere. That one particularly stung.
One of the most annoying yet amusing things about thinking back on my childhood, as an adult who is now comfortably out as transgender, is the stark contrast between how I was viewed before and after transition, in terms of being perceived masculine or feminine. Put simply, every way I’ve ever presented my gender, the world has tried to tell me was wrong. The whole time I was in the education system, I was yet to come out as transgender, meaning in my school years I presented as male. Routinely, I would be told by adults and my peers alike that I was too feminine to be male. I cried too easily, I was too gentle and soft, I was into the wrong things, I spoke the wrong way, I held my body the wrong way or I socialised with the wrong people. It was a big part of the mentality used to bully me: I was too feminine, and that was a problem. I had to uncomfortably sit in gendered spaces like the sports changing rooms, afraid of my body being seen, and uncomfortably surrounded by the kinds of gross ‘locker room’ talk about women that you’ll only experience when men think you’re ‘one of them’. I had to listen, and not be obviously silent, while also not agreeing with them, whenever they spouted gross sexist rhetoric about women. It was a hideous environment, where I felt I was being attacked without them even knowing they were attacking me. It wasn’t a malicious attack, it was just what they happened to believe.
When I would come home crying after being bullied, my step-dad would tell me that I needed to man up.
Adults would look at my eyes, deep blue with what I’m told are exceptionally long eyelashes, and tell me my eyelash
es were wasted on a boy. They were too gorgeous. Any woman would kill for natural lashes like mine. In adulthood, I’ve had makeup artists shocked by those lashes. In childhood, I was told they were lashes only a woman deserved, and that I didn’t deserve them, as I was not a woman. I loved my eyelashes. I hated that I’d stolen them, forever to waste them on an undeserving male face.
Now, if you grow up being told you’re not masculine enough to be male, you’ll probably end up like me, assuming that if you transition, that clearly inherent femininity will shine through. Growing up, everyone could clearly see the woman underneath my male label, and as such surely if I try to present as female, that’ll just be leaning into that, right? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.
As an out trans adult, I’m now told I’m too masculine to be female, which feels like the world playing a cruel joke. Not transitioning until after I’d gone through a testosterone puberty certainly didn’t help with that, as it’s pretty hard to fight some of those changes once they’ve happened.
Still, nobody tells me anymore that my eyelashes should belong to somebody else. I like that I’m now allowed to enjoy my eyelashes.
CHAPTER 3
The Teen Tipping Point
Growing up, feelings of being uncomfortable with my assigned at birth gender, as well as struggles with the symptoms of autism, were both real and present parts of my life. I lived quietly harbouring an awareness that I didn’t see the world the same as others, or feel at ease with who the world thought I was. The symptoms were visible, but I had them sufficiently under control so that they didn’t cause problems for the people around me. My struggles were my own, and they were able to be kept isolated in my own little bubble, and so they were ignored by both me and the world around me.
That all changed when I was around 15 years old, when a series of life changes made both my autism and my trans status bubble to the surface, in forms that I and those around me found harder to deny were problems. Let’s start with the first big change in my teenage years that acted as a catalyst for change: undergoing testosterone-based puberty.
When at around 15 I started to undergo masculine, testosterone-based puberty it was noticeably later than most of my peers. It all began with my Adam’s apple, which ballooned in size seemingly overnight. Due to my very wiry frame, my pointy Adam’s apple was more prominent than was common, a fact which often drew comments. I vividly remember a dinner at a restaurant where my younger sister kept moving her hand up and down in time with my Adam’s apple every time I swallowed, commenting on how weird and pointy and visible it was to the world. I ended up going and crying in the bathroom, pushing my throat, trying to flatten it. Then came the voice changes. My voice dipped fairly noticeably, and I instantly hated it. It felt heavy, weighed down and alien. It never felt like it fitted in my mouth. It was another person’s voice replacing my own. However, my relationship with my voice wasn’t terribly simple, because the voice drop coincided with a momentary drop in bullying.
A lot of the bullying I received in the early years of secondary school education centred around my gendered presentation, my not being masculine enough to be considered male. This being the mid-2000s, calling someone at school gay was still a pretty common insult topic. I got deeply frustrated by the suggestion, but not because I thought there was anything wrong with two people of the same gender being attracted to each other. What I struggled to verbalise at the time was a deep confusion around how the term gay applied to me. I knew I wasn’t attracted to men, which was the root of their allegations, but I also knew that I didn’t feel like heterosexuality fitted me either. Years later I would put two and two together that I was gay and attracted to women, and that was why the label of gay being used to pair me with men hurt. I wanted that term to pair me with women. I dearly wanted the bullies to stop positioning me as a gay man, because every time they did it forced me to ask myself uncomfortable questions about myself that I wasn’t yet ready to find the answers to.
