at least the right kind of question.
My body has always been a vehicle for the trans-
portation and translation of ideas, and all the scat-
tered performances were what I collectively called
“myself.” The specific bits of my body didn’t really
enter into the equation all that much. Many trans
people experience terrible dysphoria over aspects
of their bodies and seek to change them; some ex-
perience none, and some fall between. For me, my
gender felt wholly outside of, rather than a reflec-
tion of, myself. Extrinsic. I had mainly constructed it
from other external cues.
I am married to a cisgender and heterosexual
(cis/het) man, and so most people assume I am a
cis/het woman. I had neither expressed nor denied
it; I just hadn’t considered the question. I have al-
ways had traits largely considered “masculine,” and
my sexuality is pretty fluid, too. Mark intrigued and
interested me; I fell in love with him for that, not
because he was a man. So, I had to ask myself:
was I just performing as cis/het?
For me, gender was something to be worn
and used, a means of interacting with the world;
I didn’t know how to see it as an identity in and
of itself. Jude Ellison S. Doyle wrote recently in
an article entitled “Divergent: The Emerging Re-
search on the Connection between Trans Identi-
ties and Neurodivergence”: “It wasn’t possible to
transition as long as I thought of myself as defec-
tive.... It was all so exhausting I could barely
leave the house.” I identified with that sentiment.
I had been trying to choose a single new gender
(and to do it right) but was still only expressing
a part of who I am. In my search to understand
what my identity meant to me rather than how
I packaged it for other people, I realized I am
gender-fluid: nonbinary but containing multitudes.
In that new freedom, I found myself returning
to that other possibility. I had come out as gen-
der-fluid; could I also come out as autistic?
In August 2020 the authors of the largest study
to date on the overlap of autism and gender diver-
sity announced their findings: about 25 percent of
gender-diverse people have autism (comparedwith about 5 percent of cisgender
people), leading them to suggest
transgender and gender-diverse
adults were between three and six
times more likely to be diagnosed as
autistic.* As Doyle puts it, “ ‘Autistic’
is one of the most trans things you
can be.” So why isn’t this connection
more well known?
One point, remarked on by Doyle
and also by Eric Garcia in his new
book We’re Not Broken: Changing
the Autism Conversation, is that au-
tism is underdiagnosed along gen-
dered lines. Cisgender men are iden-
tified as autistic more frequently, and
at a much younger age, than either
cisgender women or gender-diverse
people. Even the autistic stereotypes
are masculinized; an “extreme male
brain” theory posits that autistic peo-
ple process the world through a
“male” lens. In truth, there are no sig-
nificant differences between male and female
brains—but as Garcia points out, some autistic be-
haviors are seen as “female behaviors.” It is more
likely, then, that a boy who behaves neuro atypically
will be recognized and diagnosed. If parents,
teachers and therapists are seeing symptoms
along a binary of gender, they’re going to miss
people, and among gender nonconformists, it’s a
significant percentage.
For many an acceptance of an autism diagnosis
leads to a questioning of gender normative rulesOPINION
Brandy at age two, finger painting.Marilyn D. Watts