Uncomfortable Labels

by Laura Kate Dale

  On top of this, one of my key autism relaxation methods fell apart around this age: due to my feelings of dysphoria, I stopped feeling comfortable swimming. Because my body was changing in ways I was deeply uncomfortable with, I found over time that I was less and less comfortable displaying my body when swimming, and as such missed out on the autism relaxation benefits of a nice swim. Some days I would be fine, others I’d be unable to stand the idea of people seeing my body.

  I love swimming: the constant pressure of the water, the ability to move freely and the muted quiet when you’re submerged under the water. Growing up, swimming was one of my favourite things to do when I was stressed or anxious. It made me feel calm and safe and allowed me momentary respite from sensory issues. The last time I swam was around age 17, and I didn’t swim again until I was in my mid- to late 20s, after I’d had lower surgery to turn my penis into a vagina. Swimming was the biggest thing I missed during that decade of dysphoria, and my first swimming trip as an adult I just swam by myself for four hours without getting out of the pool. I’d missed it so dearly, but dysphoria had kept me from engaging in such a key autism management tool.

  The problem I think for me was that all of these issues hit me at the same time, and that combination ultimately made me feel like my whole world was falling apart around me. I’d known my routine, and I knew I could keep how I felt under wraps. Suddenly my world was chaotic, changing, uncertain and unpredictable, with me at the centre of it unable to ignore how much I disliked who I was. I’d struggled before this with socialising, but at this point it just got harder and harder. Not only was I too trusting, unable to read people properly, bad at understanding social cues and non-literal meanings, but on top of that I was leaning hard into a presentation and personality I did not feel comfortable with, trying to avoid admitting I was a comedy punchline incarnate.

  This was at the same time as my peers started to move towards more complex social dynamics. My teenage peers were starting to push for independence, choose their own friends based not solely on proximity, push social boundaries, engage with more intricate social politics and make use of more unspoken rules regarding how socialisation was meant to occur. The step up in my peers’ social skills not only caused me to feel more isolated, but also became a point of ridicule, where my lack of ability was more easily picked up. I was more easily misled, mocked or confused than my peers, which encouraged them to make a point of making fun of me specifically for being different. This just hit home: I didn’t fit in.

  The more stressed I became, the less I slept. The less I slept, the more exhausted I became, the more exhausted I became, the more I started to stim and isolate myself and feel overwhelmed. The more I struggled, the more I was bullied. The more I was bullied, the more afraid I became to face my own discomfort.

  The more these piled up, the more I wanted nothing more than to get out of my own head.

  It was around this time that being LGBT and on the autism spectrum began to have enough of a visible effect on my life that my parents first started to suspect something was going on. I didn’t tell them I was a lesbian trans woman with autism, because the whole point was that while I was struggling with symptoms, I didn’t yet know what was causing them. That was partly thanks to not knowing that I fit certain diagnostic criteria. Part of it was due to worrying that maybe everyone felt this way and was just better at hiding it. Part of it was down to me not being ready to face and accept that this was who I was, and nothing would change that fact.

  As a devout Christian at the time, I prayed for years to be fixed or cured. I prayed every night that one day I would wake to a quiet world, nothing overwhelming, with my mind and body in sync. I prayed to be normal, to be comfortable, to be someone who I didn’t hate myself for being. I prayed to get out of a head so messed up I often thought death would be preferable to an existence this separated from the world, not knowing the what or why.

  I prayed to have a brain that didn’t want to kill itself…

  It depends on how you look at things, whether or not my prayers were answered. I prayed to not be trans or have autism, and neither of those prayers were answered, but I suppose the prayers to be happy in my own head were eventually answered in a roundabout way.

