Asexuality: The Illegible Orientation
Why did Riverdale writers choose to make the clearly asexual Jughead straight? Why did The Walking Dead writers choose to make Daryl Dixon heterosexual after 10 seasons of highly relatable aroace characterisation? Why did producers of Married At First Sight: Australia (2024) go hard on the trauma backstory for the middle-aged, inked-up, ruggedly handsome (demisexual) Timothy?
- Allosexual writers and showrunners are incurious about asexual lives. They consider us a nothing rather than a something. They can’t conceive of how our identity might impact the rest of our lives, beyond the realm of the directly sexual.
- Writers do not consider asexuality as an identity in need of media representation. They consider asexuality a pattern of behaviour with a backstory of trauma. A traumatic past is very useful when creating character — the most interesting characters have ‘ghosts’, ‘flaws’, ‘psychic wounds’.
- Writers use their desirable perma-single characters to ‘mystery box’ sexuality and encourage shipping culture — a highly effective and completely free form of marketing for any work of fiction.
- When series run over years, writers require new material, new plotlines. Any sex-free life is seen as a lacuna which may come in handy after the romantic and sexual plotlines of other characters sate audience interest.
- At a subconscious level, allosexual writers think asexual people are broken. So unless their beloved character gets a sex and romance resolution, he remains broken, forever. This is immensely dissatisfying and even frustrating for writers and audiences alike — allosexuals typically feel they deserve to know, for sure, the details of a fictional character’s inner sexual world.
- In sum, people do not abide illegibility. This resistance is not limited to fictional characters; it affects any real person with an illegible sexuality living in the real world.
The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies
In 2010, eight days before Christmas, 25-year-old Bristol woman Joanna Yates went missing. Her body was found strangled on Christmas morning. Eventually it became clear that Joanna had been murdered by one of her neighbours — a Dutch man called Vincent Tabak who is serving life in prison.
Unfortunately, Joanna had another neighbour — also her landlord — and this landlord-neighbour sported a strange and off-putting hair style. In an attempt to deal with male pattern baldness, this quietly retired high school English teacher had simply let the long parts grow longer, then sort of brushed them across his head.
Months later, once he’d been persuaded for the sake of his own freedom and public image to get rid of the combover, Christopher Jefferies looked indistinguishable from any other retired white man you’d pass without noticing. He even looked… dapper.
It really was just the hair that made Jefferies, not Tabak, the target of a national witch hunt. As soon as the public saw Jefferies’ image on the news, minds were made up— anyone with that hair must be a psychopath!
I recognise the ‘mad man’ haircut because my own father dealt with baldness in similar fashion. All through the 1980s and 90s, my father had a terrible combover. Our mother didn’t like it, and tried to persuade him out of the wispy bits whenever she was charged with the task of trimming the remnants of his hair.
“You have no idea how useful hair is,” our father would frequently say. “You especially notice baldness after a shower of rain. Walking under trees, cold drops fall on your scalp. It’s most unpleasant. No, I’m keeping what’s left of my hair.”
My mother made slow inroads on the combover — over decades — until one day my best friend came to the house, said hello to my father and then afterwards exclaimed in hushed tones, “Oh my word, your Dad lost the combover!”
Honestly, I hadn’t even noticed. I am not especially observant. Infamously so. I also hadn’t noticed that peers had looked at my father and judged the combover. He’d always had it, for as long as I could remember, and your parents are just your parents.
Another thing about my father: He is Autistic. And so am I. We care far less than The Common Man about how we look to others, partly because we’re not driven in the same way by social hierarchy. My father is somewhat vain, no doubt about that, but he wasn’t joking when talking about the practicalities of hair.
Also, my father is not what you’d call a masculine man. Autistic people have a different sense of self. As one example, we relate to gender differently, being less concerned with gender rules. When social rules don’t come naturally, as a built-in feature, it’s far easier to dismiss them. It’s also (too) easy to accidentally break the rules and then be judged negatively for it. My father had once been a fashionable young man, very interested in clothes. He fondly remembered his winklepickers and bellbottoms. A burglar broke into his apartment one night in the 1970s before he was married. He was forever after slow to leave the house, checking the doors and windows many times.
“Well, if you’d been broken into, you’d be the same way,” he would retort as we waited in the driveway for Dad to stop doing his security rounds.
The thieves had stolen his weekly pay-packet, which he had stored in his trouser pocket. What annoyed my father the most: The thief had taken not just the money but also the trousers. Those had been my father’s favourite trousers. The biggest slap of face, though, came from the local newspaper. The headline read: “Thief wins money AND the bags.” This was in reference to a well-known New Zealand game show called It’s In The Bag. (The catchphrase was, “Money or the bag?!”)
“Those trousers were not bags,” my father would mutter, decades later. “They were very nice trousers, and I was very annoyed to have lost them.”
My father worked in the toll exchange, back when phone calls had to be manually connected. “The Post Office” was a big employer of the queer community, and that’s where my father found his people. He very much enjoyed the company of the people who, as a married white man, he had been promoted to supervise. His younger brother (and closest friend) was indeed gay, and very camp. But my father wasn’t much less camp.
“When you two go out, people will think you’re a gay couple,” my mother said.
“Fine. I don’t care. He’s my brother!”
