Times My Autistic Face Has Gotten Me Into Trouble
My whole life, I’ve been told to smile.
Ten years old
I’m in standard four. My public primary school teacher transferred from a Steiner school and has set our classroom up according to Steiner principles. I love the freedom of it, and I love him. But every now and then, I’m reminded he doesn’t always get me. I’ve been fiddling with my multicolor pen to see what’s inside. Turns out there’s a spring inside. It springs out. The spring falls under my desk. I get out of my chair, crawl under the desk, and search around on the carpet, hunting for the missing spring of my favourite pen. I find it. I set about putting the pen back together.
Mr M sees me under the desk. “What are you doing under there?”
I’m about to explain, but he answers his own question: “Sulking.”
Earlier that year, when this teacher — Mr. M — was acting principal and our class was saddled for one term with a first-year teacher — Miss J— we went with another class on school camp.
This is Aotearoa New Zealand. We are camping in one of the most beautiful parts of a beautiful country. These are the excursions of today’s billionaires but on a 1980s local budget.
We are at a well-equipped campsite near a beautiful beach with golden sands and beautiful walking tracks. The late-summer weather is perfect. I’m enjoying myself as much as I ever can, given that I’m an (unidentified) Autistic kid in a brand new environment, trying to determine what’s expected of me next.
After the abseiling, I am walking behind the first-year teacher (Miss J) to a shed, where I’ll be borrowing a specialised tramping pack for a day trip. (This is a feature of my long-term memory: I remember the bad things in granular detail.)
Nothing:
Literally nothing at all:
Miss J: [Swings around] Gives me a completely unexpected dressing down. “If you don’t wipe that look off your face, I’m calling your mother to come and take you home. Everyone’s gone to a lot of trouble to organise this camp. Buck up your ideas. Right. Now.”
What ‘look’ on my face? I didn’t know I had a ‘look’. I had been feeling fine. But now I’m feeling scared. I know that my mother won’t stand up for me if she is called to come and get me. My mother is also a teacher at the same school, though not on this camp. She is friends with this first-year teacher I’ve been lumped with.
I suspect Miss J is mad at me because I didn’t eat an ice-block earlier with everyone else. Miss J had pressed and pressed me. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like ice-blocks? Do you need something else to eat?”
The reason I couldn’t eat: I always had trouble eating in new places. My nervous system is too jumpy. And we had only just arrived when the ice-blocks were passed around. Also? We had been required to choose a flavour. I could not choose a flavour, and I certainly couldn’t ask for anything else, so had decided not to eat refreshments at all.
Adult-me would love to see what Miss J would have said to my mother, who has hypothetically driven to collect me for ‘misbehaviour’. How would Miss J explain my transgressions? “I just don’t like your kid’s face. She’s weird in some way I can’t put my finger on. And she looks like a boy. Creeps me out. Take it away!”
But I am only ten.
So, I go out of my way to appear chirpy. When you’re ten years old, you really want adults in your life to like you, even when you fully understand that they do not like you. You have no choice. I get up at six o’clock the next morning. I run to the kitchen.
Mr M and Miss J are sitting opposite each other at a trestle table. Sunlight is just starting to stream in the window. When they see me appear, they look baffled and bleary-eyed. They’re sipping coffee.
“What are you doing up this early?” says Mr M.
“I’m here to peel potatoes,” I say.
“Hmm.” Then Mr M says, “How do you get your hair to do that?” He is referring to the way my short-cut hair sticks up vertically in the mornings before I wet it down. I’ve been so keen to impress that I have jumped straight out of my bunk and rushed to help out the kitchen in time for six a.m. potato-peeling duties.
Now I realise the potato thing had been a joke. When Mr M had told us we’d be up at six the next morning to peel potatoes, he didn’t mean it. I don’t see potatoes. But here I am. And my teachers don’t want me here. They were hoping for a bit of peace and quiet before starting their day. But I do have a big smile across my face, as instructed. They tell me to go away and amuse myself for a bit.
Note: neither of them is smiling at this hour. But I am, just as instructed. The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I don’t know the word ‘hypocrisy,’ but I feel it.
That evening, or perhaps the following evening, Miss J organises indoor ‘games.’ Two classes of kids are on this camp. Dinner is cleared away, and chairs for 60 kids are arranged in a giant semi-circle. Miss J asks for a volunteer. I never volunteer. I like to know what’s happening in advance. Volunteering terrifies me.
No matter. Miss J volunteers me anyway.
