i passed 3 tween girls doing a coordinated dance for tiktok on a walk
recognition: that’s me.
memory: when i was a kid, i wanted to play jump rope and hand-clapping games with the girls, instead of kickball and four-square. the boys were always trying to win, and would spike the ball; girls were smiling at each other, clapping hands and hugging.
i tried a couple of times to fit into these girl groups, but it was awkward, and i just gave up. i went to a different school every year, but that aspect of social life was always the same, as was my inner sense of association.
Saying that autistic people who question the current paradigm of neurodivergence are seeking proof of a superpower does real harm. Diagnostic criteria are a snapshot. To refer to the snapshot as reality, without considering the hand that crafted the lens it was taken with, and for whose benefit, or what it distorts, cannot be seen as anything other than harmful to an understanding of complex systems.
Downstream of that, to then force people to identify with a disability designation that hints at accommodation, while the already meager care infrastructure is being actively dismantled by a government that wants to put autistic people on a list and ‘cure’ us, while at the same time removing funding from research that doesn’t agree with their agenda… to watch this all unfold is beyond heartbreaking. It’s criminal and cruel, and to enter neurodiversity justice spaces and hear the rhetoric from people who are claiming to advocate for the best interests of autistic people is just another example of the gaslighting being replicated by the gaslit.
It’s also understandable. We work from the models we’ve been given to work with. We recognize that there are privileged people and marginalized people. It seems to make sense to keep the structure intact and simply reset the algorithm to bring marginalized people in. But the system depends on there being marginalized people, and changing the algorithm simply shifts the suffering onto a different group of people. If we want equity to work, for real and for everyone, we need to learn how to work together differently.
Western science is good at some things, but it is also a paradigm that is easily gamed. What question we choose as a thesis determines the field of inquiry, the variables we can see (and the ones we can’t from our viewpoint), and the output is a snapshot. If we limit our questions to support a funding requirement, a political climate, a class preserving mechanism, or a corporate agenda, the snapshot is distorted, and this has real consequences.
I live in Berkeley California. Do you know how many people I have crossed paths with who are engaged in a research project that is losing funding due to the political climate? Let’s just say that we are not living in a time when good information is on the ascendancy, even at the academic level. I know people whose whole departments are fundraising to keep the lights on, and funders are not neutral.
In hostile times, it’s time to circle the wagons and protect the children within. The wagons here are perhaps a poor metaphor, being a symbol of colonial expansion. But what works is the idea of a circle protecting the future health of our community. The civic infrastructure that was supposed to protect us is being dismantled and defunded, along with the research institutions that were ostensibly designed to help us describe ourselves in ways that align with our nature.
But there is so much we can do if we train ourselves to abandon those decaying structures and find support through cooperation. Tōjisha Kenkyū is a self-study paradigm developed by people in the mental health community in Japan, who recognized that the stories being told to them by clinicians did not match their experiences nor provide support in the ways they needed. Through deep inquiry and information sharing, people working in this modality are learning bottom-up strategies and new language that allows them to access mutual support and offer more effective advocacy.
Every healthy community has access to its own story, that changes and unfolds within its very ecosystem. The questions that arise might not fit a funding landscape, but mutual support makes things possible that top-down institutions won’t.
The understanding of neurodiversity is in its infancy relative to Western scientific paradigms. As far as I can tell, the word neuronormativity only emerged within this century. Paradigms this new are bound to experience shifts that change the landscape of our understanding. When I hear people in the neurodiversity community loudly advocating for top-down paradigms that view neuronormativity as a standard of human growth and ability, and neurodivergence as a collection of abberant deviations from the norm, I can’t help but wonder who they are representing, and why they feel so confident in articulating the boundaries of an emerging paradigm.
Nature has amazing ways of achieving balance in a changing ecosystem. The whole reason we look like we do, and not like our ancestors Australopithecus, is that we diverged. Does that make us disabled versions of our ancestors? No. Evolution is a series of mistakes, that sometimes end up being helpful to the community, even as they are divergent from what came before.
Sometimes, what’s helpful to the community is someone tall enough to reach a food source inaccessible to most, and perhaps communities who had a few statistical outliers in height were more successful. In the context of industrial productivity, maybe the tall ones are just a liability, but is that the driver of change we want to follow? Look what doing so has done to biodiversity on the planet.
Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone with sensitive hearing, who can hear the approach of a predator or track game hidden in the canopy. Again, in an office, they are just seen as annoying, asking for accommodation again. Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone who thinks differently. When I think of the process of getting nutrition out of cassava, I wonder who on earth would have the patience and determination to figure that out. I’m sure it wasn’t one person, and parts of the process probably unfolded over centuries. But it’s not hard to imagine that at some point in the process, someone with cognitive differences might have thought to try something new. That’s not evidence of a superpower. It’s a person working the way they work, in the context of a team that values them. That’s the person we all know who we find frustrating, because their thinking seems so contrary.
In a society that’s not conforming to an origin story that pathologizes differences and that recognizes that through drought and famine and herd depletion and times of bounty, differences in the community are an asset, not a liability. They might develop ways of doing things that build respect for these differences. If we look at the practices of various cultures we can actually see that this is true.
Are autism advocates who advocate for the model of neurodivergence as a deviation from neuronormativity simply trying to practice realpolitik in social terms, accepting that industrial agriculture, production, and the administrative mechanisms that support them are the way it will always be, and we should engineer ourselves to align with that reality? If so, count me out. That’s the project I thought we were trying to abandon at all costs. If not, where does your confidence come from, and why does it feel so much like a story we’ve heard before, that got us into this mess?
my tendency is to laugh at my first impressions. something in my history casts a sinister spell that even the simplest question disperses. delightful surprises arise when i go beyond the first brush of my eyes. followup questions are the love language in my dialogue with life.