Despite this acceptance, our father wasn’t one hundred per cent accommodating. Despite enjoying the company of women and queers, my father was a man of his era, and had internalised homophobic views. He did at times wish my uncle was a bit less obvious about it.
Our father also had many opinions regarding the appearance of women. Many men have opinions on women, but my father’s opinions were a strange indeterminate gaze. More than your typical straight bloke, my father’s criticism was unusually specific. He had thoughts on what women should do with their hair, for example. His criticism was unusually specific. His own choice to wear his hair a bit longer was partly a reflection of his own gender non-conformity.
My father was misogynistic, though not sexist — a combination you might find unusual (until you read the work of Kate Manne and understand the distinction between terms).
Sometimes I wonder, if my father had been born half a century later, would he have considered himself straight and cis gender? He was most at home when he was literally at home. After he was made redundant in the 1990s, my mother went to work while my father did the housework and cooked dinners. Resentment grew between them — many straight women cannot find this attractive — and my father was ultimately unable to spend his days doing the job of a ‘housewife’.
Watching interviews with Christopher Jefferies, I see parts of my (formerly married) father in him. Most of all, I see neuro-kin.
Jason Watkins, the actor who played Jefferies, studied him carefully in preparation for the film:
“I went off and looked at all the footage that I was able to find,” says Watkins of creating his version of Jefferies. “Footage of Leveson and of him coming out of his house and being door-stepped. I have to say I was resistant to meeting him because I thought I had sort of got him, in terms of impersonating him and applying that to the script. But Roger persuaded me and we drove down to Bristol and I spent some time with him on my own in a café — and spent a lot of time looking at him while pretending to listen to what he said. He caught me out a couple of times which was kind of embarrassing… he gave me one of his withering looks.
[…]
“He did one particularly unusual thing with his hands behind his neck… it was really uncomfortable and he’d hold that for a very long time. And his nails are longer than most people’s nails and he does care for them, and I asked him why he kept his nails so long. And he went ‘Are they’?
Also the director of the film had been taught by Jefferies.
Christopher Jefferies’ neurotype is his own business — and he is, these days — a ‘privacy crusader’. But when I see his manner of speaking, the recognisably Autistic pose of his fingers as he speaks, I see one of life’s oddballs — someone very familiar and relatable to me, but forever susceptible to a witch hunt.
I will avoid speculating on Christopher Jefefries’ sexual orientation. He is a real man, after all, and his private business should have always remained private. There was plenty of speculation about his sexual orientation at the time. So I’m not claiming him as a fellow asexual. That said, his life outwardly resembles the lives of many aromantic asexuals, and that’s who I’m talking about today.
Because asexuality is an invisible orientation, asexual men — in common with Autistic men — can come across to others as ‘possibly gay’. When a ‘possibly gay’ man lives his entire life as a single man, he not only comes under suspicion for seeming gay within a homophobic culture, but even in these slightly more enlightened times, unless he declares himself one way or the other, he’s seen as permanently shady. “Maybe whatever he is is worse than being gay.”
Let’s not forget the influence of female partners on men more generally. If this ‘eccentric’ man had ever married, he’d have been tutored by a wife to do something with the hair before it got into that permanently windblown-looking state. Fact is, there would be far more men walking around looking like the pre-makeover version of Christopher Jefferies if not for men’s close female relatives issuing them orders and advice. Of course, women are acculturated to care more about appearance because women are well used to the ever-present threat of social ostracization for the most minor of fashion errors.
If Mr Jefferies didn’t happen to be landlord to a tragically murdered woman, he would be living out his retirement in peace. But people with strange hair, unusual body language, slightly ‘too careful’ diction — especially men, and especially men who have spent their lives working with young people — are permanent outsiders. Forever suspected. Never fully included and embraced. Christopher Jefferies is one of life’s ‘illegible’ people.
Screenwriter of the 2014 film had this to say:
“I followed the story at the time,” says Morgan. … I presumed he was a lonely man who was mad with jealousy at the idea of this young, hopeful, happy woman having a good life ahead of her. Then I didn’t pay much attention to it until about a year later, when I saw a picture of a very different-looking Christopher Jefferies with cropped hair giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry. My blood chilled and I felt so ashamed at having been complicit in this obscene prejudgment.”
In 2001, British tourist Peter Falconio was murdered in Australia’s Northern Territory. In common with the case of Christopher Jeffries, a section of the British tabloid press decided to sell more papers by creating the narrative that Falconio’s girlfriend, Joanne Lees, was guilty of the crime. They recognised an opportunity to exploit Joanna’s illegibility. To the public, they know, Joanna Lees would be perceived as insufficiently upset. In fact, Lees was completely innocent and Bradley Murdoch was convicted in 2005 of Falconio’s murder.
The case of Lindy Chamberlain also comes to mind. Lindy’s baby was murdered in 1980 while camping at Uluru (formerly more widely known as Ayres Rock). Lindy had named her baby Azaria, which to many indicated that she belonged to some kind of cult. Again, a witch hunt, as the narrative burgeoned into possible child sacrifice. Lindy was reviled, and spent three years in prison before her baby’s little jacket was found in the wilderness, showing that she had been correct, after all. A dingo really had taken her baby. Australians and New Zealanders will still frequently joke, “A dingo took my baby!” Part of Lindy’s issue: The story seemed so unlikely, as dingoes are to many people more like family pets than wild animals. Also, her mournful, panicked wail sounded like something out of a (badly scripted) film. Her very genuine distress was misread as fake dramatization.