In front of everyone, Miss J blindfolds me with a folded paisley bandana. I don’t know what’s about to happen. Worse yet, now I can’t even see what’s happening at this moment. I can’t follow what she’s saying about the game either because I’m starting to panic a little. Anxiety. Auditory occlusion. Then, the blindfold falls off. I haven’t touched it. I can barely move. Miss J looks down at me. “What happened to your blindfold?”
“It fell off.”
“You must have a funny-shaped head,” she sniffs, in front of everyone. I have wondered for years what’s so ‘funny’ about the shape of my head.
The ‘game,’ as it happens, requires me to sit on someone’s lap. I don’t know why this is meant to be fun. I still don’t know how boomer teachers of the 1980s and 90s collectively thought it funny to play uncomfortably sexual games with pre-adolescents. But they did. Gen X will tell you. Many did.
I’m supposed to be feeling people’s hair. If I’d been smart, I’d have found someone with long hair, a girl, to avoid the humiliation of sitting on a boy’s lap. Unfortunately for me, I just want to get this over with, so I choose a random lap to sit on. Only then will my humiliation be over. Fifty-fifty chance. Unfortunately, I sit on a boy’s lap. I hear loud laughter. But I’m not laughing. Nor is the boy. My classmates don’t know what to make of me, either. Am I a boy or a girl? I’ve been asked many times. There have been interrogations and accusations. “If you think you’re a boy, why are you wearing girl’s underwear?”
(Why are you interrogating my underwear? Also, I never said I’m a boy.)
Now I’ve been deliberately shamed on camp by Miss J. The boy with the lap is collateral damage. I don’t remember the game continuing for long — if at all — after my turn. Maybe one of the adults realised this wasn’t working as a ‘game.’
One night, in our sleeping bags, Miss J goes around to each of the girls, saying goodnight. Other girls like her. And she likes them. I am hiding deep inside my sleeping bag. I no longer want to be noticed.
“Who’s this?” Miss J asks playfully, lifting the flap of my sleeping bag. Then, her tone changes. “Oh. It’s you.”
On the final day of camp, the toilets need cleaning. Miss J picks two girls to clean the girls’ toilets and another two girls to clean the boys’ toilets. This teaches the boys that cleaning toilets is for girls.
Miss J picks me to clean the boys’ toilet alongside another ‘naughty’ girl from the other class who she also doesn’t like. Together, this other girl and I mop the toilet floor. The other girl is messing around. After cleaning out the urinal — a novelty we’d never seen before — she pokes the weesey mop hard into my face.
Miss J has taught everyone else how I should be treated. Although I’m generally pretty respected by my own classmates, this girl is from the other class, and she only knows me as the kid who’s been shamed, not as the kid who is smart at schoolwork.
Back in school, Miss J keeps telling me to smile. I think that’s the basic problem. She doesn’t like my face. She also doesn’t like that I look like a boy. Adults don’t tend to like that, especially not in 1988.
On reflection, there are many things Miss J can’t stand about me. My mother requested I be put into a composite class with the year below because I learned to read early, and my mother now realises I was pushed ahead of my grade earlier than I should have been. For social reasons, I should be with same-aged peers. So Miss J’s composite class it is. I’m one of six Standard Fours in a class of Standard Threes (I’m the age of a Standard Three).
But Miss J is brand new to teaching and doesn’t realise how quickly a Standard Four kid can finish the work she sets. I am frequently out of work. That’s okay because I like reading, and the class rule is this: If we finish early, we get to read.
One day after lunch, we are doing SSR (silent, sustained reading), and Miss J tells everyone to put their books away. We’re working on posters now. The ones we started yesterday.
I keep reading. Miss J sees me still reading and starts yelling: “I told you to finish your poster!”
“I finished mine yesterday.” Unlike her voice, my own voice is calm and collected. Unlike her fuming angry face, mine is expressionless… I assume. Possibly scathing. Miss J walks away. She leaves me to read — I’m following her own rule, after all — but she doesn’t apologise. I notice that, too. If I had yelled at her, I’d be made to apologise. I’d be sent to the principal’s office.
There are many incidents like these.
Fortunately for me, Miss J leaves our school after one term of fully hating my guts. I don’t want to attend her goodbye party. The goodbye party will be held at her house on the Saturday evening of my precious weekend. Her house is a modified barn at the farm of her mentor teacher, another teacher at the same school who, I later learn, also hates my guts.
But my mother makes me go. I sit by the farm pond and catch sight of an eel. Then the party is finally over.
