SHE/THEY/ME

For beloved T. And everyone else feeling scared right now, especially my 2SLGBTQIA+ siblings. I see you and I know together we will rise, elevate love over hate, and live welcoming and inclusive lives. 

But I will fight for and with you, too. 

Dear Persons,

I have a good brain. It helps me understand things about the world, like some of the rules of good manners or finances. And, in collaboration with my feelings, this brain has empowered me to be a strong advocate for justice, ethics, and inclusion. 

It’s enabled me to achieve great academic and professional success, too, although it never quite managed to suss out the institutional dynamics of schools and universities, never mind corporate environments. Nor did it help with earning the big bucks. Nonetheless, it does help me expertly manage what bucks I do have. 

In the absence of any neurotypical capacity to read social cues or intuitively grasp and honor customs and hierarchies, my brain has used logic to navigate interactions and spaces. It has a fairly powerful eidetic memory capacity. It can even answer lots of math questions without any conscious calculations. 

But there are some areas my brain hasn’t been able to help me with, such as certain aspects of proprioception, facial recognition, directions, unspoken sociocultural codes, and spatial awareness. 

And I’ve never been able to use my reasoning to figure out why people are supposed to look or act a certain way when it comes to gender and sexuality, from gender identity to relationship norms.

Statistics around gender diversity amongst Autistic people are eye-popping: We are per capita way, way more diverse in our gender identities, expressions, roles, sexual orientations, performances, relationships, lived and hoped-for family models, etc. than the neurotypical population. 

This makes sense to me, as an AFAB (assigned female at birth), nonbinary veering toward femme, pansexual Autistic human who has explored, blundered through, and lived a variety of relationship models—and who is probably naturally polyamorous—with an inclination toward living alone—despite being married (twice! see below). 

I have a doctorate in sociology, so I do have some academic-style thoughts on the matter, but I haven’t done more than anecdotal research in this area and so will hold off on sharing on that level. 

Still, I thought my personal experience might be illuminating and/or comforting for readers. 

Especially now, when those of us who don’t fit the incredibly limited bounds of the next president’s narrow vision of human worth feel more vulnerable than ever before. 

So here’s a microcosm of my own journey as a contributor to these remarkable statistics.

I don’t think I really thought about gender in childhood. I played with the (sometimes but not always gendered) toys I was given. The only toy I really remember desperately wanting was a skateboard, when I was eight or nine. From as early as I can remember, I really loved to draw, write, listen to music, and do extensive research in the library—all non-gendered activities. I was relatively content. 

But the years when you really try to fit in (mostly 11-17ish?) didn’t work out well for me. I admit to initially trying to pass as “normal,” with moderate to little success. This may have been especially challenging in my preppy environment, where the difference between Nantucket red and Caldor red was glaringly obvious to everybody but me. 

Yes, I was a blonde, thinnish, fairly tall white person, but I genuinely didn’t know what I looked like or claim my privilege.

What I did look like also included: sad, droopy, beaten down, “L sign” on my forehead.

Most social pressures that others bow to didn’t (and don’t) even register for me. Or if they did (do), and I occasionally attempt to capitulate (usually I don’t), I do it wrong. Think fluffy mohawk. 

At a certain point, I guess I just decided that wasn’t going to work—the whole fitting-in project. I realized that while I was quite good at thinking for myself, I was not able to successfully or consistently think like the “normal” NT people. 

For example, there were girls and they acted like girls and associated only with female friends and…huh? Because they have those bits?

But what would work, as a mode of living and performing my own self? I began working out my own rules for living early on. At 11 years old, I didn’t know any vegetarians, but I became vegetarian. I didn’t initially know any Queer people either, but over the course of becoming conscious of sexuality and identity (also beginning around that same age of 11), I simultaneously evolved as Queer. In both cases, I followed what seemed to make rational sense to me…but also my heart and gut. 

I became who I was.

In the process, I never found any arguments that weren’t culture- or faith-based to explain the much more common, “acceptable” ways of living (like eating meat or looking like a “girl” and only “liking” “boys”). I was both unable and unwilling to conform to such norms in my life. 

All of the wonderful Queer gender diversity we see now in many (not all!) places was much more hidden then. One risked bullying, ostracization, etc. But I had less to lose (since I was already on the margins)—and more to gain (acceptance from people who truly accepted me). 

The punk rockers and the Goths, the weirdos and the Gays…they accepted me. 

Others…not so much. The only person in my family who really welcomed me exactly as I was (most family members were clueless or worse; in their defense, it was a different era) was my grandmother Merlin, a petite beauty from Knoxville, Tennessee, who, to all appearances, led a completely conventional life and should have naturally partaken in the discriminatory norms of her generation/milieu. 

