We're Not Broken

by Eric Garcia

  “just feeling very happy to be in her presence”: Chris Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  “‘I’m going to marry that boy’”: Cori Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  “tend to be a bit naive and trusting”: Matthew Roth and Jennifer Gillis, “‘Convenience with the Click of a Mouse’: A Survey of Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder on Online Dating,” Sexuality and Disability 33, no. 1 (December 31, 2014), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11195-014-9392-2.

  when Cassidy Luna was diagnosed: Chris Williams, interview with the author, 2019.

  “Holy crap, I might also be as well”: Cori Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  “The desire, the drive and the social knowledge”: Suzanne Leigh, “A Long Shadow Is Lifted on Asperger’s in Adults,” USA Today, July 23, 2007, https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-07-23-adult-diagnosis_N.htm.

  neurotypical people asking their autistic classmates to prom: Alexandra Zaslow, “Cheerleader Asks Special Needs Student to Prom in Sweetest Way Possible,” Today, February 29, 2016, https://www.today.com/health/cheerleader-asks-special-needs-student-prom-sweetest-way-possible-t76571.

  “when you have it by yourself”: Cori Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  how women could navigate “high-tech relationships”: Silberman, NeuroTribes, 252.

  “barely changed another word in the text”: Silberman, NeuroTribes, 252.

  “It felt like I had to mask more”: Chris Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  “It’d be interesting to ponder that”: Chris and Cori Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  “It was not tears of unhappiness”: Anlor Davin, interview with the author, 2020.

  a nonprofit that focuses on supporting autistic people: Greg Yates, interview with the author, 2020.

  “like the sensory stuff”: Anlor Davin, interview with the author, 2020.

  denounced by the United Nations: Angelique Chrisafis, “France Unveils €340m Plan to Improve Rights of People with Autism,” Guardian, April 6, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/06/france-to-unveil-340m-plan-to-improve-rights-of-people-with-autism.

  send their children to institutions: Angelique Chrisafis, “‘France Is 50 Years Behind’: The ‘State Scandal’ of French Autism Treatment,” Guardian, February 8, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/france-is-50-years-behind-the-state-scandal-of-french-autism-treatment.

  “Our autisms are not the same but there is some overlap”: Greg Yates, interview with the author, 2020.

  Greg slammed doors: Anlor Davin, interview with the author, 2020.

  because of the autism: Greg Yates, interview with the author, 2020.

  “Fears and stereotypes often impede individuals with disabilities”: “Human Sexuality and ASD,” Sun, July–September 2017, https://www.delautism.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Sun-July-Sept2017.pdf.

  “you will go to jail”: Amy Gravino, interview with the author, 2020.

  did not know that their children had masturbated: J. Dewinter et al., “Parental Awareness of Sexual Experience in Adolescent Boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 46, no. 2 (October 25, 2019), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4724358/.

  “you’re thinking that they’re innocent”: Amy Gravino, interview with the author, 2020.

  have been featured on Good Morning America: Thea Trachtenberg and Lindsay Goldwert, “Couple Lives With Autism, Comfort of Each Other,” Good Morning America, February 24, 2009, https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=6952013&page=1.

  were the subjects of a documentary: Lisa Bonos, “Love on the Spectrum: How Autism Brought One Couple Together,” Washington Post, January 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2016/01/08/love-on-the-spectrum-how-autism-brought-one-couple-together/.

  they were in their first year of marriage: Eric Garcia, “Autistic Men Don’t Always Understand Consent. We Need to Teach Them,” Washington Post, April 27, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/27/autistic-men-dont-always-understand-consent-we-need-to-teach-them/.

  “We didn’t have a lot of those conversations”: Lindsey Nebeker, interview with the author, 2016.

  it’s nice to have the consent to do it: Dave Hamrick, interview with the author, 2016.

  309 autistic individuals: R. George and M. A. Stokes, “Sexual Orientation in Autism Spectrum Disorder,” Autism Research 11, no. 1 (2018), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29159906/.