ON LEGIBILITY PRIVILEGE
Legibility privilege has much in common with passing privilege, a concept from the transgender community.
It’s important to note that ‘passing attempts’ are very common, and not just within marginalised communities.
I would even call ‘deliberate attempts at passing’ more typical of allistics than Autistics. Allistics are more concerned (and savvy) when it comes to the social hierarchy and how others perceive and judge. So allistics commonly hope to ‘pass’ as looking younger than they really are, or as more capable, more discerning, more wealthy and so on. Passing exists on a continuum. In business world it’s called ‘impression management’. When Autistics are forced to pass as allistic to the point where the self is effaced and erased, this is called ‘masking’ and it’s unsustainable. When queer people suppress the true self, it’s called ‘staying in the closet’.
If everyone were to consider, with full honesty, the times they have tried to ‘pass’ in their lives, perhaps less judgement would fall on those from marginalised communities simply hoping to avoid outright discrimination and even threat of death e.g. trans people hoping to pass as cisgender, or Autistic people trying to keep their jobs.
Because of the great rewards in being considered normal, almost all persons who are in a position to pass will do so on some occasion by intent.
— Erving Goffman, 1963, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity
Fortunately, these days many people are talking about white privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, cisgender privilege and so on. Increasingly, we hear about more specific forms of privilege: Beauty privilege, allistic privilege and of course allosexual privilege (which comes when experiencing sexual attraction in a normative way).
But when talking about ‘legibility privilege’, I’m zooming out a bit, away from the specific. I’m talking about the privilege that comes from being easily read. I’ll call that legibility privilege.
A person without legibility privilege is often considered weird, odd. An illegible person can even evoke a disgust response in others. Then there’s the catch all “odd” and “weird”.
Good at art? Independently wealthy? Over 70? You might get eccentric. All my life I’ve gotten ‘quirky’. Significantly, I’m white and read as female. I’ve also been acculturated as female (despite being agender). But if I were to resemble Christopher Jefferies and my neighbour had been murdered, my life might easily take a more sinister turn.
Whether odd, weird, eccentric, creepy or quirky, one thing holds true: These adjectives describe the subject, not the object. If the subject finds the object weird, that’s because the subject does not understand the object. The subject has not encountered this before. The object is unfamiliar.
If the subject were to hypothetically turn the weird object into an object of interest and make it their lifelong mission to understand everything about them, the weirdness would go away. This holds true even as the object doesn’t change one whit.
We are attracted to the familiar, repelled by the unfamiliar. Autistic people are frequently reminded that we don’t like change.
Many people dislike change. Whereas Autistics tend to be very obvious in this (we have our regular supermarket, our unchanging routes to work, our favourite brand of socks), it is the non-autistic among us who are largely responsible for failing to interrogate their own base emotions when encountering people with neurotypes not exactly like their own. Whose variety of “dislike of change” is medicalised and problematised? The neurominority’s, of course.
For me, ‘illegibility privilege’ is a better fit than ‘passing privilege’ when considering the (sometimes) very subtle phenomenon which so often applies to agender asexuals like me.
If we try to apply the concept of ‘passing’ to an agender person, first of all, what are we trying to ‘pass’ as? There’s no natural inverse to being agender. Sure, the inverse of ‘agender’ is ‘feeling a strong or at least a discernible relationship to one’s gender’, but gender itself is so conceptual, there’s no way I can ‘pass’ as ‘gender’.
‘Passing’ suggests there’s a bar, and once you’re over it, you’re over it. In reality, a marginalised person passes in some situations, not in others. The bar moves, at times abruptly.
What about asexuality? I consider asexuality a sexual orientation in its own right. To be asexual means ‘to see the world differently’, and isn’t very much about sex per se. So if I’m ‘passing’ as ‘allosexual’, that’s entirely out of my hands, resting instead in the perception of others. By changing the phrase from ‘passing privilege’ to ‘illegibility’ privilege, this shifts the gaze back onto the viewer, which is where this judgement happens. After all, ‘passing’ isn’t about what I’m doing or not doing, but is entirely about how others perceive me and treat me accordingly.
My experience of gender detachment is entirely internal. I fully understand that people don’t quite get me. My whole life, I’ve felt misunderstood — though also very fortunately well understood by people with similar neurotypes. We have the knack of finding each other, which serves as evidence there’s something palpably different about us. If we recognise our own neuro-kin, so too can the allocishet allistics. The Common Man™.
The Illegibility of Adolescent Androgyny
I haven’t always been read as female. Between the ages of about 8 and 11 (before I was forced into a feminine school uniform), I presented as very deliberately androgynous. At public playgrounds in particular, random kids would demand to know if I was a boy or a girl. I couldn’t answer, but was always privately elated that I had successfully dodged the gendering game.
My ambiguity never lasted. Everyone always had to know. At school, while sitting beside the netball court in two lines, one girl sitting behind tapped me on the shoulder. “Larre, I know you’re a girl now. You’re wearing girl knickers.”
