My life turned around in an incredibly short period of time. There was a six-month turnaround in my early 20s, where I went from an in the closet trans person, unable to live full time as myself, working a supermarket job that played havoc with my sensory issues, and with no prospects for the future, to living full time as Laura, working from home as a writer in a role where I could control my sensory surroundings. My life really did turn around out of nowhere, with such little warning, and that’s the kind of thing I hold on to and try to encourage others to hold on to. If I had succeeded in killing myself at the age of 22, I would never have known I had it in me to be a full-time writer, which has now been my job for over four years. I would never have had the chance to travel the world for work. I would never have met my favourite people, or experienced my favourite pieces of media or eaten my favourite ever vegan chocolate cheesecake. I never would have had the opportunity to dance and play tambourine with my favourite rock star in front of a crowd of thousands, or to become a published author with my life story out in the world. While the world’s treatment of trans people may still sometimes play on my mind, and being overwhelmed by my own brain can be more than I can bear some days, I try to remember that statistically, I have probably lived less than half of my life. I’ve probably not yet met my favourite person or had the best day of my life yet.
I also try to hold on to the fact that my life today is infinitely better than it was even four years ago. If my life could improve that much in the past four years, how much better could it get in the next four? The past four years saw me learn to better manage my autism symptoms, to make friends more easily, to overcome many of the barriers I used to struggle with, to be more comfortable in my skin and feel safer and more at ease with my body. If those improvements have happened in the past, they’ll hopefully continue to happen in the future. Things are often hard for me, but they’re not nearly as tough as they once were, and I hope that means they’ll one day be far easier to handle than they are today. I have faith that my own struggles with suicidal ideation will get easier to manage, but that faith in my own future is just lingering under the shadow of the knowledge that, statistically, I’m going to have to cope with the suicides of people around me more often than most.
Watching someone end their own life because they’ve lost a struggle I have to fight to stay on top of every day will never cease to be difficult to process. I know there’s this idea that those of us on the autism spectrum are incapable of empathy, but it’s simply not true. While I might sometimes struggle to empathise with experiences that I have no parallels for – experiences that differ between neurotypical and neuroatypical brains – I have an incredible amount of empathy for, and experience an incredible amount of pain about, experiences I have been through and understand from past experience. If anything, I’m oversensitive to feelings of empathy, as long as I can draw on a similar past experience to remember how it felt. When someone close to me dies, I feel sadness. I remember the bleak unending sorrow, the inescapable emptiness and the chaotic fear that wanting to die is paired with: the isolation, the relief, the anxiety and the obsession. I remember everyone, every time someone close to me ends their life. I over analyse every interaction, looking for clues someone not on the autism spectrum might have caught. I fixate on everything I did or did not do. I picture how easily I could have been the one in their shoes. I might not always empathise with every situation, but suicide is one I sure know how to feel for.
1 www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2017/05/autismsuiciderates
2 ‘Is transgender ideology making the UK’s mental health crisis worse?’ https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/is-transgender-ideology-making-the-uks-mental-health-crisis-worse
CHAPTER 12
Being a Trans Woman with Autism Is Sometimes Pretty Rad
A lot of this book so far has been about being trans and having autism, and why both those things can be tough, and complicated, and upsetting, and generally pretty exhausting. I’m not going to lie; a lot of the time those are the prevailing feelings I have about these aspects of who I am. A lot of my life I spend frustrated at my inability to be like everyone else, my inability to be comfortable with who I was born as, and upset by the ways the world tries to punish me for the circumstances of my birth.
However, that’s not always the case. More than once in my life, I’ve been asked by some inquisitive stranger, if there was a ‘cure’ for being trans, or having autism, would I take it? While there are for sure some days I’d give anything for a quiet mind, or the feeling of dysphoria to vanish, on balance I don’t think I would want those aspects of who I am erased from my life because there are some real positives to being trans, queer and on the autism spectrum. So, I’m going to dedicate some words here to talking about the things I love about being trans and on the autism spectrum. I think it’s important we do so, because if people could start to see trans status and autism as having positives rather than being purely negative, maybe it’d become more apparent why there’s such a need for society to adapt and accommodate our existence, rather than trying to sweep us under the carpet or pretending we don’t exist. There’s value in helping us to live more comfortably as we are, rather than trying to erase these aspects of my existence.
So, what do I love about being on the autism spectrum? Well, while I sometimes struggle to mentally disconnect from a task properly, during the time I am working on that task I am laser focused; it’s my whole world. It’s what allowed me to write four chapters of this book in a single train ride during the spring of 2018, and plays a big factor in the way I’ve made my career working as a media critic. I can shut out the world around me and just lock myself into the task at hand, obsessively drinking in every possible detail. It allows me to push onwards with work when I might not feel up to it, and has played a huge role in my ability to remain focused as a work-from-home writer. Without that laser focus, I would have had a lot more trouble resisting the urge to do non-work-related activities during my working day as someone whose living room and office are mere feet apart.
