Uncomfortable Labels

by Laura Kate Dale

  When you’re also on the autism spectrum, reading these situations with nuance can become even more difficult. I struggle often to read the more nuanced, unspoken aspects of social interactions accurately. When looking at a person’s face, there are thousands of bits of data every second, and my brain struggles to hone in on what is important and tune out what is not. In the chaotic storm of static information being generated all the time, I often don’t know what to look out for, and struggle to know the intent behind something said in the moment. If someone does an exaggerated smile or frown, I can look at that expression and tell you it’s a smile or a frown and the emotion connected to that, but in a fast-moving conversation outside of a testing environment, with someone I do not already know, I often struggle to contextualise the little shifts in tone of voice, the facial expression and posture clues, to tell if they pose a threat or are safe.

  As a result, I’ve had to live a lot of my life post-transition assuming the worst possible outcome from social situations, and adapt accordingly. If I’m having a day where I’ve had to wear clothing that is not actively feminine coded, and not been able to wear makeup or shave due to tactile sensitivity issues, I have to assume for my safety that I am going to be read as male, and put into situations where I will have to defend my ability to use those spaces. If I can enter those situations alongside other women, or have the mental energy to use my ID to fight my ground, I may still use female-coded spaces, but if I am alone and having a rough day there are occasionally rare times where I have to face defeat and use male-coded spaces instead. Male-coded spaces still pose risks to me as a trans woman, but sometimes that will seem a lesser risk than entering a female-coded space and risking being confronted by someone who does not have my best interests at heart.

  If I am using a women’s bathroom alone, I will usually keep my passport in an easily accessible pocket of my bag, so I know it’s there if I need to use it to defend myself. If someone seems like they are going to get aggressive, to be safe I tend to leave the bathroom and try again later. In some ways more difficult to handle are the situations in which I face anger and aggression once already inside a cubicle. If someone starts pounding or kicking at the door, or shouting threatening and derogatory terms at me, I will tend to assume that their threats are real. Perhaps they’re just trying to scare me, but I err on the side of protecting my safety. I’ll try to wait them out as best I can, but that can be tough to do emotionally. In an ideal world, I would handle those moments by putting on some headphones, getting out stimming tools like a fidget cube, tub of slime or rubix cube, and just repeatedly engage in known sensory tasks until I calmed down and the situation was over. Put a song on repeat, solve a cube over and over and keep the anxiety at bay. The problem is that doing so isn’t safe when under threat of attack. If the person gets past the door somehow, I have to know what’s happening and be able to start moving very quickly if an opportunity to exit safely presents itself. The sensory information of being threatened through a door might be overwhelming, but I have to manage and endure it without my normal coping tools, just in case the worst happens and I need to run.

  This is sort of a theme that permeates a lot of difficult situations encountered as a trans woman with autism; the normal autism coping tools at my disposal are not safe to engage in when you’re being attacked for your trans woman status. If I’m being followed through London late at night by a man who started off offering to pay me for sex, then when I refused his offer starts threatening to take it by force, I can’t put a song full volume on loop in my headphones because I need to hear what he says. I can’t stop and take time to obsessively plan a route home that gets away from him, or gets me to a 24-hour establishment, or gets me near people and cameras, because I have to look like I already know what I am doing and that I am heading somewhere with purpose. I can’t use stimming aids or engage in stimming actions, because that gives away my status as a vulnerable member of society who is not confident in their ability to safely escape the situation. I have to handle a difficult social situation without the tools I need to get through non-stressful situations. The situation is tougher and my tools are reduced. It’s a deeply unpleasant experience to encounter.

  In terms of how I personally handle these sorts of situations, I’ve learned to tailor my coping mechanisms to fit the situations I am in. If I am trapped in a bathroom cubicle with someone shouting at me, I can’t make use of stimming tools, but I can make use of stimming actions that are normally judged poorly by neurotypical people because I probably will not be seen. I can sit in that stall rocking and flapping my hands if needed, and not have anything to grab and pack away if I have to make a sudden departure. I may not be able to obsessively plan if someone starts following me, but I can obsessively plan in advance in case it happens. I can plan so that someone is expecting a message when I arrive, I can send a Facebook recording on my phone to someone describing where I am, I can call the police and warn them of my location and the fact I am being made to feel unsafe, or I can even just pretend that’s what I am doing. I can make sure I know routes that take me past safe spots and focus on counting my own footsteps as a subtle form of stimming. I basically just handle these situations by adapting my coping mechanisms to account for worst case scenarios that may come up.

