ever since i was young, i’ve felt like i was from a different culture, and was dropped into this one by a stork. somewhere along the way, i decided to stick by this, and honor the integrity of my original culture, and not get too deep into this dominant culture that i still feel like i’m just visiting.
what’s interesting is that i see, hear, and feel traces of my original culture, the more i move through the world, study other cultures, and talk with culture-bearers when they are available. i can’t claim belonging in any one culture, but i can recognize ways of relating and of doing things that align with the nature of things in ways that the dominant culture does not. sometimes, just a tiny affirmation that something i’ve struggled with in the modern, capitalist world makes sense in a different context can provide a sense of deep calm.
i present as male, and am feminine-attracted. i have always been told that i need to be more assertive in finding a partner, that i need to put myself out there in a certain way. i notice that there is a certain way that the glance of the masculine-attracted person tends to not land on me. even with my deep voice and male presence, being more feminine-identifying internally, this makes a certain sense to me.
when i feel an affinity for someone, though, my instinct is not to be assertive, but to continue to be open and present, without trying to grasp. i don’t feel that this is hesitation, lack of confidence, or fear of rejection. i feel that this is a cultural norm that my body remembers, even as the world moves quickly around me.
i feel that my original culture is centered around inclusion, and meeting everyone’s needs in the community, simply because everyone belongs. this being so, my original culture is a women’s organization, and men are willing participants in this organization, but do not center themselves in matters of partnership.
i see that a woman recognizes a person that would make a good partner by seeing how that person moves and deals in their affairs — whether it’s a business partner, an activity partner or a romantic partner — and gender is not really at issue here. and a woman, knowing that she can choose or not to engage in partnership, because her needs are met by her community, has all the agency.
there’s some deep part of me that has a cultural memory of a time and place where it is understood that a woman simply chooses a partner when she recognizes one who she wants to work with, and that any advertisement on the part of a potential partner is a cheap performance that is never going to land well. i may or may not be a good partner — in business, activities, intimate relationships — but either way, that is not my decision to make; it’s instead the shape of my arc, the cut of my cloth, and whether i am useful is right there for all to see. it is either my time or it isn’t, but forcing the issue benefits no one.
i read about places where such arrangements are indeed the way of everyday. this gives me a sense of deep calm, while also reinforcing the feeling that i was dropped here by a stork.
I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core.
The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of as normal and platonic, like getting together to braid one another’s hair or do nails or other grooming activities, along with gossip and food and music. The response I’ve gotten doesn’t tell me that the idea is being rejected because it came from someone with a masc presentation, but just that the idea itself feels icky or weird or frivolous, regardless of who proposed it.
I think we’ve reached a time of cultural compression when the the need to mask in public makes casual intimacy too costly—if we forget for a couple of hours that we’re supposed to be competing with one another, and stepping on one another’s shoulders and fingers and toes, we’ll miss an opportunity for social advancement. Moments of casual intimacy remind us of the brutality of the work environments we operate within, and since it seems that brutality is unavoidable, it is the intimacy that becomes the thing to avoid.
And since I experience this casual intimacy as a kind of vitamin—an important part of a balanced social diet—I recognize that we have created a condition where everyone is starved of something that would always be available if we would collectively let down our guard and stop performing invulnerability. We hunger for it, but someone’s rules say that we are only allowed to experience it within a contractually sanctioned relationship, so when we get feelings outside of those pigeonholes, there is a conflict—between the natural tendency toward connection, and the imposed imperative to suppress the connection.
This being so, I own that I will always be perceived as too much—”too familiar,” “flirty,” “inappropriately intimate,” “overly emotional,” “dramatic,” “too informal,”—simply because I refuse to accept the inevitability of the brutality that many people face in their work and social environments. I refuse to suppress the natural tendency toward connection. I refuse to impose a contractual constraint on where I experience intimacy. I feel it is actually my whole job to remind my community that productivity is not the goal, that free time is a virtue to be cultivated, and that casual intimacy is our actual settled and natural state.
That being so, I might describe the grief I feel about the loss of a loved one in the middle of a work meeting. I might express that an interaction with an especially loud and reckless motorcycle made me feel vulnerable when applying for a business license. I might point to the behavior of a person in a management position, and show how that person is taking an opportunity to punch down, rather than being accepting, inclusive, and supportive. “Too much” means “not silent,” and in spaces where we are expected to disappear, “not silence” equals “too much.”
And to be clear, what I am calling intimacy has nothing to do with sexuality or even physical touch. Intimacy is simply the willingness to return to our basic, true character in the presence of another, and to drop the mask that work and social navigation require of us. Intimacy is simply abandoning the performance of invulnerability for a moment or two. Intimacy is simply acknowledging the fiction of independence, and experiencing the wonder and joy of interdependence, even if only for a couple of moments.
At the present moment, I propose that the most radical and revolutionary act we can engage in (but the most powerful, since we can engage in it any time) is simply the act of casual intimacy—when we acknowledge that each of us has a way that we care for ourself, and that we could just as easily care for one another in the same moment.