I’ll never forget Gram saying to me at a Woolworths counter in the mall, “Darlin’, people should be able to love whoever they love.” 

Eventually, at my girls’ boarding school I learned that many other girls were also attracted to girls. Passionate crushes, love relationships, and everything in-between, with plenty of drama. My first romantic relationship was with a fellow AFAB student. 

Over time, I cut my hair progressively shorter and became androgynous. I never wanted to be masculine, exactly, so much as I wanted to be an elf. A gamine. A garçonne. A demigirl (new language! I love all the new language!!!)! 

My self. 

Throughout my entire life, I’ve been hugely into feminism, goddess spirituality, wimmins’ cultures and communes…but also Queer, alternative, artsy, edgy spaces and ways of being. Fundamentally, I’ve lived a life both feminist and unconventional, as usual at once following logic and heart—what feels like the essence of me. 

I married two men, though. I attribute this man-marriage thing in part to my friend Pickles betting me $100 to not cut off my hair (I bet her the same), thereby veering me toward femme. Since I’ve rarely cut it since, I guess I appear more cisgender now. 

But my internal essence has always combined all of the above. As “black and white” as my thinking has always been around justice, kindness, living a moral life, honesty, etc. (I’ve written and spoken about this a lot elsewhere), gender and sexuality have always seemed arbitrary to me. 

As with being Autistic, none of this has been something I’ve discussed much publicly, in part because I assumed everything about me was pretty obvious. Also, I’ve always felt that who I am is expressed through my actions and ethics, rather than the details of my identity. 

That was, I now realize, a luxury. 

Who will they come for next, dear reader? 

As for marriage, I like the ethical clarity of monogamy. I am open to it as an alternative option to my natural lack of monogamous inclination. I think it’s a good model for raising children and creating family, although I honor other models and think they can be just as successful, ethically valid, hot/enticing, and/or safe/comforting. 

Neither society nor any pro-monogamy ethos or religion has ever convincingly convinced me otherwise. 

Now I live in one of the most 2SLGBTQIA+-friendly areas in the world. Families and people of all permutations safely thrive here. For now. So  much so that it has rarely occurred to me to interrogate how I got where I am—to be me, here. But I get that for many others in other places or coming from more typical neurologies and/or inclinations this journey to comfort and self-acceptance can be very painful and even life-threatening. 

I very recently became terrified on behalf of many people I love, as well as myself, when the country I live in elected an openly transphobic, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rapist felon. And this draft post became even more important to me. (I am still terrified.) 

I want to be clear that being Queer is a way we are born and not a “choice” or “preference.” And obviously it’s not just an Autistic or Neurodivergent intersectionality. What I am exploring here, from my own perspective, is, first, the ways social pressures can be less obvious or binding to Neurodivergent people, as well as, second, the ways we may ultimately decide that since passing and masking are so hard and exhausting and even impossible, we might as well just be ourselves. 

I drafted these concluding paragraphs before the election, but they resonate even more now: 

My Autistic readers, do you see yourselves here? Maybe your story is quite similar—or maybe the resonances are around other aspects of your whole self that you’ve integrated and celebrated over time, perhaps despite societal or interpersonal obstacles? 

If you are not Autistic, can you imagine navigating life like this? Can you see how divergent it might feel from a neurotypical life, yet how internally coherent and integrous? 

And can you extrapolate to envision how Autistic people, as often not subject to, able to, and/or inclined to bow to the same pressures and conforming limitations, deserve to thrive everywhere, in their gloriously varied ways of interacting and envisioning and living and communicating, including diverse gender and relationship modalities? 

Likewise, dear reader, knowing that everyone has their own journey, are your mind and heart open to ALL other people’s perspectives and experiences, including gender and relationships and family and identity? 

I’m talking about the worth and dignity and equality of every human being, not just the ones who look, think, and behave like you—or in ways you and the people you know and the media you consume deem “acceptable.”  

Can you see and affirm our humanity? 

Love,

Full Spectrum Mama (she/they)

P.S. Here’s a formative song for me.

"MOTHER APPEARS DISHEVELED"

Dear Persons,

I was listening to NPR not long ago and ended up sobbing in the car. Again. The segment that got me this time was on voting rights (read it, and possibly weep, here), and how in many states persons who have appointed guardians do not have the right to vote. Whether to apply for guardianship of my son is probably the question I struggle most with on a day to day basis (followed closely by even more terrifying questions about what will happen to him when I am gone). The thought of my brilliant, politically-engaged son being unable to vote was one more tally in the non-guardianship column. I want to always err on the side of presuming competence, yet I always want my child to be able to, you know, live...sometimes despite himself.

I mention this not because this matter is resolved, but to point out that for parents with atypical children, and for people of difference in general, the world out there (your basic radio show, and so on) can be a bit of a minefield.