  That time in my life was perhaps the darkest I have ever lived through. I very persistently had thoughts of suicide, and the idea of ever understanding what was wrong with me seemed an impossible dream. I attempted to commit suicide three times as a teenager; once by drowning myself in the ocean, once by swallowing pills and once by suffocation. I failed to insulate the space properly to suffocate; my body forced me to the surface for air when trying to drown. The morning after I overdosed on pills, I woke up and took myself to A&E (ER), where I was given medication to make me throw up, and to block the absorption of some of what I took.

  So much of what society told me about being gay, trans or having autism painted a terrible picture of my future. I was going to be a laughing stock, an ostracised obsessive loner who couldn’t be trusted. I would be attacked for who I was. I would always have these issues; these problems were all inherent and would never go away. I had nothing in the way of positive autistic, gay or trans role models in my life at the time, and I felt as if acknowledging any of those aspects of myself to be true was tantamount to giving in and accepting that my life was going to be bad no matter what I did.

  On top of this, having autism made it harder for me to realise my gender dysphoria was something that other people experienced, due to the struggles I had reading and connecting with other people. I didn’t cotton on for a long time to the fact that other people had a different relationship to gender than me, and the fact that I was more like the women in my life than the men. Without a stable social network, I didn’t have a comparison framework from which to discover that how I felt was abnormal. Ultimately, most of the early trans people I met, I met due to us both having autism. I met them through autism, and only later discovered their trans status. I felt like I understood those people on some inherent level, and as it turns out there was a ruddy good reason.

  When things started to pick up

  So far, this chapter has been a bit doom and gloom, but it’s actually not all negatives. Some truly lovely people came into my life around this time, due to the discovery that we shared some areas of interest. That’s right, we’re returning to areas of specialist interest as social coping tools.

  I talked earlier in this book about how in the early years of my education, I made use of an obsessive interest in Pokémon to socialise, using the franchise as a social safety net topic. While Pokémon, and similar Japanese cartoons, sort of went out of style with my peers as they started to feel too mature for anything aimed at kids, the idea of an interest in anime being a cool thing came somewhat full circle in my teenage years. I’d kept obsessively following Pokémon through the years, but also other anime programs like DeathNote, DragonBall Z and Naruto. I found other people with those same interests, and we started to build friendships based around the fact we shared an obsessive encyclopedic knowledge of these topics.

  One example of this is that when I was around 16 years old, I brought into school a notebook themed around the show DeathNote, whose central plot hinges on a magical notebook. One of the first long-term friends I made as an adult, I made thanks to that notebook. I was running the lighting for a school disco, and a woman named Emma saw the notebook and asked me about my interest in the show. There was enough discussion room there for me to safely and comfortably talk to her for a couple of hours, and she even wanted to talk more afterwards. I knew that she was into anime, and as such I used anime as a safety topic. Any time I ran short of things to say, or wasn’t sure how best to continue a conversation, I would go back to that safety topic and feel comfortable and relaxed socially. In hindsight, as sweet as that story is when told this way, it could so easily have turned out terribly and caused me a lot of problems. The notebook in the show causes people to die if their names are written
down, and it would not have taken much for someone to have spun that as a warning sign that I was dangerous to my peers or something. It was a lovely exchange, that as an adult I am just thankful didn’t go horribly wrong.

  The same happened with music. I found out that I shared an obsessive interest in bands like My Chemical Romance with some of my teenage peers, which made it easier to meet new people. I made friends with one of my first ever non-school based friends because I was working a Saturday job in a sweet shop while wearing a My Chemical Romance t-shirt. She came up and asked me about my interest in the band, I wowed her with my knowledge of facts and figures about them and we became friends. As much as I struggled socially, I always had that band as a safety topic, something to bond over and something to listen to in awkward silences to help share an experience. If I found myself unsure how to continue a conversation, I could just start playing a My Chemical Romance song on my phone, and those friends would enjoy my company for a time. That was something I could rely on.