As we brush our hair, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by brushing someone else’s hair. As we manage our pet’s excrement on a walk, realize that we could be engaging in casual intimacy by helping a loved one who needs support to manage their excrement. As we feel a moment of grief for the loss of a loved one, recognize that we could just as easily feel a moment of grief alongside a friend who is experiencing a similar moment.
I propose that the more we engage in casual intimacy, the less we demand that our contractual relationships fulfill our needs for intimacy, and that that quality in itself is liberating to both sides of our relationships.
So, on that note: let’s get together soon to braid each other’s hair, or do our nails together, and have some snacks and music and gossip time, and maybe cry about our dog that just died, or about the parent that doesn’t remember us that we are caring for.
In this economy, this is the type of care that cannot be monetized, and that is only available to the privileged. Let’s privilege one another with casual intimacy, and invite whomever we can into that state of privilege—because if everyone is included in it, it is no longer a privilege, but a right—simply a natural state of being, around which we organize ourselves, around everyone’s comfort, and not just our own.
i grew up in a biracial household where Blackness, white passing, and whiteness were all intertwined, as a neuroqueer, bigender, autistic child with high justice sensitivity, but low hierarchy awareness. being late-diagnosed, i didn’t have names for a lot of my experiences, but looking back, it all makes perfect sense. none of the labels i’ve used are choices i’ve made. they are simply acknowledgements of what always was.
Framing gender, sexual, and relational preferences as choices does real harm. These choices are the result of a culture built around a specific origin story, that by now is clearly a failed metaphor. When the beauty of human variation has been forced through binary tunnels for centuries, who we are has to make a choice as to whether or not to question imposed binaries and let oneself become observably nonconforming, without role models or a shared language.
It’s the conformist power structure that forces the human being to prune themselves or be pruned, or risk the consequences of noncompliance. The choice is whether or not to allow oneself to be who they know themselves to be—and no one should be forced to make that choice. Calling the decision to do so a choice is a cruel trivialization of a life-or-death ultimatum.
You have to understand that growth requires belonging, and belonging requires recognition. A child who is loved is recognized, every day. A child who is recognized accurately, every day, by their community, grows to understand themselves in community. Belonging to the whole community, a child learns what their strengths and frailties are; and the community learns how to reciprocate with that specific child.
On the other hand, a child who is viewed with mistrust because some characteristic does not conform to imposed role options is neglected. Even if they get their material needs met, a child that is not recognized misses out on growing up belonging. If the whole community fails to recognize them, without knowing it they have imposed a completely different growth arc, shaping that child indelibly. A community that knows no differently ascribes this different arc to the common deviation metric of the day—which never includes the complicity of the community, or the imperfection in the lens being used to observe it.
The community that recognizes the value of human variation to the well-being of the collective will be delighted with a child’s specific qualities, and growing up with a community that is delighted by your presence has consequences, for the better.
The community that has a narrow tolerance for human variation that deviates from a small set of imposed categories that don’t map well onto the human organism will have difficulty experiencing delight in their children’s growth. They may go so far as outsourcing child rearing en masse, raising children in environments with few real role models, and without the belonging that comes from recognition.
Delight is like a vitamin, depriving a child of real-time reciprocal delight has real consequences, not for the better.
In the wake of centuries of binary training that twists our nature into prescribed shapes, given a window of opportunity, what looks like a decision to choose a nonbinary gender, a sexual preference that’s not prescribed in the dominant origin story, or a relational orientation that deviates from the cultural median, is more like an acknowledgement than a choice.
Acknowledgement is a moment of recognition. It is the delight that we reflect back to our child through our eyes, that allows one’s inner light to grow alongside one’s outer presentation. It’s an acknowledgment that should never have been framed as a choice. That moment of acknowledgment should always be celebrated, and never trivialized as a choice from a menu made on a whim.
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?
this is one kind of harm caused by the abled/disabled binary when it is applied as a permanent designation to people: it erases from view the environment that enables or disables a person, and it makes invisible all of the ways that the environment is designed to enable the abled person.
it functions to other into a social class an experience that everyone is living, but some don’t recognize—the experience of needing to exist in relationship.
if we recognize that no one can live outside of relationship, and that we play both roles continuously—the carer and the cared for—then we start to recognize the moment of need without needing to label someone needy.
In designating certain people as disabled, without the embedded values of care and reciprocity at the cultural level, then the abled person gets to sidestep the role of caregiver, and there is not enough care to go around, leaving the disabled to have to negotiate for care that in a different culture would be considered a human right. I’m not just talking about healthcare. I’m talking about basic human dignity.
binaries are useful conceptual shorthand that should never be applied to people without their consent. if you can understand the value of going beyond the binary based on biological gender, and the real harm that strict adherence to that binary causes, you can understand why permanent status as a disabled person might leave some people out. What I hear when I hear “autism is always a disability” is “there are only two genders: male and female.”
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.