I realised the top of my underpants were visible above the band of my shorts. A serious error. I hated those ‘girl’ knickers — the pastel coloured undies that usually had a teddy bear or similar on the front, and which were always trimmed in some kind of basic lace. The lace, now visible, screamed ‘girl!’ I felt violated that something as private as my underpants had come in for public comment, and seemed to ‘prove’ something wrong about me.
Also, this girl had accused me of lying. But I’d never once told my classmates that I was a boy. I knew I wasn’t a boy. But classmates didn’t accept me as a girl, so I must be a boy. I hadn’t been trying to ‘fool’ anybody. I really was simply being my non-binary self before the word existed.
Any privately executed gender-affirming practices were subtle, and mainly consisted of this: Whenever the class was required to line up outside a classroom, it was always with girls in one line, boys in the other. I would hang back and join at the end, so that I could walk between the two lines, belonging to neither.
I had recently experienced a mass inquisition, surrounded by classmates who decided once and for all they needed to determine my gender. What did I do at home? Which toys did I play with?
“Do you like Masters of the Universe?” one boy asked.
At home, my brothers and I combined my Barbie dolls with their action figures. We took them into the yard and turned the garden bed into wild landscapes, where clumps of weeds were bushes, providing cover for our plastic characters.
“Well, yeah, I guess I like Masters of the Universe.”
“What’s your favourite?” the boy asked, clearly dubious.
I was able to talk about Masters of the Universe only because my brothers collected them. “I kind of like Stinkor because he’s furry, but he really stinks.”
This is true. Mattel infamously mixed patchoulli oil into the mold. I was able to talk further about the various toys in the collection.
“Okay. You’re a boy.” My interrogator reluctantly admitted me into his fold.
One (bully) girl had approached me later, still mulling over my gender. “Are you going to be a single mother when you grow up?” she asked.
I said “yes”.
Her question says far more about her own social background, indicative of the life she saw in her older sisters and for her own near future.
At the age of ten I could not see myself as a “mother”, and had nothing in common with the young single women I saw around town — a cohort vilified by the conservative media for daring to procreate and drawing on public funds — but I did identify with the word ‘single’. I could see myself as single. Also, by answering in the affirmative, this girl might leave me alone.
My preadolescent androgyny vexed my mother. She walked me past the pharmacy in town and asked if I’d like my ears pierced. I did not want my ears pierced. But she kept mentioning it. Eventually I assented. She took me back.
“Is she ten yet?” the ear-piercing guy asked. “I don’t do kids younger than ten.”
“Oh yes,” my mother assured him. “She’s ten.”
Piercings require quite a bit of after care. Studs need rotating. A stinky brown liquid must be applied twice per day. I suppose that’s what the dude was concerned about. Was I old enough to take care of the wounds? But I do wonder now if consent ever came into it. This was just one example in my life of coerced consent — a pattern of conditioning which would be very much to my detriment once I left home. (By then I had fully learnt to mask — or ‘pass’ as an allocishet allistic. Autism correlates strongly with anxiety. I am convinced that the pressure to mask is the main issue when it comes to Autistic anxiety.)
Ten-year-old me chose a pair of blue earrings, not pink, thinking a ‘boy colour’ might cancel out the girly bling. Also, this was the 1980s. For a few years in the late 80s a certain type of boy was wearing a single stud and also a rat tail — a single lock of hair trailing down the back of his neck. These kids were always the designated ‘naughty’ boys in class. Perhaps if I angled my head the right way, people might mistake me for a boy with a single ear stud?
For the record, earrings didn’t stop people reading me as a boy. An unfortunate consequence of my new look: Relief teachers hated me on sight. Around this time I also had my hair cut into what I would now call a spiky mullet, after asking my mother to take me to the ‘unisex’ hair salon. I didn’t have a word to describe my gender, but figured unisex must be it. But when I entered through the doors of this new and mysterious place, it was just a regular salon. I’d given no thought to what I actually wanted my already shortish hair to look like, so the young, 1980s-punk hairdresser just gave me a Shona Laing cut. (My mother hated it, still complains about it, insists I ‘insisted upon it’ and never took me back.)
I was actually a quiet kid at school — at times non-speaking — who hoped to become invisible. I found school work easy and always finished it quietly. So (most of) my regular teachers wrote glowing reports and delighted in giving me extension work. It was the adults who didn’t know me who judged me negatively on sight. Even the boys who played up — the rat-tailed boys with a single stud earring— were liked better by teachers than I was. Disruptive kids were at least legible. Teachers could deal with them. But who on Earth was I? Not all teachers could deal with me — a reality made manifest each time I was required to change schools. (Six times in primary school, as small-town toll exchanges kept getting shut down, requiring our family to move to more densely populated places.)
“But she’s wearing earrings!” my mother once exclaimed to yet another adult who had mistaken me for a boy. In those days, an ‘old person’ had been born around the year 1900. That generation grew up with very strongly gendered clothing expectations. For this reason, many older adults of my childhood really didn’t look further than ‘pants’ or ‘dress’. Once, a certain old man stopped to speak to my mother.
“Don’t you look lovely,” he told her, referring to her sundress.
My mother laughed, genuinely happy to receive the compliment. Then the old geezer realised I was a girl, not a boy.
