III
------------
Life Post-Transition and Diagnosis
CHAPTER 9
LGBT Spaces Are not for Autistic Adults
As a member of the LGBT community living with autism, one of the biggest issues I have been unable to find a suitable solution for is meeting and socialising safely with other LGBT people in my local area. You see, being an LGBT adult today still comes with some risks, even living somewhere like England. Men, afraid of being perceived as gay, often lash out at transgender individuals. We’re at times perceived as men, or as predatory dangers to society. There are people who recognise my position in society as being a vulnerable one and will try to take advantage of that fact. There are those who stalk me on the street making creepy propositions, those who kick at bathroom doors feeling I should not be using those spaces, and people who mislead me in order to later mock me, all based on my visible LGBT status.
The first time this really sunk in for me was about three months after going full time living as Laura. I was on a coach home from a work event in London, a three-hour bus journey on motorways where stopping the vehicle is tough, and getting off before the journey is done would have left me stranded without an exit strategy. Within around ten minutes of the coach leaving the station, a pair of men approached me as I sat alone at the back of the bus, and attempted to force a snuff vial under my nose. I tried to inform the driver, who took very little interest, simply telling me to tell him if things escalated. Once we’d made it onto the motorway, things did escalate. One of the men came and stood over me, questioning me about my genitals and describing how he imagined my body in graphic detail. He repeatedly stated that I should feel lucky; he thought I was sexy, and according to him nobody else ever would. He asked if he could fuck me in the bus bathroom. I said no. He offered to pay me. I said no. He tried to push me into the bathroom by force, an act not one passenger attempted to stop. I had to push past him, sprint to the front of the bus, and force the driver to pull over and call the police.
I spent 20 minutes sitting in the doorway of the bus before we stopped and the police arrived, eventually locating the men and confirming that the substance they had tried to pressure upon me was an illegal drug which would have impaired my perception. I spent the remaining two hours of my bus ride home just thinking over and over in my head. My status as transgender had made these men feel entitled to not only my body, but to tell me I didn’t deserve the interest of anyone but these predatory creeps.
This event was the first, but by no means the last. I’ve numerous times been attacked, pressured or preyed upon by people who see my transgender status as a threat, or a weakness to take advantage of. For my own safety, I have to be careful who I disclose my same-sex attraction or transgender status to, and finding other people like me in my local area is a vital part of being able to make new friends who I feel safe being around.
Typically, the solution to safely finding other LGBT individuals in an area is to attend specifically LGBT-focused venues and events, in order to ensure that the people you are meeting are people you can safely be yourself around. Go to a gay bar or Pride event, meet some other LGBT people, all done. You can go into those settings confident that who you happen to be won’t be an issue, and have the flexibility to get to know people based on their interests and personality instead.
Things are not so easy when you’re both LGBT and on the autism spectrum. Most LGBT-focused events and venues are aimed at individuals aged 18 and over, because of our weird societally held beliefs that being gay or transgender is inherently an adult and sexual act, or that being around LGBT people as a child will somehow turn a person gay. A big part of this is due to the history of the LGBT rights movement during decades of open and aggressive persecution. If you look back to the 1950s, gay bars were a safe haven for a community that was not socially accepted, and attacks on LGBT individuals focused on the ‘unnatural’ nature of their sex lives. LGBT people were not seen as people in love, people being themselves or people harming nobody around them; these bars were raided by police because LGBT people were seen as perverts, deviants and dangerous individuals. As a result, these venues had to stay age segregated in order to avoid accusations that they were targeting young people, which played a considerable role in the growth of LGBT spaces once being gay or trans started to become more socially acceptable. Bars and clubs had time to be established as safe havens, places to hide from a world that was hell bent on persecution, and that status as a safe place to hide from a discriminatory world solidified their position as the defacto place for LGBT people to meet for decades to come.
As an unintended side effect of this, most LGBT venues are focused on activities that are adult in nature. You’ve got gay bars, clubs and dating events aimed at finding sex and romance, and not a whole lot else on a national scale. Because inviting LGBT youth into private spaces risked giving homophobes ammunition to allege wrongdoing, there was never really any incentive for youth-oriented LGBT spaces to blossom, a problem that has persisted ever since.
Today, we still see a lack of LGBT characters in media targeted at children, because it’s still seen that allowing children to casually interact with or perceive LGBT individuals will create that status in youth. Parents, by and large, are unwilling to encourage their children who might be LGBT to meet other LGBT children. This is a problem, because as an individual with autism, I struggle with the sensory aspects of many of those adult-oriented environments: loud music, flashing lights, crowds of people I do not know, a huge number of unknown variables mixed up to create a chaotic sea of sensory overload. Those kinds of venues tend to be my worst nightmare. This issue even permeates all-ages LGBT events, like Pride parades. LGBT events tend to be loud, bright and more than a little chaotic. I get why LGBT events are this way; so often in life as LBGT individuals we’re expected to tone ourselves back, for our own safety and so as not to be viewed poorly by those around us. We live life carefully watching what we say, who we say it to and how we say it. These events and venues are an opportunity to be as loud and proud as we like, revelling in the pure joy of being as visible and unrestrained as we like. This doesn’t change the fact that the cornerstone LGBT-centric experiences for meeting new people play havoc with my sensory issues.