On Monday, the last Monday I see her, Miss J makes us all write about “Saturday” in our creative writing exercise books. I know everyone else will be writing some carbon copy version of: We went to Miss J’s and rode a horse and cart with the old fella who lives next to Mrs. H’s orchard, then we watched five minutes of Ghostbusters on Miss J’s television before she yelled at us all for failing to take our shoes off at her door.
So I decide to write something different, for variety’s sake. I do write about “Saturday,” as instructed, but I write about my day before the party in question. I write that I got up, brushed my teeth, jumped on the trampoline, messed around in the yard… On and on it goes. I do not mention the party. I’ve already written several pages of a very mundane 1980s Saturday of free play in excruciating — mocking — detail.
Miss J reads what I have written. She is ropable. “What about the party!?”
I shrug.
She makes an exasperated noise and shoves my exercise book back at me.
She is clearly very offended. Perhaps she expected me to write complimentary things about the party she so generously put on. Perhaps she wanted me to say something complimentary about her, since she would soon be leaving for good.
In hindsight, I couldn’t have come up with a better middle-finger salute as good riddance to that Miss J, who hated my ‘flat-affect face. And I didn’t even try to offend. I was trying to provide my teacher with more varied reading material.
Occasionally, Autism does me a solid.
Twenty years old
I’m a third-year university student majoring in Japanese, a subject I have loved since early in high school. Thanks to my being young for my year, I spent an extra year in high school — this time in Japan. That year afforded me an extra year of maturity before hitting university, which I needed.
The Japanese lecturer before us is a Japanese national in her 50s— a feminist who specialises in ancient Japanese literature. But she also teaches the linguistics part. That’s the course I’m taking. We’re in a lecture theatre. This class is quite large — again, about 60 people, mostly international students from various parts of Asia.
We’re doing a translation. The translation has something to do with Aotearoa history.
Our feminist lecturer asks, “What year did New Zealand women achieve suffrage?”
Having already spent a gap year in Japan, my Japanese is pretty good. I know the answers to most questions. I hold myself back from answering everything, dominating every class.
But no one else answers this one.
“Larre?” The lecturer finds my face in the lecture theatre. “Surely you know the answer to this. You’re a feminist.”
The lecturer is correct. I do know the answer to this. I could tell her the answer right now. But for some reason, I don’t tell her shit. I shrug. I still can’t explain this, except to say it bothers me at the age of 20 to be publicly identified as The Class Feminist. I’m not even in this woman’s feminist Japanese literature class. How does she know this about me? What the hell gave it away? I don’t remember saying anything in support of women’s rights. Not out loud?
I know one thing for sure: These days, I am no longer that non-binary kid who everyone assumes is a boy. I am a badly-dressed young woman. I wear green and purple thermal tops under tees and cargo or track pants, always with comfortable footwear and no make-up. I spend my days scurrying between classes and my three part-time jobs, commuting by foot, bus, or bicycle between each of them. Basically, I clean lecture theatres from 4 a.m., then spend the rest of the day attending lectures in my cleaning clothes, no doubt smelling like Pledge polishing spray.
I know another thing, too: It is the late 1990s, and it doesn’t pay to be a ‘feminist’ in public. It doesn’t get you anywhere — no allowances, only further obligations.
Case in point: I have recently won a rare and valuable scholarship to study at a Japanese university. I’ve spent the last three years at my Aotearoa University doing extra independent study to pass the very difficult written test taken at the Consular Office.
The languages department is very proud of my achievement, as it supposedly reflects well on them. So they won’t miss a marketing opportunity. My feminist lecturer arranges for me to meet with a newspaper journalist at the Consulate, where I am required to pose for a photograph and say charming things.
Later, after the massive picture of my face appears in the newspaper, and distant relatives call my parents to tell them they saw it and isn’t that marvellous, my mother asks why I didn’t at least dress up for it. I tell her I rode my bike into town, so what did she expect me to wear on a bike? Fortunately, I think the photographer touched up my photo, so I at least don’t look sweaty and red. I had a headwind.
“You should’ve taken a taxi,” my father says.
I wouldn’t know how to take a taxi. I could probably work it out, but I don’t know the exact steps around taxi-taking. But I do know how to get from my own house to the Consular Office of Japan, where to chain up my bike, and how much extra time to allow given the wind.
I can’t understand what the big deal is anyway. I didn’t even want to do this stupid interview where I was required to tell many, many lies.
“Why do you like Japan?”
[some bullshit]
The real answer: I’m not sure I like Japan, per se, but I am totally in love with Japanese linguistics. The only way to improve my Japanese language skills from here is to base myself in Japan and study under a linguistics specialist. And it’s great to be paid to study. I am exhausted after three years of full-time study and part-time jobs. I need a break to just… study. To be a student.