“Not like these pant things girls wear now,” the old man sneered, gesturing with gnarled hands at 10-year-old me. I’d just been up a tree, for the record. This old man owned the camping ground we were staying at, and had himself built the treehouse — but perhaps not intending it for ‘girls’ like me.
My mother didn’t stand up for me that day. My mother’s generation were taught to respect their elders, no matter what. But after the old man had disappeared, I did want her to say something. Something reassuring, something which would put that old man in his place, if only between ourselves. “It’s okay, you’re okay in those shorts.” Something like that. It never came. Instead, every formal occasion was ruined because my mother permitted the ‘boy clothes’ only on regular days, but on ‘special days’ I was forced into a dress she had purchased without me in attendance, since I refused to set foot in the girls’ section of the store.
Photos from childhood rarely show me smiling. I see red and puffy eyes. The constant shock of being forced into a dress led to tearful meltdowns which never once ended with me allowed to wear what I felt comfortable in.
That old man’s generation is dead now, but many of those codgers were genuinely disgusted that girls had been granted permission to wear shorts and trousers. It meant they could no longer pigeon-hole us at a glance, by our general silhouette. (And yes, some of those older adults were my teachers, unfortunately for androgynous little me.)
When my mother understood that the new earrings wouldn’t fix the androgyny problem, I realised something myself. So this was why my mother had pressed to get my ears pierced, when all the girls in my class spent months pressing their mothers for the very thing my mother straight-up ‘offered’.
I’ve spent my adult life read as ‘woman’. Even when wearing chain store clothing from the men’s section, or from the ‘unisex’ section of a more modern store, my body has been shaped by female hormones, marking me out as unambiguously female.
But you see, I have experienced both sides. I have experienced Legibility Privilege and its flipside. These days I have a young adult trans child of my own. Many memories have come flooding back. I remember what it feels like to be one thing, misread as another. I understand gender dissonance and the unexpected pleasures of gender euphoria. (Do cisgender people feel this as their everyday normal?)
And as a lifelong ‘quirky’ type, with a sexual orientation few understand, with a neurotype which automatically infantilises me and invalidates my take on situations if ever I come out as Autistic to an allistic, I do know how it feels to exist permanently at the social periphery.
The Flipside of Legibility
When it comes to legibility privilege, it doesn’t matter whether someone is correctly read. It only matters that they are perceived as correctly read. Whenever someone thinks they know who you are, they are more likely to trust you. Except in cases where discrimination and stereotyping cancels it out, liberal-minded people can accept those who are different from themselves, so long as they think they know your kind.
It makes sense, then, that legibility privilege can only come into play once other ‘more eclipsing’ forms of discrimination are no longer in play. For instance, a liberal-minded cisgender person has now learned that transgender people are ‘legitimate’, deserve rights, should not be treated worse than cis people, should not be asked invasive questions, and so on. Perhaps they’ve met and known trans and genderqueer people themselves. As a result, trans people are legible to them.
It doesn’t follow that this hypothetical person understands what being trans means to the particular trans person standing in front of them. It simply means that the trans person in front of them can be pigeon-holed, and because of the pigeon-holing itself, the cis person feels they know who they’re dealing with. The trans person is not mysterious, not Other, not scary.
Michael S. Kimmel writes of his gender transition in Privilege: A Reader (2018):
As my legibility as male (rather than female or “indiscernible”) becomes clearer to others, my legibility as a person, as human, becomes clearer to others. I experience people in a new way.
— Michael S. Kimmel
He describes walking through an airport after testosterone, and the fresh (to him) experience of being greeted by strangers, being smiled at, being included. This is jolting, because for the previous six years he has walked through the world with an illegible gender, as a “gender outcast”.
Kimmel calls this experience “the privilege of mirroring” — when people see you as one of their kind. (In this case, “normatively gendered”.)
He then describes the internal experience of being multiply genderqueer while at the same time experiencing the very real privilege extended to legibly, normatively gendered white men:
I occupy new illegibilities: the erasure of gender complexity and of my history, the erasure of my humanness in my new, more masculine, queer monstrosity, the erasure of me as myself. I do not know what to make of these new illegibilities. They come about because of cisnormativity, the assumption that people are all cisgender. Few imagine possibilities for multigendered identities and histories. Few imagine we might be trans. Being seen as a straight male frustrates me even as it protects me; being seen as a gay male frightens me even as it validates me. I am not transitioning as much as the world is transitioning around me.
— Michael S. Kimmel
Asexuality as Illegible
While many asexual-spectrum individuals are also genderqueer and can identify 100% with what Michael S. Kimmel writes in that paragraph, the same frustration applies to aspecs of any gender— for our non-normative experience of attraction, as its own thing.
What genderqueerness and asexuality have in common (aside from the huge overlap): Both are internal experiences — about how one relates to the self, contra to how one relates to others (cf. homosexuality and bisexualities, which are more visibly — and legibly — about how one relates to others).
I could tell a very similar story but for unmasked Autistic people — again, to be Autistic is an internal experience rather than a ‘behavioural’ list of medicalised ‘symptoms’. And with increasing visibility we are increasingly legible as Autistic, though not necessarily understood. Still not accepted.
For all kinds of marginalised identities, the ‘privilege’ of legibility tends to reduce outright violence and overt forms of oppression, but precisely because legibility does not equal understanding, legibility tips over into a different, more subtle form of discrimination. Legibility “frustrates even as it protects”, as Kimmel writes above. Legibility can erase.