  Lastly, my obsessive interest in video games helped me to make friends. I spent so much time by myself playing games, reading about games and listening to people talk about games, that I became the go to person in my friendship group to answer questions about what was coming out and when, what was worth playing and how to get through games. That particular obsessive interest ended up being the catalyst for my eventual career path. In my twenties I ended up getting a career as a professional video game critic, a full-time paid job that kept a roof over my head and is still my primary job today. It was one of the first times in my life that I realised an obsessive level of interest in and knowledge of a subject might not be a bad thing. Once you hit your teenage years, and people start to not only pick their own interests, but more heavily invest their sense of identity in those interests, it’s easier to rely on one topic to maintain a friendship for a number of years. As long as their interest in that topic doesn’t pass, it’s enough to avoid being alone. I found that, during my teen years, women were more open to being friends with me, so long as we shared obsessive interests. I wasn’t welcome in same-gender events, like sleepovers, but I was at least welcome socially in group situations, and that helped a lot. I was the non-threatening male friend who just loooooved to squeal about shared interests, and that was enough for me to start making my first proper friends. Sure, I was leaning heavily on safety topics as a crutch, but it was real notable steps of progress.

  The downside to this increase in friendships was that I ended up falling into many of the same traps I had fallen into as a child, but without requiring the same level of manipulation or coercion to end up there. Where as a child people like Daniel had manipulated me by threatening actively to abandon me if I went against them, in my teen years I ultimately put that pressure on myself, because that was the only childhood model I really had upon which to base friendships. The last time I’d had people willing to stick around me in life, it had been made clear I had to go along with things I was uncomfortable with, or the result would be threats of social isolation. I knew to shut up, fit in, do what everyone else did, or as I saw it my friendships would fall apart. The idea of a friendship where disagreement or saying no to someone was not a cardinal sin had simply not occurred to me. As a result, based on observation of social models rather than any active pressure in the moment, I went into a lot of my teenage friendships fearing a threat of isolation that was never actually made. This caused me to start doing something I had never previously done: breaking rules of my own volition. I lied to my parents about where I was going in order to not miss events I knew I shouldn’t be attending, I skipped classes to spend time with those friends, I went underage drinking and I did a number of things that were in hindsight dangerous or risky behaviours.

  As a teenager, I would tell my parents I was going for a sleepover at the house of a friend from church, before hopping a fence and sneaking past security to get underage drunk on a section of beach my friends knew was never patrolled. I would skip classes in order to sit and socialise with friends, because I feared missing some important situation that would cause the group’s dynamic to change, or a vital in-joke being created while I was absent. I would go out into town at lunch rather than do my homework, again out of fear that my newfound social circle would abandon me. Past experience told me that if I didn’t do everything I was expected to, I would return to isolation, and that scared me even more than the consequences of my choices.

  I also did things that, while not morally wrong, felt wrong to me on a personal comfort level. I lost my voluntary virginity – something that I wasn’t comfortable doing while presenting male, not least because of some of the parts of my body that involved – because I believed doing so was something that would help me to establish some sense of internal or external validity as masculine. It didn’t work, but these were the kind of things I did to try to convince myself that I could be like my peers, that I could be who the world expected me to be. I thought that if I had penetrative sex, using my penis, I would maybe feel more like a man, or that my peers would see me more as deserving of the masculinity I was meant to embody by circumstance of birth. Ultimately, it just made me feel weird. That wasn’t the side of that equation I felt I was meant to be on.

  During these years, I spent a lot of time ignoring societal boundaries, ignoring my own personal boundaries and ignoring who I wanted to be, in the pursuit of maintaining friendships I saw as under attack from the threats of a decade prior. I can see a decade after these events that I probably didn’t need to do any of that, but it was the messed up view of social interactions I had been left holding. I used past results as an indicator of future outcomes, and acted accordingly. This whole model was sort of how I got through these years, using past data to extrapolate future outcomes. Basically, I created social flow charts. Not hypothetical ones in my mind, but real literal physical ones.