  “That’s a whole other kind of barrier”: Amy Gravino, interview with the author, 2020.

  is bisexual and married to a man: Jessica Benham, interview with the author, 2020.

  is a lesbian: Haley Moss, “Julia Bascom on the Amazing, Vibrant and Resilient Autistic Community,” Geek Club Books, March 28, 2019.

  “a tap on the hand”: John Marble, interview with the author, 2018.

  they chalk it up to autism: Melanie Yergeau, interview with the author, 2018.

  coauthored: George A. Rekers, O. Ivar Lovaas, and Benson Low, “The Behavioral Treatment of a ‘Transsexual’ Preadolescent Boy,” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 2, no. 2 (June 1974), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00919093; George Rekers and Ole Ivar Lovaas, “Behavioral Treatment of Deviant Sex-Role Behaviors in a Male Child,” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis 7, no. 2 (1974), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311956/pdf/jaba00060-0003.pdf; G. A. Rekers et al., “Sex-Role Stereotypy and Professional Intervention for Childhood Gender Disturbance,” Professional Psychology (1978): 127–36, https://content.apa.org/record/1980-23511-001; G. A. Rekers et al., “Child Gender Disturbances: A Clinical Rationale for Intervention,” Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice (1977): 2–11, https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0087487.

  conducted their work on a five-year-old boy: Silberman, NeuroTribes, 319–23.

  mother saw a television ad: “The ‘Sissy’ Boy Experiment: A Documentary by CNN,” YouTube/CNN/Savvas Tappi, June 13, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0lZBL2H4nI.

  “defrost enough to produce a child”: “Medicine: The Child Is Father,” Time, July 25, 1960, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,826528-1,00.html.

  “Eleven Possibly Autistic Parents”: Sarah Deweerdt, “The Joys and Challenges of Being a Parent with Autism,” Atlantic, May 18, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2017/05/autism-parenting/526989/.

  the iPhone personal assistant Siri: Judith Newman, “To Siri, with Love,” New York Times, October 17, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/fashion/how-apples-siri-became-one-autistic-boys-bff.html.

  “I do not want Gus to have children”: Judith Newman, To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 115.

  “I cried myself to sleep”: Kaelan Rhywiol, “Why ‘To Siri with Love’ Is Incredibly Damaging to Autistic People Like Me,” Bustle, December 8, 2017, https://www.bustle.com/p/why-i-believe-to-siri-with-love-by-judith-newman-is-a-book-that-does-incredible-damage-to-the-autistic-community-6780420.

  the Iowa Supreme Court ruled: Grant Rodgers, “Ruling: Court OK Needed for Disabled Son’s Vasectomy,” Des Moines Register, April 18, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/18/ruling-court-ok-needed-for-disabled-sons-vasectomy/7893917/.

  “Hey, sweetie, Mom is right there”: Chris Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  “We don’t have any idea what she’s capable of yet”: Cori Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  disagreed with each other during our interview: Anlor Davin and Greg Yates, interview with the author, 2020.

  that there are clashes: Chris and Cori Williams, interview with the author, 2020.

  7. “Not Sure if You’re a Boy or a Girl”

  “slower to get things”: Eryn Star, “Surviving Education Trauma: Teacher Abuse of Disabled Students,” National
Council on Independent Living, June 29, 2019, https://advocacymonitor.com/surviving-education-trauma-teacher-abuse-of-disabled-students/.

  “complicated my relationship with my gender identity”: Eryn Star, interview with the author, 2019.

  animal scientist Temple Grandin published: Pripas-Kapit, “Historicizing Jim Sinclair’s ‘Don’t Mourn for Us.’”

  compared to just 6.6 per every 1,000 girls: Jon Baio et al., “Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 8 Years—Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2014,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, April 27, 2018, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6706a1.htm#suggestedcitation.

  three girls out of eleven: Kanner, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact.”

  “an extreme variant of male intelligence”: Hans Asperger, “‘Autistic Psychopathy’ in Childhood,” in Autism and Asperger Syndrome, ed. Uta Frith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37–92, https://blogs.uoregon.edu/autismhistoryproject/archive/hans-asperger-autistic-psychopathy-in-childhood-1944/.