Therefore, true Legibility Privilege is really only enjoyed by those who belong to dominant-hegemonic classes.
The Performance of Authenticity
The aesthetic that all of the Kardashian sisters promote is one that is highly contoured, highly artificial, requires a lot of work, be it money, time in the gym or technological and surgical enhancement. That image really brings home this idea that the Kardashians have created themselves in the image of their own model.
And somehow that reads to us as more authentic.
— Tara Isabella Burton speaking to Lauri Taylor at Thinking Allowed Podcast, BBC, 2024
Tara Isabella Burton explains further that the Kardashians are simply an extreme form of what all of us are now expected to engage in — curation and creation of self. The only people exempt from this expectation are the powerful and wealthy. Privacy has become a luxury good.
What does this modern lack of privacy mean for those of us with less legible sexualities? It means there is no longer any part of our lives free from interrogation and public speculation. Unless we create some form of narrative, less generous narratives will fill the void.
Can you think of a single celebrity whose sexuality and/or gender is ambiguous, and who has also managed to avoid intense speculation?
Now think of people from your own wider social circles. Is there someone at work who nobody really knows?
Illegibility Affects Work Opportunities
By the time I attended teachers’ college in the early 2000s, I was as masked as I’d ever be. As an unaware, invisible Autistic, everything in my life had so far led me to “mask or wither”.
In Aotearoa-NZ at that time, secondary teacher qualification was, at minimum, a bachelor’s degree followed by a year at separate campus, where half of the one-year course was spent learning theory, the other half teaching in schools under the supervision of ‘associate teachers’. New Zealand is a small country, and for our three six-week blocks of teaching practice we could be sent literally anywhere. Our tutor would visit each of us during that six weeks we spent on practice, to observe and critique as we delivered lessons around the country. (Tutors did a lot of travelling.)
I requested to be sent back to one of the towns from my childhood — the town where I had briefly passed as a ‘boy’. I have very fond memories of this area — a picturesque, stunningly beautiful part of the world. I knew the roads. I knew the beaches. I felt at home there.
When my tutor visited she took me out to dinner in town, not far from where I’d had my ears pierced, 12 years earlier.
“That group over there, they’re teachers,” she whispered as we ate.
“Oh. You know them?” I asked.
“Nope. When the waitress asked who wants coffee, they all put their hands up.” Then she laughed. “Only teachers would put their hands up.”
It’s true — teachers are expected to behave in a very specific way, and the main point of teachers’ college is to determine who is safe to send into schools. It’s not enough to be a good and moral person. Teachers must be legible. To be legible, teachers must behave in ‘teacherly fashion’. And so, the main job of my tutor was to mould us into acceptable, teacher form. First, she must get to know us all as best she could. Hence the invitation out to dinner.
Aside from that coffee comment, I remember her asking me about my friend — another Autistic young man who I clicked with on the first day. We were firm friends thereafter, sometimes calling each other in tears after a terrible day at a shitty little rural school with insufferable staff members who either didn’t want us there or who were using us to do all their work — all criticism, no coaching. Together we played lots of badminton in the criminally underutilised teachers’ college gymnasium (and lost quite a few cocks, which are probably still sitting between the ceiling and the top of the fluorescent lights). My tutor had seen how close we were.
“So, is Simon your boyfriend?” she asked.
My face must have said it all. Hell no!
Simon was more like my brother. I didn’t yet know I was asexual — that wasn’t a thing, especially not where I came from in the pre-Internet days.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” my tutor pressed.
Again, I shook my head. I could not even imagine myself with a boyfriend.
Nearing the end of my section, I had an exit meeting with my associate teacher, who had filled in my report. As we sat together at his desk, he gently pushed some paperwork in my direction. I was meant to sign something or other, but what he showed me, accidentally on purpose, I wasn’t meant to see.
Recall a time you saw or heard something about yourself you weren’t meant to. For myself, the times this has happened have been… enlightening.
My tutor had scribbled a sidenote on my letter of introduction. My associate teacher would have read this before he had even met me. My tutor had written: “Larre is a difficult person to get to know, but you’ll work her out eventually.”
I’m sure my associate was deliberately showing this to me. He wanted me to know how I was being perceived, and how this tutor of mine had the potential to screw me over. (They are notorious for this.)
By this point, the end of the year was in sight and, as it happened, I had already accepted a permanent teaching job. Despite everything, I had been among the first in my cohort to find work. This was a huge relief.
My previous section had gone terribly. I’d been sent to the utter whoop-whoops of rural New Zealand, to a school which has since been closed down. I had no choice but to board with my associate teacher in her spare room— a fellow oddball but in a completely different way.
I’ll never know what I did wrong there, but I felt ostracised by all staff on my first day. No one said hello. I had to locate my other associate teachers for myself, who seemed cold and unsmiling. Looking back, I’d probably parked in someone’s space, or used the wrong mug in the kitchen. Teachers are notorious for this sort of pettiness, especially the ‘long-termers’, and we’d all been warned against this sort of misdemeanour by our tutor.
