and an embrace of gender diversity. Garcia quotes
Charlie Garcia-Spiegel, a presenter at Autspace,
a conference on, for and by neurodivergent peo-
ple: “We [autistic people] can see a lot of the so-
cial rules around gender are bullshit, basically.” It
suggests that the 25 percent of autistics identify-
ing as trans have been freed to do so by their
autism. For me this occurred in reverse. Question-
ing how I felt about my gender(s) gave me li-
cense to look at the other performed behaviors
I’d learned to cultivate. It’s also made me realize
how much I have been impacted by social expec-
tations and how hard I had worked to meet them
over the years.
As Eryn Star, an autistic and transmasculine
writer and advocate emphasizes, trans people
encounter prejudice, violence and denial of ac-
cess to health care and other services. Some
people claim they are illegitimate and want to
prohibit them from living authentic lives. At the
same time, people with autism are frequently
rendered as incapable of making decisions for
themselves about their sexuality. This increasingly
public disdain and discrimination against trans
and autistic people has surprising champions,
including author J. K. Rowling, who suggested
that autistic trans people assigned female at birth
(AFAB) were being pressured to transition.
(The autistic community responded with the
hashtag #WeAreNotConfused.)
“I have faced,” Star says, “the denial of my queer-
ness because I am disabled.” Living authentically
as both trans and neuroatypical means confronting
what I had always feared: if you cannot ape nor-
mativity, you may be denied your autonomy.
For years I feared acknowledging my autism
because I had absorbed the prejudice surround-
ing disability. Autistic people (as Garcia’s book
title emphasizes) are not broken. Autism is dis-
abling because we live in a world built for and by
neurotypical people. Acknowledging my autism
is not an admission of weakness; it’s a statement
about myself as a self.
For Star, rediscovering their body as an autistic
person no longer repressed by social pressure
led to discoveries about their gender as trans-
masculine nonbinary. For comedian Hannah
Gadsby, the late diagnosis of autism led her to
“be kinder to myself” and “not always to take the
responsibility.” Both early and late diagnosis with
autism offers a window into understanding our
own identities. I’ve learned that I have a right to
ask for and expect accommodation. Neurotypi-
cals think they are meeting us halfway because
they don’t realize we’ve already come miles and
miles just to get here. I am neurodivergent. I can
be forgiven for missing cues and instead be hon-
ored for how much work goes into social interac-
tions, all the time.
So much of this—perhaps all of this—comes
down to acceptance, accommodation and justice.
After a lifetime of trying to perfect myself, I’m final-
ly living in my own authenticity: autistic, gender-
luid, unique. I’m still in the play. But if I don’t have a
script, I can write my own, or I can cut the scene
and draw the curtain. No matter how we identify,
trans, neurodivergent, neuroqueer, we have a right
to be—just as we are.OPINION
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