On top of that, there’s also no guarantee that these heavily advertised events will be safe for me as a trans woman with autism. Because they’re so high profile, with all eyes on them, they often attract the wrong kinds of people and create difficult types of situations for me to handle. For example, at London Pride 2018, a group of anti-trans protestors hijacked the Pride parade, eventually managing to secure the lead spot in the parade and spewing hate speech, shouting threats of violence at people like me wearing trans Pride flags and calling trans women rapists. In that particular example, I was trapped in a large, busy, sensory-overloaded crowd of people, as a woman from a clearly anti-trans group came up to shout at me that I was a monster. I was scared and overwhelmed, and in my attempt to manage the situation, I told her to fuck off, told her that hate speech wasn’t welcome there. She grabbed a police officer and tried to have me arrested. It was an awful lot to try to contend with at that time, with both my status as a trans person and an adult with autism contributing to the stress I faced. This sort of protest appearance is more common when an event for LGBT people is large in scale, and publicly built up long in advance.
Looking a little more broadly at the issue of venues and events being autism aware, autism-friendly events tend to be very one size fits all and inflexible. The best example I have of this is autism-friendly cinema screenings. As an adult living with an autism spectrum condition which largely affects my sensory processing abilities, there are certain aspects of visiting a cinema that always hinder my experience no matter what I do. Bright green neon emergency exit signs always exist in my peripheral vision, I cannot guarantee a seat that isn’t directly next to another paying customer, I cannot rewind the film if I missed something imp
ortant due to there being too much sensory information and I can’t control the volume of the film if I am struggling to focus on sounds properly. These are known parts of the cinema-going experience, and I do what I can on a personal level to mitigate those issues. What I don’t however do as a method of improving my experience is attend specially marked autism-friendly screenings of movies. I routinely get them recommended to me by friends and family members without autism who’ve seen them mentioned in passing but not looked properly into what they are. The concept is often misunderstood at a core level. This is not because autism-friendly screenings are inherently bad things; quite the contrary. I don’t attend autism-friendly screenings because autism is a spectrum, and the one size fits all approach of autism screenings is tailored to one type of individual with autism over another. Again, this isn’t to say the current form in which they exist is flawed. They currently exist in a form beneficial to many, but by no means all, and I want to take the time to explain why their marketing is a little misleading conceptually.
Taking UK cinema chains Odeon and Vue as example cases, both cinemas do offer some potentially beneficial changes as part of their autism-friendly screenings. In isolation, the idea of slight room lighting does help me, in that it makes the exit door lights less comparatively bright and more easily ignorable while watching the film. The ability to openly bring in my own texture-friendly food and drink is useful, but if I’m being honest I do that anyway in regular screenings. A lack of adverts, while not a huge change, does allow me to more accurately predict when a film will end, and makes me more comfortable slotting it into my day, and slightly reduced audio volume levels do make it a little easier for me to focus on the film.
However, a lot of additional factors are introduced by the nature of an autism-friendly screening that are definitely not to my benefit, most notably, the presence of other individuals with autism. While lower volume and higher ambient light are useful in isolation, when paired with the additional movement and noises that accompany an autism-targeted audience I end up being more aware of the sensory information created by my fellow attendees. People moving and making noises is extra information, not drowned out by the lack of light or the high volume, and can ultimately make it harder for me to focus. As much as I struggle with loud single source volume, I struggle more with multiple sources of sensory information I cannot predict. Also of note, autism-friendly screenings are almost exclusively for films with U and PG ratings, which limits the range of films available that someone like me can experience in that environment. Cutting to the chase, autism-friendly screenings are really screenings designed primarily for young or nonverbal individuals with autism and their families. That’s by no means a problem. The lighting and volume changes in those screenings are definitely beneficial, and a heightened tolerance for volume and movement likely mean those accompanying the individual with autism do not need to be as self-conscious while watching the film. They’re just not one size fits all experiences.
If I as an adult could attend an autism-friendly screening with the same lighting and volume changes, the same alterations to food and drink policy, but a wider variety of movie types available and the knowledge that I was attending with other adults who were, like me, wanting to avoid sensory distraction, I would probably attend those fairly regularly. As it currently stands, I just sneak my own food in, try to place my hand so it blocks out the exit light, pop in earplugs to dampen noise and hope the seat next to me stays empty. Autism-friendly screenings exist, and I am glad they do, but if your friend with autism would rather not attend one, it may be because much like the autism spectrum itself, these screenings are not one size fits all. The cinema variables are all correct and beneficial in isolation, but do not help me when practically applied.