But it was more than that. I hadn’t quite learned to pass as normal. Notably, I had a strong preference for sitting on the floor. This preference was catered for beautifully during the years I’d spent as an exchange student in Japan, where I’d lived the year before. Instead of sitting at the chair of my assigned desk in the staffroom, I chose to sit on the floor to do marking and lesson preparation. This was commented on. Probably very negatively, in hindsight, but no one actually said, “Stop sitting on the floor.”
That’s how it so often goes with allistic, Autistic interactions. We’re usually not doing anything wrong, per se. I wasn’t in anyone’s way. So allistics won’t tell you, “Stop doing it, you’re weird.” Instead they’ll just make vague comments, maybe even while laughing, then forever consider you weird.
Anyway, I have always been a copious writer, and while on section, student teachers were expected to keep a Reflection Journal. I had such an awful experience at this school that I filled an entire exercise book. For me, writing is catharsis. I also kept a personal journal all through my teenage years, never showing it to anyone. I never meant to show this to anyone, either.
But during the post-section interview with my tutor, I learned just how much I had been despised. The deputy principal had even sent a letter to my tutor saying that I had given him the middle finger instead of stopping to give him a personal goodbye. I was shocked. I had not given anyone the middle finger. That would’ve been a career-ending act.
“I waved from the gate,” I told her, aghast. “The middle finger? What?”
“Ah, that makes more sense,” my tutor said. “I do find it hard to imagine you giving the middle finger.” Then she did something that shocked me. She saw my Reflection Journal poking out from other paperwork on my lap. She learned forward, grabbed it, and threw it onto a pile of everyone else’s Reflection Journal, sitting in a heap on the carpet near her office wall. I hadn’t realised she’d be reading this! I had been so honest when I thought no one would read it. How would she judge me once she’d read my innermost thoughts? I understood I had no choice but to let her read it.
Next, she told me to write a letter to the deputy principal, explaining the honest mistake. Not the middle finger, a wave. She would approve the letter first. So I wrote the letter, explaining that I had felt completely misunderstood during my section, that I hadn’t said goodbye because when I popped in he’d been on the phone, and how I didn’t want to hang back because by the time I waved goodbye, I was crying.
My tutor read that, looked moved, and said it was a very well-written letter.
Then she gave back my Reflection Journal. “I read this,” she said. “I’m so sorry I was overseas and couldn’t visit you at this school. I see you were indeed treated very badly.”
Some other tutor had visited. Fortunately for me, he had observed me teaching and thought I’d done a great job of managing a particularly difficult situation. He saved my bacon by writing a glowing assessment.
That Reflection Journal also saved my bacon. Having read my innermost thoughts, I was now legible to my tutor.
And because I was legible, she recommended me for a job. Entirely on her recommendation, I was offered several.
“Take the one at the girls’ high school,” she advised. “You’re a good fit for girls.”
She had read me as a feminist — another label which has always followed me around, and which I eventually came to embrace. She had also, correctly, read me as sexually inexperienced. I had no idea how to handle the senior boys showing sexual interest in me, pushing me during class in ways I hadn’t been prepared for.
If I had remained illegible, would my tutor have recommended me as a teacher? The answer to that is a firm no. Due to a shortage which has only gotten worse, teachers’ college is relatively easy to get into — the main requirement back then was a degree and a few letters of reference. But teachers’ college is not so easy to graduate. After each section at a high school, fewer of our cohort came back. Approximately a third of student teachers didn’t finish the year out. Some left of their own accord — others, I understood, had been asked to leave.
So I moved Islands, and started my new life as an adult. Before starting at my new job, I had asked the hairdresser for an Amélie hairstyle, as the film had only recently come out. Not surprisingly, I was told I looked like Audrey Tatou, and also consistently mistaken as a French teacher whenever I attended training days at other schools. Then the live-action Scooby-Doo movies came out. Students called me Velma. My teachers’ college friend, Simon, my ‘boyfriend’ from teachers’ college, had been posted to a different rural town on the same island. One day he attended the local movie theatre. Next time we spoke, he suggested that if I didn’t want to be mistaken for Velma Dinkley, I might ditch the orange polo-neck (which was technically reddish-orange).
The principal of the girls’ school where I worked was a bit of an eccentric herself, I soon learned. But also a feminist, who never expected me to ‘smile’ in the way I had been very specifically coached at teachers’ college by my neurotypical tutor. (This principal herself was frequently advised to smile — only ever by men.)
She mistook me for an entirely different sort of young woman. Fashionable. The truth is, I’d spent the summer before teachers’ college working in a women’s clothing store and made a careful study of how to dress. I’d studied how to apply make-up. Moving to a completely different part of the country where no one knew anything about my backstory, it was assumed I was naturally like this. The head of English even asked me to do everyone’s make-up for the theatre production. Me? Make-up? I only knew how to do my own!
“Where do you buy your clothes?” another young teacher asked me. “You always look very stylish.”
The Ed Gazette did a feature on our school and the principal took a photo of me teaching to accompany the article. My head of department’s husband taught at a nearby school. “Everyone’s asking, Who is that glamorous young teacher?” she told me. I felt fraudulent. I had never stopped feeling gender dissonant. These comments were intended as compliments; instead they were difficult to take.
If these people had known me just two years earlier, they’d have seen me in army surplus gear, with stripy green and purple thermals covering my arms. Hair pulled back into a bun which my mother called “severe”.
But now I was young, single and apparently ready to mingle.