While my sensory oversensitivity is sometimes a hindrance, causing me to get overwhelmed and limiting my ability to get through life, it has also made me aware that I have tools most people lack, which can help me calm down in situations where others cannot. While stimming is usually a way for me to get through periods of sensory overload, the calming nature of stimming for me often works to calm me in far more traditionally stressful situations. I know if I am anxious and upset I can listen to My Chemical Romance’s album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge on loop, and the safety and comfort of a known quantity occupying my brain will bring me back to calmness. I know I can pop a weighted blanket on my lap while handling a stressful email, and have less trouble dealing with it. I can spin a spinner ring during a job interview and bring myself to that place of calm focus. For events that for others are stressful and anxiety inducing I have years of practice with coping mechanisms, which enable me to manage these more effectively.
Also, let’s talk about happy stimming, one of the most joyous things in this world. Stimming is so often seen as just a negative, a way to get through overwhelming negative experiences, but happy stimming is a thing too, and it’s a joy the neurotypical world never really gets to engage with. Sometimes, when I am overwhelmed by excitement, I will just flap my hands, because there’s so much happiness I physically can’t contain it. I guess the closest experience for the neurotypical community is the idea of jumping for joy. Happy stimming is similar, but turned up to the extreme. It’s a cyclical experience, where extreme positivity causes stimming and then the stimming helps to focus on just that positive experience, which in turn makes the positive experience more intense. It’s a beautiful nonverbal expression of positivity that feels like it transcends words. I remember one of the most exciting moments of my life, being pulled up on stage by Gerard Way, my all-time favourite singer during a concert in London, leaving the stage and just rocking and flapping and twirling with
overwhelmed happiness, and it’s one of the happiest memories of my life.
On top of all that there’s my obsessive fascination. I’ve mentioned already that I work as a media critic, and I honestly don’t think I’d be able to do the job I love without my obsessive brain and its thirst for information about the things I love. I drink up numbers and data and facts and correlations, and catalogue them in very rigid ways that allow me to pull from a lot of knowledge and talk about a wide number of subjects with experience.
The isolation that comes part and parcel with autism spectrum conditions for many is often portrayed as a purely negative thing, but I like to view it as having a positive: the fact it allows me to be incredibly introspective about my own life experiences. When you spend as much of your life as I do sort of just isolated in your own head, you have a lot of time with your own thoughts and a lot of incentive to understand yourself. Other people for a long time wanted nothing to do with me, and as I didn’t really understand how to read other people to understand the problem, I focused on understanding myself to get to the route of the mismatch in interactions. This led to me learning to be very on top of my own feelings, beliefs and thought processes. This level of personal introspection has also been invaluable to my work as a writer. I don’t think I’d be able to write with as much clarity about my life experiences, and explain to others my difficulties and unique perspective, if not for the insular introspection that living with autism has afforded me.
Lastly, while oversensitivity to sensory information can sometimes be overwhelming to a ludicrous degree, it is also really useful for being able to feel okay when spending lots of time alone. I work alone from home, and have to be okay with large spells of social isolation, something that many people find exacerbates issues like depression. I tend to find it doesn’t have that effect on me, largely because it’s hard to feel alone when there’s constantly static and noise happening. I can always hear cars driving past which I know are full of people, water moving through pipes that will pass under people’s homes. I can see animals like birds and insects moving outside my window. I can’t tune out the world, and as such I never really forget that the world exists around me. It’s pretty hard to feel alone in a world this constantly loud and busy and full of experiences.
In terms of being transgender, I find most of the positives I have gleaned are less about how my brain works, and more about the kind of person I have become over the years as a result of transition. I grew up assigned male, and as such spent a number of years inhabiting spaces designed for men, full of men, and assumed by the men in them to only contain men. As a result, I saw a lot of the worst of what men do first hand and got a real understanding of how men act when they think women are not around. The terrifying rhetoric and attitudes casually thrown around regarding women as conquests, as possessions, as prizes to unlock, as things men are entitled to, are hard to really appreciate without first-hand understanding. As horrible as it was to experience those things while not identifying comfortably as male, it has allowed me a really valuable insight into some of the issues that need tackling societally in regards to toxic elements of masculine culture, and has allowed me to help fight for change from a place of first-hand knowledge.
I’ve also experienced first hand the differences in the ways male presenting and female presenting people are treated, which, while unpleasant, gave me a great deal of understanding of the realities of systemic privilege in society. Prior to my transition, when I was masculine presenting, I felt safer travelling alone at night, I was treated with a great deal of respect, interrupted less often, taken more seriously as an expert in my field and granted more space in the world. Men used to put their legs together when sat next to me; now they spread their legs wide, denying me space. Men used to concede space to me when walking down the street, now they walk in a straight line and put the expectation to move upon me.