  I would sit in classes making conversational scripts, plotting out template conversations which would help me meet new people, planning out my evenings minute by minute, and slotting in variable branches in conversations for what I would do if I needed to slot in a safety topic. Any time a conversation went in a direction I had not prepared for, I would return to the flow chart and remake it, adding in new branches of how to respond. I tried to treat people and social situations as mathematical equations with set solutions, where I could plug in the data and know a successful result. It wasn’t healthy, but it was a way to survive. It was a way to keep going and manage tough unknown situations.

  My teen years were a mess of uncertainty, confusion, chaos and self-dislike. I was making friends, but because of past abuse, I was assuming I had to be someone I was not to maintain them. I was using time I should have used for schoolwork plotting out social flow charts. I was doing things that were morally wrong, or that I was uncomfortable doing, just because I thought it would help me fit in, be more comfortable or avoid further isolation. I was being bullied for who I was, running from who I was and generally unaware of who I was. Those years were a mess, full of many choices and decisions I am ultimately not proud of: choices and decisions that almost cost me my family’s support, and almost sent my life down a dangerous path. I love some of the people I met, but I can’t love who I was.

  Using emo aesthetics to test the waters

  My mid- to late teen years occurred in the mid- to late 2000s, and as a depressed hormonal teenager living through those years, I was lucky to find an aesthetic subculture to fall into that allowed me some scope to experiment with more feminine presentation without being assumed to be not male. I spent several years dressing like the poster child for the mid-2000s emo subculture. For any of you reading this book who are not ‘the right age at the right time’, the stereotypical image of a mid-2000s emo is a skinny teenager with straight black hair swept across one half of their face, lots of red and black clothing, some Converse shoes, wristbands and lots of spikes, studs or checkered fingerless gloves. Imagine goths, if they were a little mo
re feminine in appearance, and their clothing was tighter fitting.

  In terms of associated personality traits, people who considered themselves emo were basically kids with depression but who lacked the emotional vocabulary required to explain to someone that they were constantly sad for no reason and maybe they needed some actual medical help to sort that out. It was the support group culture for kids who due to trauma needed to mature too soon, and they sort of lacked the healthy coping mechanisms to deal with the onset of depression when their peers around them were maturing in healthier ways. Emo fashion aesthetics identified to others that you were likely someone with baggage, but that you understood what it was like to have that specific flavour of depression, and as such might be someone relatable. It was a way to find others who were struggling and to feel a little less alone.

  With that preamble about emos out of the way, the reason I sort of fell into that subculture during the years things were getting tougher for me was primarily the somewhat gender-flexible aspects that embodied the emo style of dress. Everyone was encouraged to grow their hair long and use it to cover up some of their face, which appealed to me as someone looking to grow their hair long without being accused of not being male as a result, and as someone who struggled with their appearance and liked the idea of having less of their facial structure on show. On top of that, it was a fashion style where people, regardless of gender, tended to wear the same colours of clothing, the same types of jeans and shoes, the same types of accessories, hoodies and even accessories like bracelets. It was a fashion style where it was commonly joked guys would buy their jeans from the women’s section of stores leaving them with flat crotch appearances, and where being more visibly emotional than your peers was seen as a positive, not a failure of masculinity. It was one of the few social cliques of the era where crying, as someone perceived male, was not a reason to invalidate someone. It certainly wasn’t free of its own share of controversy. I remember well one night at a party at my aunt’s home where my mother asked if I was part of a suicide cult, because she had read a news story where The Sun had presented the subculture as being about scoring points via self-harm and suicide attempts, and that the band My Chemical Romance’s album The Black Parade was a call to kill oneself to impress the band, which makes me laugh today looking at the context of the album’s themes of ‘not [being] afraid to keep on living’. Still, regardless of the way it was perceived by older generations, it gave me space to grow my hair out, cry when I needed to, dress very similarly to my female friends, experiment with more traditionally feminine clothing and accessories and do so without having my status as male questioned.