  It is important to note however that not all of the difficult social situations I have to navigate as a trans woman with autism are quite so vicious or dangerous; sometimes it’s just added stress brought into mundane everyday activities. Sometimes I will have my ID refused, because someone might not believe it belongs to me. I’ve had my bank account fraud locked more times than I care to admit, because business owners believed I was using another person’s bank card and ID for a sizable purchase. Having your ID refused or your bank account locked would be stressful for anyone. When you’re also on the autism spectrum, it can be daunting to have to go and fight for access to your own accounts, while trying to stay calm enough on the surface that your anxiety handling that situation isn’t read as guilt or an indication that you are trying to mislead. More than once I’ve had accounts locked and, when making phone calls to resolve the issue, had the person on the other end of the line refuse to verify my identity. I gave all the correct information, all the right answers, but they hear my voice, don’t believe I am who I say I am or think I sound too anxious, and refuse to give me access to my own accounts. These are normally the most difficult situations to handle: the ones where I know I am in the right but I just can’t get people to take me seriously as myself, because of my appearance or my neuroatypical behaviour. While I shouldn’t need to do this in order to get through life, I’ve taken to bringing paperwork with me whenever I go somewhere that I might be expected to produce proof of identity. I’ll often keep alongside my passport a copy of letters confirming my transgender status, a copy of my name change forms, a copy of my diagnostic confirmation letters for Asperger’s and yet more information tying me to that identity, all sealed up in a small packet in my handbag. It’s ultimately not worth the fight leaving them at home tends to cause. I just sort of live life assuming that I am going to have to double, triple, even quadruple prove that I am who I say I am, and struggle with the issues I tell people I struggle with.

  In terms of potential support that could be provided for these issues, an awareness from medical professionals of the overlaps between autism and trans status, and the areas where these conflicts arise, could lead to better support in future. There needs to be education that there are unique tough situations that trans people might face, and conversations need to be had about safe ways to get through those situations. While in a utopia you wouldn’t need to teach trans women with autism how to stay calm when harassed without causing issues that get them into more danger, depressingly it’s not the world we live in yet, at least in my experience.

  CHAPTER 11

  Learning to Watch Your Friends Die

  In the last few years of my life, I have had to get depressingly good a
t watching my friends die around me. Almost half of transgender people have at some point in their life attempted to prematurely end their own life, and a study by the University of Newcastle6 found that nearly 35 per cent of individuals with Asperger syndrome had seriously considered or attempted to end their own lives by suicide. While these numbers might from the outside seem shockingly high, they don’t surprise me at all.

  I am one of the 50 per cent of trans people and 35 per cent of people with Asperger’s who have attempted to end their own life. I am one of those statistics; I understand why so many people like me end up on that list, and I have had to get used to the fact that those statistics have not only already claimed friends of mine, but will likely continue to do so for years to come. So, let’s talk a little about why I’ve tried, and thankfully failed, to kill myself as a transgender adult on the autism spectrum.

  Often, when people who are not transgender discuss trans suicide rates, the question comes up regarding whether the simple act of being transgender is in and of itself a factor in suicidal urges. It’s often positioned from the outside that being transgender is inherently an act of feeling broken in some way. The idea is that people like myself are depressed, we try to force ourselves to be something we are not, when that doesn’t fix our depression we assume that depression is unfixable and that’s why we want to kill ourselves. Some argue we look at the changes we have made to ourselves and view ourselves as mutilated monsters. They argue we regret what we’ve done to ourselves and that’s why we have higher suicide rates. During the time of writing this book, an article appeared in The Spectator by writer Simon Marcus, suggesting that trans rights charities market being transgender as trendy, leading people into incorrectly believing they are trans and getting themselves into depression and suicidal feelings as a result, and that as a consequence of this transgender people were placing an unnecessary burden on the mental health service that could be avoided by simply not transitioning.7 Those commonly held notions are nonsense. The aspects of my trans status that made me feel suicidal, and still cause me to struggle with suicidal ideation to this day, are nothing to do with the actual experience of being transgender and everything to do with how the world treats transgender people.

  Before I came out to the world as transgender, I held an immense amount of guilt over my feelings of dysphoria and my desires to present myself to the world as female. Everything the world had told me about transgender people told me that to be a trans woman was the most shameful, disgusting act a human could engage in. If I was trans that would make me a gross man who was mutilating themselves to trick men and assault women. I would be a laughing stock, an abomination, a sinner turning my back on my childhood Christian faith. I felt ashamed of who I was, and deadly afraid to admit my trans status, but at the same time I was in a huge amount of pain caused by my dysphoria. I was trapped with two choices as I saw it: live with the pain of not transitioning, or transition and live a miserable life. Both seemed like situations I could not live through. I didn’t want to live in either of those ways.

  As an adult post-transition, my suicidal ideations are driven by societal views of my existence and the messages those send, attacks and harassment that make me afraid to live my life, and by the rejection I receive from those I care about. To this day, transgender people like myself are still seen and treated as monsters, and it’s hard not to let the constant media onslaught of anti-trans coverage leave a mark on my sense of self-worth. Every time the BBC offers a platform to someone like Germaine Greer, explaining that I am just lying about being female because people like me want to rape women in changing rooms and destroy the safety of cisgender women, or the cover story of a glossy women’s mag is dedicated to talking about how trans women are secretly just trying to push some agenda that starts with letting women be men and ends with some outrageous slippery slope fallacy that paedophiles will be given socially acceptable status, it chips away at me a little. I find myself exhausted, hearing over and over that I am a monster damaging and destroying the world, hurting everyone by trying to fight for my right to exist.