Having experienced life on different sides of the gender presentation spectrum, I’ve learned to understand the place privilege has in society. I now understand better the privilege I possess as a white person, for example, and how important it is to be aware of that, as well as fighting to address those imbalances where they exist, a perspective I might not possess without that personal experience.
I’ve also learned to fight more for the breaking down of gendered expectations, for men as well as women. While living as male presenting there were experiences in life denied to me on the basis of gender, like dancing and dolls. As a woman, I am often assumed not to be qualified to talk about areas of expertise like video games and computers. These expectations are nonsense; we should be fighting for men to be able to wear dresses if they want to, even if they’re not transgender, and for women to be able to engage with masculine-assumed interests without dissuasion. Not every person who wants to experience cross-gender interests is trans; not all of them want to transition, or feel dysphoria, and we should be supporting them.
Lastly, transition has changed the balance of my emotional spectrum in a way that I feel is nothing but a positive. I experience less anger and more sadness, which feels like a far more healthy negative emotion to experience, and a far easier emotion to understand and process. I feel more joy, more glee, more empathy and more love. Getting my body cleared of testosterone and pumped full of oestrogen not only changed my body, but it changed my emotional range to one that feels a lot more healthy and in line with who I want to be.
Also, you know, since transition I feel a huge boost in confidence. I’ve had to fight for my right to be me, and every time I look at my appearance I get reminded that I got to choose who I am. Every beautiful aspect of me – from my appearance, to my fashion sense, to my friends – is something I chose and crafted. I threw away a me I was unhappy with and crafted a new me who made me happy. I overcame my own unhappiness by revamping myself, and no matter how hard the world tried it couldn’t stop me. That feels pretty empowering. If I were suddenly a cis woman tomorrow, I wouldn’t have that sense of pride in myself that I had travelled this road and come out the other side the strong warrior princess I am today. I really wouldn’t change those aspects of myself, even if sometimes life is hard for me.
CHAPTER 13
Roller Derby
The Intersection of LGBT and Autism-Friendly Group Sport
Growing up at school, and for a good part of my time as a young adult, I stuck as far away from exercise as I could. I was uncoordinated and sports forced me to reveal more of my body than I was comfortable exposing, experiencing more physical contact than I was comfortable with, in the presence of a bunch of boys and men I felt fundamentally uncomfortable in the presence of. The one sport I didn’t struggle with on a sensory and coordination front, swimming, became an obvious no go once puberty really started to take its toll, and I basically just wrote off the idea of ever taking part in sport and exercise, be that solo or, even worse, as part of a team.
This all sort of changed when I was around 25, with the discovery of roller derby. For the uninitiated, roller derby is sort of like rugby, on a circular track, on skates. It’s a contact sport, where you have one player per team trying to pass all the other team’s skaters over and over to score points, while other players try to prevent this happening. It’s fast, it’s a bit brutal and it’s all about teamwork. roller derby is also pretty infamous for being a very female focused and pro-LGBT sport. It’s stereotyped in the media as being a sport primarily played by non-straight women, as well as being incredibly supportive of trans women, and from my experience with the sport that reputation is incredibly well earned.
I got into roller derby as a result of another trans woman in my life. She’d been going along to the beginners’ training sessions and mentioned it to me. She was nervous about attending, so I said I would borrow some kit and come along. That trans woman didn’t come to any more practices, but I went along and ended up having a great time. I say I had a great time; I did fall over a heck of a lot that first session. My balance is terrible when j
ust standing feet flat on the ground, and I had never used quad style skates before rocking up, but I picked it up quickly enough I think.
What struck me straight away about the roller derby group I joined was how totally and instantly accepting they were of me taking part in their all-female sports league. I’d had a great deal of anxiety about joining a sports team, due in no small part to the transphobic backlash often spouted by the media any time any trans athlete does better than their cisgender competition, but the group were nothing but welcoming. Not one person in that group ever brought up my transgender status without me mentioning it first; they were all out waving their transgender, bisexual, gay and pansexual Pride flags during Pride month, and they never made me feel like anything but another one of the girls. One of the experiences I remember as really important when it came to making me feel wanted and respected in the group was when I passed my minimum skills test, and was preparing to move up to main practices with the rest of the team.
One of the things that’s done in roller derby, at least in our league in the UK, is that when moving up to main practices, new skaters are assigned a more experienced skater to keep an eye on them, making sure they’re welcome and safe and included. This is often referred to as a big sister/little sister pairing, and it was really special to me as a part of bonding with that group. As a trans woman, I grew up being referenced as male, and never got to experience that sort of gender-affirming sibling bond that others experience when much younger than myself. On a weekly basis, having someone pull me in for a hug, welcome me as their sister or little sis and mentor me through those early months in the sport was validating and affirming in a way I could not have expected.
Uncomfortable Labels Page 13