“You should buy a prize bull,” a male relative advised when visiting town. “Meet a rich farmer that way.”
My principal wondered how I might meet a man in this relatively small town. “Night school,” she said. “I should suggest a new class. Cooking for one!”
She was jesting, of course. But I was freshly baffled. No one had read me as a sexual single before now. Students, too, were fascinated by the mysteriousness of my life. Juniors were forward enough to query me about former boyfriends. They wanted to set me up with another young male teacher on staff. The reality would have astounded them: I had never so much as held a boy’s hand. Nor a girl’s hand, for that matter. Yet here I was, teaching kids with more sexual experience than I had. One of my junior students had given birth over the summer holidays. Her mother was bringing up the baby as my student’s younger sibling. This was not an unusual story.
One day, nearing the end of a busy meet-the-parent night, the principal sat down at the chair opposite and leaned in. I had just been talking to the father of another girl in my form class. He now wandered around on the far side of the hall, well out of earshot.
With her chin propped on one hand, the principal said, “Did you notice anything about Mr X?”
I gave the guy another glance. Shook my head. Shrugged.
“Ah. He’s probably too old for you. You won’t have noticed.”
I looked again. Ah, yes. This father was good looking. Tall, dark, tanned, muscular. A full head of dark, curly hair. Straight off the cover of a Mills & Boon.
I watched as he walked across the hall. He sat down to speak to the Food Tech teacher, an older woman who I liked very much.
The following day, in the staff toilets, I happened to be washing my hands at the sink alongside the Food Tech teacher. I relayed what the principal had said to me, and how much it had baffled me.
“I didn’t notice how handsome he was. The only vibe I got out of that guy was possible physical abuse,” I confided. “His daughter seems downcast lately. I’m worried about her. I suspect her father is violent at home.”
“Mm. I get that feeling, too,” the Food Tech teacher said.
At least I wasn’t alone in that.
At a subsequent parent-teacher evening, the principal again sat at my desk during a quiet moment. She knew I had attended one of New Zealand’s most well-known public school s— well-known for its massive size, for its groundbreaking initiatives. She had recently attended a principal’s conference and met the new principal of this old high school of mine — a man I hadn’t met, of course. Younger. Also quite handsome.
“What do you know about him?” my principal asked me, perhaps thinking I’d heard something.
Again, I could offer nothing. I no longer lived on the same island. I looked young to her, but for me, high school had finished six years ago. I had no connection to the place.
“He puts in long hours,” my principal said. “Apparently he sometimes sleeps in his office.”
Okay, odd. An oddball. At least more interesting than the stuffy old guy who ran the show when I was there. I thought this, didn’t say it.
“I don’t think he’s married?” my very heterosexual principal mused, perhaps hoping I’d deny or confirm it. “But I don’t get ‘gay’, either. I think he’s probably asexual.”
It took me another decade to realise that I was asexual myself. At the time of this conversation I was in the early phase of what would eventually turn into my first marriage, a coercively controlling relationship, in which an older man, a senior teacher at the same school, was taking full advantage of my pliability.
But that was the first time I remember hearing the word asexual. And by no coincidence, I have remembered the entire conversation. My principal didn’t mean ‘asexual by orientation’. The word was yet to be defined and refined.
The Dangers of Illegibility
As a (temporarily) Legible Person myself, I was privy during those years to a different sort of conversation than I was used to —I was part of conversations that happen between Legible folk, as they try to Work Someone Out.
It was unusual enough that my boss was speaking to me as an equal in that situation — perhaps unbelievably so. But what felt more unbelievable to me: She mistook me for someone who was like her. I had fooled her completely. She really did think I was a normal person. That, of course, is why she had hired me.
The case of the Sexually Illegible man who somehow secured the job of principal at my old high school is a classic example of how no part of our lives remains unaffected by (il)legibility.
Remember, I was a teacher at a girls’ high school. At this particular high school, our pastoral roles were significant. The school is geographically situated in the midst of poverty, and school deals with all of the social problems that go along with poverty. We took great care of our girls.
That girls’ high school was an oasis of safety. High school was a desexualised place, insofar as that is ever possible when it comes to horny teenagers and their volatile hormones. But the staffroom of that school was as desexualised as a workplace can ever get — and still, sexual expectations pervaded the joint.
The pressure I felt to partner up was immense. So I acquiesced. I fully leaned into the life which was expected of me.
For a while.
Once I left that town, I vowed never to return. And I haven’t. I even left the country.
I did enjoy Legibility Privilege in that town— mistaken, briefly, for a neurotypical, heterosexual, allosexual young woman. I understand with the clarity of hindsight that, if I had been visibly queer, I would not have been offered the job in the first place. I know this because that principal did not allow lesbian girlfriends to the school formal. Many on staff quietly disagreed with that. But the principal (the very woman who had had final say when employing me) had the final say on everything, and a bullshit reason when queried — she didn’t want girls bringing along other girls who had left school under a cloud. (Most often because they had gotten pregnant, or been expelled for violence.)
Legibility Privilege allowed me to earn a teacher’s salary for four years — a normal young ‘woman’ in a normal town doing a normal job. But because Legibility Privilege is no such thing when applied to highly masked and closeted minorities who are roundly misread, when I could no longer play that role, I could no longer keep that life.
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.