Education builds bridges to new understanding. (educare: to bring up; to nurture). Indoctrination burns bridges and prevents new ones from being built. (endoctriner: to instruct; to imbue with an idea or opinion). Education makes the world bigger. Indoctrination keeps one sequestered in a silo.
The reason anti-woke folks rail so hard against indoctrination is that they were shaped by indoctrination that was presented as education; and in the absence of actual education, it’s easy to conflate the two, or confuse one for the other. Their impulse to resist indoctrination is sound. The target of their ire is misplaced.
The people who built these systems often believed in them completely—which is exactly what makes indoctrination so effective. You don’t need cynics at the top. You need true believers who’ve never crossed the bridge themselves.
That’s how the confusion between indoctrination and education perpetuates itself—not through deception, but through unexamined inheritance.
‘woke’ just means ‘educated, and ready to cross the bridge when it presents itself.’
‘anti-woke’ just means ‘bridges are dangerous: it’s only safe in the silo.’
Good for you, for recognizing the importance of education, and the power of indoctrination to limit education’s reach. If you’re sitting with the anxiety of a world widened beyond the scale of what you were prescribed, just reach out. Folks are here for you—just over the bridge.
to be woke is to have a visceral sense of justice, as reliable as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and cognition—that allows one to recognize that the current language of justice is inadequate, as justice is not applied equitably across all who would access it; and to participate in creating language that leads to equitable application.
to be a woke ally is to recognize that one lacks the visceral sense of justice; to believe those who experience it; and to use the other senses to fill the gap, trusting that the language will mature if allowed to do so—to be blind, but willing to coexist with the sighted.
to be anti-woke is to deny the existence of the visceral experience of justice; to belittle those who would enrich its language—to be blind, to deny the existence of sight, in the most literal sense, and to refuse to coexist with the sighted.
only a person who has had the sense of justice bred out of them can own humans or force them through contract into unpaid labor; deny them equal access to the right to vote; justify and continue to fund genocide; or accumulate wealth while others starve.
knowing that the path of the ally is available, one follows it to redemption.
never suspecting that justice is lived experience, the whole world becomes one’s adversary.
I recently received pushback from the usual channels when I posted about decolonizing the gender binary. As is my way, I went looking to history to see if I was being unfair to white guys. What I found was pretty clear, and it’s not just related to race (like gender, a relational construct), but more about power.
Gender flexibility tends to appear in cultures where gender is understood as a relational/functional/spiritual category rather than a biological one. The binary hardened historically where:
Roman law codified sex/gender into property and inheritance structures: strict gender roles ensure that only certain people are eligible to pass along the family name, and that eligibility is determined by the accidental conditions of one’s birth, framed as divine right—the same power structure that legitimized the emperor.
Abrahamic traditions systematized binary creation theology: by encoding the male/female pair as the first and foundational act of divine sorting, the binary was lifted out of social negotiation and into ontology—it became not a human arrangement subject to revision but a feature of reality itself, which meant that any person who didn’t fit wasn’t merely unusual but was an offense against the created order, converting natural human variation into theological emergency.
Colonial administration required legible, fixed categories for population management: census-taking, taxation, land assignment, and conscription all demanded that bodies be sortable into stable, enumerable units—and a population with fluid gender categories resisted that enumeration, making it ungovernable by the ledger’s logic, which is why colonial law didn’t merely discourage gender variance but criminalized it, converting a bureaucratic convenience into a moral imperative.
Industrial capitalism needs stable labor and domestic role assignments: the factory and the household have to be administered as separate spheres with non-overlapping populations, because the system’s profitability depended on reproductive and household labor remaining unwaged. Enter binary gender roles, enforced at the level of law, medicine, and social shame simultaneously.
Each of these systems borrowed legitimacy from the one before it, passing the same externalization cost forward in an unbroken chain.
What’s lost if we only recognize the one narrative? We miss that the relational/functional/spiritual frame for gender is much older than the biological one—many traditions that include multiple genders are thousands of years old. The binary as a rigid universal is, relatively speaking, a recent and geographically specific imposition.
And in many countries around the world where gender and sexual binaries are strictly enforced after the supposed retreat of colonialism, it’s not a return to some older tradition. Many of the countries with the most prescriptive gender codes had some of the most complex and dynamic relationships to gender in pre-colonial times: they are literally continuing to do the colonizers’ work. It turns out that the gender binary’s effectiveness as a sorting mechanism is often seen as more important than recognizing a history that embraces human variation.
So yeah, it’s looking like mostly white guys. I look enough like a white guy that I don’t have any trouble pointing out this information. My inner white guy can handle it. I choose to transcend the binary. How? Understand the history of the sorting mechanism, and for whose comfort it was designed—and then decide whether your discomfort with dismantling it is really yours, or just the mechanism doing its job.
there’s no decolonization without dismantling the gender binary.
the intersectional person is the one who binds community—because they actually understand and empathize with everyone.
countries and communities who stigmatize nonbinary identity and orientation are doing white colonizers’ work: one-drop purity tests don’t build you up—they prove you’re not good enough.
if you’re judging someone for their nonconformity, just know that you’re doing the white colonizers’ work. no reason not to say it out loud.
here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:
as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,
growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:
walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.
the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.
we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.
instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.
what. the. fuck. happened?
and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?
do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