I have many friends – who I still speak to! – who like to say “Oh, it’s hard being the parent of any kid.” Sure, I will give you that. And I will gladly agree we most of us love our kids the same agonizing, rapturous, heart-expanding amount. But I am not Full Spectrum Mama for nothing: I have one typically-developing child and one who is developmentally and neurologically atypical and I can assure you it is not the same kind of hard! When your child develops differently there may be taken-for-granted, essential life skills that he or she may develop late...or never.

The idea that G will “grow out of it” – whatever “it” is – is thus often meaningless and certainly not reassuring.  For example, all his life G – despite assiduous and almost-constant attempts on my part to change this - has used his clothing as a combination napkin/tablecloth while eating. And that’s when he notices he has food on his face or hands...which he usually doesn’t. In the scheme of things, I’d like to think of this as minor – I mean, G is extraordinarily KIND and FUNNY and SMART – yet how will this be viewed by a potential employer? Or partner? (And no, I do not mean typical sloppiness, my “all kids have challenges/all boys are slobs” friends.)

Or perhaps your child is or you are (as am I) at the other end of the noticing/reacting spectrum and barely able to function because of obsessive compulsive (OCD) needs and/or sensory overload from crumbs and the like?

Maybe G’s table manners will improve someday. Maybe someday I will be able to ignore a single crumb on my finger. But sensory processing differences (SPD) and other neurological differences are often integral to who we are, part of our very biology. Neurodiverse and differently-abled persons may develop neurological, practical, and/or emotional strategies to function in a world that was not designed for them – and sometimes doesn’t make sense - but there is much we will never “grow out” of...

My conservative yet highly clinical estimate is that I worry about G a million, billion, gazillion times more than Z, my typically-developing, typically-abled daughter, even though she has had her issues as all children do...

I usually write more from the perspective of a child advocate, or in efforts to spread awareness and acceptance of difference. This time, I wanted to write about what the parents I know who have children with extraordinary challenges feel like a lot of the time, both to acknowledge and honor them (us) and to spread awareness on this front.

I am not complaining – my child brings me extraordinary wonder and joy every minute of every day – I am explaining.

Those of us with who are different, or have children with differences – or both! – have to navigate more-complicated, often “inappropriate*” (to us!) environments and interactions – environments and interactions that may feel overwhelming, cruel, arbitrary, opaque -- almost all the time. In a very real sense, the “problem” is the world, not our kids/us.

My Meeting Friend became my dearest and most-cherished support-network-of-one when mutual friends who knew our children kept suggesting we connect, and then our paths kept crossing en route to and from Meetings, therapies, etc. etc. My Meeting Friend was once at a Meeting – of which one has exponentially more with an atypical child (and yes I know this from personal Full Spectrum experience) – and glanced over at what one of the “professionals” there to evaluate and assess her son had written on a pad and read, “Mother appears disheveled.”

Now this is a mother who has willingly and bravely made changes and sacrifices for her child beyond what most could even imagine. That very day alone I am positive she had already cooked several different healthy breakfasts taking all individual food allergies into account, carefully planned out ways for both of her children to have their own kinds of successes (including – egads! – athletic successes!!!!) and learning experiences, gone to great lengths to ensure social interactions and a beneficial sensory diet for her son, written several emails regarding grades, social situations, IEP, 504,etc.,  made sure her other child felt “just as important,” oh - and worked at her job...** With a smile on her face.

I am impressed she even had clothes on after what she has been through. But there that note was -- amidst, I am sure, other stuff (such as “EXCELLENT parenting!” and “Kid is PERFECT, just a WEENSY bit unsuited to the average boring old, sensory-/social-nightmare classroom”)  --  ...”Mother appears disheveled.”

Figure I – Disheveled Mother

...Ya think? And I wasn’t there at that particular Meeting, but I do know that she has had the grace to laugh about it ever since.

My friends, do you appear disheveled or know someone who does? From crying in the car, maybe? Are you disheveled on the inside even if you appear “heveled” on the outside? You are in good company.

Much Love,

Full Spectrum Mama

* “Inappropriate” is such a trigger word for many on the spectrum. There are a lot of “normal” things we find “inappropriate,” believe me (and there is no monolithic “we” in either neurodiverse or neurotypical contexts!). Nonetheless our children are often told, especially in school, that X, Y, or Z is “inappropriate”...One hopes that some consideration is given to the possibility that people who perceive and process differently may have different standards – and not always assume that neurotypical standards are the correct and appropriate ones. 

** How do I know these things? Because I know my Meeting Friend. But also because I and most other parents I know who have children with differences do these types of things Every Day. I just wrote a letter to G’s teachers and “learning specialist” while I wrote this footnote.

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