  “autism can be considered as an extreme of the normal male profile”: Simon Baron-Cohen, “The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism,” Trends in Cognitive Science 2, no. 2 (June 2002), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12039606/.

  also argued that exposure to testosterone: Emily Underwood, “Study Challenges Idea That Autism Is Caused by an Overly Masculine Brain,” Science, September 3, 2019, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/study-challenges-idea-autism-caused-overly-masculine-brain.

  “living proof that we’re definitely not extreme males”: Lucie Kanfiszer, Fran Davies, and Suzanne Collins, “‘I Was Just So Different’: The Experiences of Women Diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder in Adulthood in Relation to Gender and Social Relationships,” Autism, March 22, 2017, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362361316687987.

  extreme male brain theory: M. Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

  and how this plays a role in furthering the diagnosis gap: M. Remi Yergeau, interview with the author, 2018.

  that this might be because girls’ special interests: “Autism Signs Can Be Different in Girls,” Cleveland Clinic, September 3, 2019, https://health.clevelandclinic.org/for-females-with-autism-differences-matter/.

  more age-appropriate and less eccentric: Nancy Volkers, “Invisible Girls,” The Asha Leader, April 1, 2018, https://leader.pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/leader.FTR1.23042018.48.

  “‘that’s not a special interest’”: Jess Commons, “‘You’re Just Kooky’: Why Women with Autism Aren’t Taken Seriously,” Refinery29, September 1, 2019, https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/autism-young-women.

  than boys with ASD: Spencer C. Evans et al., “Sex/Gender Differences in Screening for Autism Spectrum Disorder: Implications for Evidence-Based Assessment,” Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology 48, no. 6 (March 30, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2018.1437734.

  “over the diagnostic threshold”: Katharina Dworzynski et al., “How Different Are Girls and Boys Above and Below the Diagnostic Threshold for Autism Spectrum Disorders?,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 51, no. 8 (August 2012), doi: 10.1016/j.jaac.2012.05.018.

  “because you’re just the chatty girl”: Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, interview with the author, 2018.

  “gender-based expectations”: Philippine Geelhand et al., “The Role of Gender in the Perception of Autism Symptom Severity and Future Behavioral Development,” Molecular Autism 10, no. 1 (March 29, 2019), https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-019-0266-4#Tab1.

  “high functioning females with ASD”: Thomas W. Frazier et al., “Behavioral and Cognitive Characteristics of Females and Males with Autism in the Simons Simplex Collection,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 53, no. 3 (2014), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935179/.

  surveyed 2,275 autistic people: Sander Begeer et al., “Sex Differences in the Timing of Identification Among Children and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 43, no. 5 (September 22, 2012), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-012-1656-z.

  surveyed 2,568 children born in 1994: Ellen Giarelli et al., “Sex Differences in the Evaluation and Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders Among Children,” Disability and Health Journal 3, no. 2 (2010), 107–16, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21122776/.

  women had higher camouflaging scores: Meng-Chuan Lai et al., “Quantifying and Exploring Camouflaging in Men and Women with Autism,” Autism 21, no. 6 (November 29, 2016), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1362361316671012.

  “there are few specialists”: M. Remi Yergeau, interview with the author, 2020.

  title of one of her books: Liane Holliday Willey, Pretending to Be Normal: Living with Asperger’s Syndrome (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2015).

  “We blend in easier because society makes excuses”: Liane Holliday Willey, interview with the author, 2015.

  went undiagnosed until she was thirty: Ashia Ray, interview with the author, 2018.

  “My mom pretty much viewed me being autistic as her fault”: Eryn Star, interview with the author, 2018.

  surveyed fourteen women who were diagnosed with autism later in life: Sarah Bargiela, Robyn Steward, and William Mandy, “The Experiences of Late-Diagnosed Women with Autism Spectrum Conditions: An Investigation of the Female Autism Phenotype,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 46, no. 10 (July 25, 2016): 3281–94, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-016-2872-8.

  “feeling obliged”: Bargiela, Steward, and Mandy, “Experiences of Late-Diagnosed Women,” 3288.

  “Whatever they told me”: Liane Holliday Willey, interview with the author, 2015.