  I know on paper it’s all nonsense, but that doesn’t stop it reinforcing that paranoid void in the back of my head telling me the world would be better off if I just died. It reinforces that suicidal ideation voice that says I’m a monster. Every time someone attacks me, be it beating at a bathroom door, trying to sexually assault me, tracking down my home address and posting it online, dedicating entire forums to harassing me or just shouting slurs at me from a car going by, it just reminds me that there’s a whole world out there that feels so much vitriol aimed at my existence that it can be channelled into these acts. If someone has it in them to hate me that completely, surely I must deserve it? I know it’s untrue, but it’s often tough to believe that.

  Lastly, there are family members in my life, alongside long-term friends, who have refused to support my transition. Some of them just left my life, abandoning me forever. Some stayed in my life, but refused to adapt to my new name and pronouns. Others still just outright told me that I was lying, that they would never see me as female or that they thought I was a monster. When people who are that important to you, who you’ve grown up seeing as cornerstones of your life, and whose approval is painfully important to you, abandon you, it can be hard to keep going and to process that knowledge properly. The aspects of being trans that have in my past driven me to suicide attempts, or suicidal ideation, are other people’s responses to my existence as a trans woman. It’s not being a trans woman that pushes me towards an early death; it’s the world’s treatment of trans women.

  When it comes to autism and suicidal urges, there’s remarkably little research into the causes of elevated suicide rates. Speaking purely for myself, the times when autism symptoms have been a factor in my suicide attempts and urges can be explained pretty simply. I live with a head that is filled with constant sensory static. My coping mechanisms are judged; I don’t know how to connect properly with the world; I often feel isolated, and lonely, and overwhelmed, and frustrated that I can’t ever properly escape this unending struggle in my mind. I will never be like everyone else around me and I will often be judged for that fact. The world is not built to accommodate the unique way my brain works. I sometimes find myself feeling like death is the only way I will ever get permanent relief from the struggles autism causes. I struggle with obsessive, repetitive thoughts that are often hard to shake. If the thought that death is the best way to shut up all the static in my head gets stuck there on loop, it can be dang hard to shift.

  The overlap between these two causes of suicidal urges can be tough to combat. If I get a media-regurgitated nonsense argument that I am a monster for being trans stuck in my head, being on the autism spectrum can cause that thought to persist, looping and looping and looping. If I get fixated on how my autism means I will never fit in or be accepted, I can find myself equally fixated on my feelings of never being acceptable due to being trans, and both can mentally boost the other. I already draw attention in public as a trans woman, and if I am anxious about that for my safety I find myself avoiding autism coping tools for fear I’ll make myself even more noticed. Both these triggers for suicidal urges compound and clash with each other, and it can make fighting those urges tougher and tougher.

  I’m now in my late 20s, and I have not attempted suicide in over five years. The reason I’ve not made an attempt to end my life in that time is largely twofold. I’ve improved my life to a point where I now have a reason to want to live and aim for the future, but I have also had to live through the suicides of numerous people close to me, and that has been a very difficult experience. As a trans woman with autism, I have surrounded myself with a lot of people with shared life experiences, which means I have a lot of friends who live with autism, are trans, or are both. When you combine those elevated suicide rate communities, it means I have had to deal with more suicide in my life than most people. The week I am writing this, I’ve experienced both a suicide and
an attempted suicide, both of people close to me. One was a transgender woman who four years prior I spent three days talking through a suicidal episode. One of them was a trans woman with autism who had been there for me in the past when suicidal urges were at their worst. One of them died as a result of their suicide attempt. One survived, but is currently in hospital.

  My relationship with suicidal feelings is complicated and has had to evolve a lot over the past decade. In the times in my life where I have tried to kill myself, it wasn’t ever out of a desire to be dead. I am terrified of death itself; the concept of infinite nothingness, even if I won’t be conscious to experience it, terrifies my conscious mind. It was more out of a fear of continuing to experience the pain of life than a desire to die. Over time, that perspective has shifted, largely due to experiencing the other side of suicide so frequently. Death isn’t painful for the dead, but it is painful for those left behind. Sure it ends one experience of pain, but it often causes countless more. I’ve been there in the depths of that feeling, I feel no ill will to those in my life who killed themselves, but the pain it left me with is not something I feel I could ever knowingly inflict on those who love me.

  Even if I would never act on those feelings any more, I still have to fight those urges day to day. The world still makes me feel like a broken monster as a trans girl with autism, and I still find my brain getting fixated on the idea that the world would be better without me. I’m just thankful I survived long enough to find things to hang on to. The world gave killing me a pretty good shot for a while.

  As this chapter has been a bit doom and gloom, focused a lot on death and despair, I want to end the chapter on a brighter note, if one exists for a section of autobiographical writing about suicide. While I struggled deeply with suicidal ideation in my early 20s, and am having to cope with a lot of brushes with other people’s suicides in my late 20s, going through my own battles with the beast has given me a real sense of perspective and strength from which to support others in their struggles as an LGBT person, or as someone with autism, or even just struggling with depression and suicidal urges.