“What do you intend to do with your Japanese?”
[some bullshit]
The real answer: Honestly, you’ve given me three weeks' notice between ‘getting the scholarship’ and ‘landing in Japan.’ I haven’t thought any further ahead than that. Next week, I’ll be plonking myself on the other side of the world, where I know no one, and will be required to speak Japanese and only Japanese because you’re sending me to a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. I’m nervous but also excited about needing to learn a whole new dialect. And you’re asking me to think further ahead than that?
A few days later, I find myself standing in my feminist Japanese lecturer’s office. She is giving me some… advice.
“You need to smile,” she tells me. “Japan is like that. If you don’t smile, you won’t get far, no matter how good your Japanese language skills.”
At this point, I learn that the Consulate-General — a middle-aged Japanese man — had passed on to my lecturer that I hadn’t been smiley enough.
And my Japanese lecturer — herself a middle-aged feminist — is… simply rolling with it. She agrees with him. I am a young woman, after all — or perceived as one. Ergo, I would have to smile if I wanted to get on in life.
Twenty-two years old
As it turns out, I loved Japanese university and didn’t want to come home. I made great friends, travelled all around the country, spoke barely any English, improved my language skills immensely, and there was plenty of smiling. There was plenty to smile about.
But Japan is pretty strict about visas. So I was ejected back to Aotearoa, New Zealand, in the middle of a Southern Hemisphere academic year.
What now?
I remember the year-old bullshit I told the Consulate-General: I would like to spread knowledge of the Japanese language and culture to help with intercultural understanding and Japan-New Zealand international relations.
My mother was a teacher. If I, too, become a teacher, my mother will be proud. My mother wishes she’d taught high school maths, not primary school, but a university degree was beyond financial reach.
So, I apply to a teachers’ college. I have a degree. The first in my family to get one. One more year of study, and I can become a high school teacher.
I’d put the college application off, hoping all summer that a better idea might strike me, but nothing did. As it turns out, high-level Japanese skills on their own are good for two things:
- retail work
- tourism
and I’d done enough of that, all through university. I did not want to work with Japanese people as tourists. I knew that for damn sure. By the way, I did a lot of smiling. Those jobs were easy in a way. Mind-numbingly easy, in fact. Where smiling is most of my job, in fact, where it is the main part of my job, I can do it, no problem. I sold many trinkets to many Japanese tourists, smiling and bowing all the time.
With my academic transcript and impressive recent scholarship history, I am accepted immediately. Also, I’ve tutored Japanese for some years as a gifted student, so references are no problem.
After acceptance, I even get another scholarship — one specially for Japanese teacher trainees. This requires me to go back to my old university lecturers. I need some papers signed.
“Hmm. Do you know this scholarship is funded by a Nazi?”
I did not know this. But I get and accept the scholarship anyway. That wartime Nazi is long since dead. But I now feel extra obliged to get through teachers’ college and become the person everyone expects me to be… the person I have been very generously funded to be, the person I have officially claimed to be, to the Consular-General, no less. I must become a Japanese language teacher. It’s that or… what? Everything until now has led me to this.
But do I really want to teach teenagers? Not really? What I really want: To talk all day about my special interest and get paid for it. Strangely, no one asks me if I want to work with teenagers. That’s… a given? I guess?
“We don’t get many applicants with a transcript like yours,” the intake woman says. She is beautiful. She has long, red hair. “Our best applicants tend to be last-minute applicants. Every year, it’s the same.”
I hadn’t actually noticed how beautiful the intake woman was, but I took my best friend with me to the interview. My friend noticed and talked about it afterwards. She notices beautiful people. To me, people are just people. Everyone looks the same up close.
When it comes to teaching teenagers, it really doesn’t help that I still look like a teenager myself. Even at the age of 28, after I’d left teaching, I was IDed for buying a scratchie, which my mother had given me two dollars to buy (We happened to be together at the supermarket.)
My mother understands how young I look, and right now, she urges me to get my hair cut into some kind of style. Layered, or something. So, I completely change my long, straight hair. I recently watched Amélie, a 2001 French film. I ask for my hair to be cut like that. The hairdresser cuts my hair to look exactly like that. Many people comment on it. With no prompting, people will tell me I remind them of Audrey Tatou. I never wanted to spend this much money on hair. It needs cutting every six weeks. Also, everyone, for some years after, will assume I’m the French teacher, not the Japanese teacher. I speak about two words of French. One of them is Amélie.