  “I don’t want it to happen to kids that come after me”: Liane Holliday Willey, interview with the author, 2015.

  “incompatible with how they wanted to live”: Bargiela, Steward, and Mandy, “Experiences of Late-Diagnosed Women,” 3290.

  “The schema of the autistic male is sort of quirky and awkward”: Kris Harrison, interview with the author, 2018.

  “That realm of humor was off-limits”: Kris Harrison, interview with the author, 2019.

  “I feel like I’d be more myself in a man’s body”: Kris Harrison, interview with the author, 2018.

  “socially expected skills”: Bargiela, Steward, and Mandy, “Experiences of Late-Diagnosed Women,” 3289.

  “We can see that a lot of the social rules around gender”: Charlie Garcia-Spiegel, interview with the author, 2018.

  “gender variance was 7.59 times more common”: John F. Strang et al., “Increased Gender Variance in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 43, no. 8 (2014): 1525–33, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-014-0285-3.

  “behavior that falls outside of culturally defined norms associated with a specific gender”: Lisa K. Simons, Scott F. Leibowitz, and Marco A. Hidalgo, “Understanding Gender Variance in Children and Adolescents,” Pediatric Annals 43, no. 6 (June 2014): 126–31, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24972420/.

  four times more likely to experience gender dysphoria: Elizabeth Hisle-Gorman et al., “Gender Dysphoria in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder,” LGBT Health 6, no. 3 (April 1, 2019), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30920347/.

  “When we’re forcibly distanced from social rules”: Charlie Garcia-Spiegel, interview with the author, 2018.

  “implied that I wasn’t qualified to be at college”: Charlie Garcia-Spiegel, interview with the author, 2018.

  “autistic girls are hugely overrepresented”: J. K. Rowling, “J. K. Rowling Writes About Her Reasons for Speaking Out on Sex and Gender Issues,” June 10, 2020, https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/.

/>   a noxious mix of transphobia and ableism: Kris Guin, “Autistic, Trans, and Betrayed by J. K. Rowling,” Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, June 11, 2020, http://www.thinkingautismguide.com/2020/06/autistic-trans-and-betrayed-by-jk.html.

  less common sexual identities: Laura Dattaro, “Gender and Sexuality in Autism, Explained,” Spectrum News, September 18, 2020, https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/gender-and-sexuality-in-autism-explained/.

  What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew: What Every Autistic Girl Wishes Her Parents Knew, ed. Emily Paige Ballou, Kristina Thomas, and Sharon daVanport (Lincoln, NE: DragonBee Press, 2017).

  discussed being autistic: Terry Gross, “Autism Spectrum Diagnosis Helped Comic Hannah Gadsby ‘Be Kinder’ to Herself,” NPR, March 26, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/862081893/autism-spectrum-diagnosis-helped-comic-hannah-gadsby-be-kinder-to-herself.

  Cromer came out as autistic: Anna Tingley, “‘Everything’s Gonna Be Okay’ Star Discloses She’s on Autism Spectrum,” Variety, March 28, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/kayla-cromer-austim-everythings-gonna-be-okay-freeform-1203174976/.

  told me that in the initial storyboards: Erica Milsom, interview with the author, 2020.

  have hired consultants: Hanh Nguyen, “‘The Good Doctor’ Upends Misconceptions About Sex and Relationships on the Spectrum,” Indiewire, January 28, 2019, https://www.indiewire.com/2019/01/the-good-doctor-sex-love-romance-xin-melissa-reiner-1202039446/.

  further stigmatized autism and autistic people: Lindsey Bever, “How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet Became Embroiled in a Controversy over Autism,” Washington Post, September 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/09/19/how-sesame-street-muppet-became-embroiled-controversy-over-autism/.

  “you need to know the interior life of the character”: Erica Milsom, interview with the author, 2020.

  vocal parts were recorded at her house: Erica Milsom, interview with the author, 2020.

  suggested she deserves the Nobel Prize: Damian Carrington, “Greta Thunberg Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize,” Guardian, March 14, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/14/greta-thunberg-nominated-nobel-peace-prize.