This is part of the issue when trying to suggest ideas for making LGBT spaces more autism friendly; what is useful for one individual on the spectrum may not help another, and finding ways to improve that experience for a wider number of people can be tricky. One major solution to the lack of autism-friendly LGBT spaces, rather than trying to reform and make room within existing spaces, is to push for a wider variety of LGBT spaces, ones in settings that tend to be less intense on the senses. While I know LGBT cafes exist, as dedicated social groups, they’re certainly not as common as gay bars are, which is a real shame. A cafe environment for example offers quieter spaces, a less busy environment, more flexibility about how to engage with the venue and is more accessible to a wider variety of people.
For me and many other LGBT individuals with autism, the internet has been a socialising goldmine, filling in the gap left by our inability to engage with other LGBT spaces. Online, tone of voice and nonverbal facial expressions are removed as factors from understanding conversational intent, with words alone explaining intent. Social media allows me to socialise with other LGBT people, regardless of their location, while controlling my sensory information. I can listen to my own music on loop, eat my texture-limited foods, in comfortable clothing, under a weighted blanket, in my own home while making a new friend who communicates by saying the words they mean directly. Communication online does avoid many of the barriers presented by LGBT bars and Pride events, but it does crucially lack an in-person connection element. Over the years, many have assumed due to my frequent isolation that I do not need in-person company to be happy and comfortable. Far from it, while I need to initiate it on my terms, I do still need social energy in my life, and it’s a shame that online communication with other LGBT people doesn’t always provide that.
There are also Pride events in the UK attempting to make accommodations to support individuals with autism. For example, a group called MyUmbrella attended Reading Pride in 2018, and provided space for individuals who were experiencing sensory overload to get away and calm themselves. They had a tent with air beds for people to come sit down on, away from the crowds and the noise, and take a moment to compose themselves in an environment where stimming would not draw any unwanted attention. On a connected note, due to the overlap with gender dysphoria, the group also offered private changing areas for transgender individuals, so that anyone attending Pride who needed to change before or after their journey for safety would have a place to handle sorting their clothing in peace and comfort. The group is hoping to expand to more Pride events nationally in 2019, and their approach certainly wouldn’t be unappreciated at these events.
Additionally, while London doesn’t currently have any LGBT community centres, at least at the time of writing, they’re soon to be getting their first as a result of a huge online crowdfunding campaign. The fund, which raised over £100,000, would offer an all-ages, alcohol-free space for LGBT people to meet and socialise in safety, as well as away from the barriers posed by venues for over 18s. The idea is that the venue would be open from morning until night, be free to enter and be free of loud noise and alcohol use. The money is being used to prove demand for the space, to help bring in larger donors from elsewhere. The hope is that over time more cities will follow suit, offering these kinds of spaces, making them something that is considered a normal part of life rather than a rare oddity.
Considering the statistically high overlap between autism and LGBT status, it would be nice to see a proper conversation begin about how to support LGBT individuals with autism in their attempts to socialise, but until then small charity setups and the internet are the only real options that work for me personally.
CHAPTER 10
Transgender Conflicts and Autism
As a trans woman living in the UK, I often find myself having to handle difficult social situations, requiring nuance in how they are responded to. If I enter a single gender women’s bathroom, and someone stops me to tell me the men’s bathroom is in the other direction, I have to make a judgement on the person who has stopped me. Are they stopping me because they have clocked that I am a trans woman, they do not believe trans women are valid as women and they want me to leave because of that? If so, do I fight my
ground? Do I provide ID like my passport, which thankfully lists me as female? Will doing so be sufficient proof to them or just leave me further entrenched in an argument? Should I even feel the need to? If they get aggressive and threaten violence in my presence should I shut myself into a cubicle away from them? Should I run? Would obeying that thought in the back of my mind telling me to just flash my vagina as an act of defiance get them to back off, or simply further the incorrect belief that having lower surgery is a requirement to being taken seriously as a trans woman? Or, on a completely different tack, would just simply saying I am a woman be enough? Would they apologise, trust that I know myself best, and let me go about my business embarrassed that they had incorrectly misread my gender presentation? Would the staff in the venue defend my right to be there? Would they be trained enough in trans rights to know my rights? Would I be safe until venue staff arrived? Do I have friends nearby? Would the defence of a cis woman coming in and telling them to back off be enough to protect me, or would it just put that friend at risk?
Responses to the existence of transgender people vary wildly from person to person currently, in the UK and across the world, and as a result these situations are difficult to manage at the best of times. There’s a delicate balancing act to any interaction, the line of reading if a judgement on my appearance is a mistake made in good faith, or an act of aggression designed to force me into an unsafe situation, and being able to tell the difference ultimately decides my safety in a lot of different situations. I have to rely on knowing when I am safe and in a position to correct and teach, when I am in a position where I need to fight for my rights, and when the safest thing to do is to hide, putting my own rights aside for the sake of staying safe in a given moment.
Uncomfortable Labels Page 11