Returning to my voice changes, this was where that double-edged sword came into play. While I hated my new deeper voice, it seemed to very quickly prevent bullies from calling me a gay man as an insult. Sure they still bullied me, but it was no longer on a topic that forced me to confront very scary questions about identity, so I considered it a step up. This played in to how I ended up feeling about facial hair as it began to grow. I deeply disliked its presence, but it stopped people from questioning my gender in ways I was not ready to address. I worked out that I could grow my hair out long, but as long as I kept facial hair, nobody would suspect anything about my feelings regarding gender. My facial hair was a smoke screen, used to grow my hair out to a length I felt more comfortable with, while avoiding any tough questions.
Having lived through the 90s and early 2000s, I was well aware that trans people were the punchlines to jokes, not people to be taken seriously. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective featured a trans woman character, who the protagonist finds attractive, until learning of her trans status. He proceeds to vomit repeatedly and scrub himself, while crying. This is all played off as a gag. He then strips off all her clothes in front of an audience, much to her dismay, exposing her penis against her will, ready for the entire watching police force to laugh and/or vomit in disgust themselves. This was a pretty common situation for trans characters in media in the 90s; they existed, but to be ridiculed or displayed as objects of disgust and horror. I felt uncomfortable about my gender assigned at birth, but I didn’t want to admit to the world I was that punchline. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was that punchline. As a result, I leaned into my new deep voice and facial hair. I hated them, but they kept me safe from having to answer tough questions about myself.
Every day, I had to choose between acknowledging the deep discomfort I was feeling, or hiding it and suffering alone. For years, I chose suffering. The more I leant into trying to hide it, the more it hurt. The more it hurt, the more I knew this was a real thing I was experiencing, and that it was killing me to ignore.
When it came to the exacerbation of my autism symptoms, I found that my symptoms got worse at around the same time, but for very different reasons. I reached the point in schooling where we began to prepare for GCSE exams, which brought with it a series of additional structural challenges. When kids reach their mid-teens in UK education, they start to prepare for their GCSE exams, a big part of which is picking subjects to study and subjects to drop. As a result of the broadening of the curriculum, as well as a switched focus to ability-based groupings, the education system becomes a lot less rigidly structured. Rather than having the same classes, on the same days, every single week, many schools like my own switch to an alternating two-week rota in order to fit in the expanded list of classes. One Monday might have maths in the morning, the next Monday starts with cookery. This switch from a predictable, static rota to one that kept changing hugely distressed me, because it took away my ability to confidently know something about how my day would play out based solely on what day of the week it was. I would no longer automatically pair one data point with a predictable series of events, and that made it not only more difficult for me to remain organised, but also to remain calm while navigating my days. The number of times I completely forgot to complete homework or to bring it into a lesson was honestly ridiculous, and I can’t blame people for pinning it on laziness or a lack of effort on my part to be organised. I didn’t have the words to explain that it was the school that had ripped routine and structure from me, and that it was their changes to my routine making it hard for me to keep on top of my work.
On top of this, the change to a GCSE curriculum-based routine also meant that I no longer had the stability of the same people in every class I attended. Up until GCSEs began, every year of my education, I had all my classes with the same thirty people: thirty students with whom I went through Reception up to Year 6, thirty new students Years 7 to 9, then all of a sudden every lesson was a different group of people, with seating plans based on who ge
ts to which room from the previous class first. Every class it’s different spaces, different people, often different rooms. Every class was a fresh state of new situations to encounter.
Then, there’s the homework schedule, which steps up at GCSE level. There’s no firm rhyme or reason to when homework is or is not given, nor when it is due in. Some days no classes will assign homework, and other days three different classes will. Some days no homework is due, some days several pieces are. Some homework is due in the next instance of the class; other homework isn’t due until a week and a half later. The fact that there was no set homework pattern made not only remembering to do it and hand it in difficult, but also caused distress around the lack of routine outside of school. Until the uptick in homework, my free time was entirely my own, and I could plan how to spend it to whatever obsessive degree I wanted. I could always plan in advance my time after school, and that was a refuge from the unpredictability of life. However, once homework was thrown in as a randomised element, I became unable to plan how much free time I would have outside of school, what work if any I would have to do and how long it would take me to complete.
With both my in-school and at-home routines shaken up, I lost the constants that had allowed me to keep my brain under control and my symptoms just got more and more difficult to avoid. It’s easier to navigate an ocean of overwhelming sensory information when there are predictable constants you can aim for and know will be where they should be. Without that, it becomes like trying to stumble your way through a place you’ve never been, drowned in visual and audio static.
Uncomfortable Labels Page 4