That year, Japanese friends visit from Japan and tell me I look like a completely different person now. Because of the hair, which I colour just a little darker. Enough to look exotic — enough so that people will occasionally query where I am from, even though I’m from a very ordinary town in Aotearoa, New Zealand, just like them.
I intend to look different. I intend to be different. If I hope to become a teacher, I’ll need to become an entirely different person because my favourite thing to do is sit for hours at a time alone in a room and see no one at all. Apparently, there are jobs that let you do this. One cousin became a lawyer and hated the solitude. Now, she works in publishing for far less money.
I didn’t know such jobs existed back then.
As it happens, the only part-time job offered to me that summer was retail assistant in a women’s dress shop. If you asked me right now to name the job I am THE most ill-suited to, it would be working in a women’s dress shop.
So there I am, working alongside older women — ex-hairdressers — who are very, very different from myself. They wear hot pants. They fake-tan their legs at lunchtime. They flip through fashion magazines and dream about the outfits. They hold sex toy parties and discuss their purchases — and their sex lives — in candid detail. They know — they just know — I am nothing like them. But they can’t quite put their finger on it. They assume I’m a little rich girl because I have been to university. My father also works at the university. One day, the one very nice older lady sticks up for me over something or other and tells the other bitches my father ‘works at the university,’ so they’d better be careful. Only she and I know the truth: My father is a cleaner at the university. My father never finished high school. It was my father who got me my job cleaning at the university — a job I was unable to get back after returning from my scholarship year in Japan because the recruitment guy took one look at me with my brand new Amélie haircut and said, “Can you use a polisher, though?”
I said, “Well, no, but that’s only because I’ve never been allowed to touch the polisher. The men use the polisher because everyone knows that polishing is a cushy job once you get the knack of it. No, I mop stairways and manoeuvre myself between tiered lecture theatre seats while wearing a backpack vacuum cleaner. That’s what I’m fit for.”
I later heard from my father the real reason I didn’t get my old job back: “She won’t be hanging around. She’s headed for greater things.”
(You may at this point understand, as I do also, exactly why I had garnered a reputation for being a ‘feminist.’)
Anyway, that’s how I ended up working in a women’s clothing store, which was an education I didn’t know I needed. I learned just how much work regular women (read: cis women) put into dressing themselves. Oh, the number of outfits that are tried on and then discarded. Me? I just walk into a store and grab what’s on the mannequin. Even better, I don’t try anything on. I just hope it fits, then scarper.
Now I’m paid to be in a clothing store. I learn from magazines and from much commentary from customers about which clothes look fashionable together. I use my staff discount to replace my wardrobe of chain store cargo pants and tees with nice clothes, lovely clothes. Partly, I’m required to. On minimum wage, we are nonetheless required to dress well.
One day, a non-binary-looking young woman my age comes into the store. She has very clearly been dragged into the store by her mother. I recognise the dynamic instantly. This person is the unadulterated mirror-image of myself. I look fancy these days and feminine, like your typical mall dress-store employee, but I am her. I am, perhaps, them. Their mother is making them attend a wedding in feminine clothing. Feminine clothing looks ridiculous on this kid. This kid should clearly be wearing a tailored suit. Having recently suffered from this exact indignity myself (being dragged around clothing stores by my mother until my mother was satisfied with my look), I did the only thing I could: I made the task quicker for them.
“I’ll bring you a stack of clothes,” I said. “Don’t worry about putting them back. I’ll put them back for you.”
The mother laughed. “Gosh, the royal treatment! Hey, bet you wish you got this treatment at home!”
(Bet they didn’t wish that.)
I can’t remember what outfit was purchased, if any.
For Autistic reasons, I basically got fired from that job, though it didn’t really matter because teachers’ college was about to start anyhow.
What happened was: I took my boss at her word when she said, “These are your hours. Write them down in your diary.” What she really meant was, “These are your tentative hours, but I can change them at any time without telling you. It’s your job to check for any changes to the white-out covered schedule I keep under the desk every time you come in.” I hadn’t known to do that, so I missed an opening. The store was fined $1000 for failing to open at 9:00 a.m., as per mall rules. Queen Bee started hiding my name badge and other petty shit like that. She also gave me a lecture, resting the entire blame on me.
So, I quit before Queen Bee could fire me.
But I’d learned what I needed to learn. Now, I looked mainstream. Normie. A friend I’d been to high school with looked me up and down appraisingly, commenting on my hair, my clothing, my shoes. He’s not gay; he’s from Taiwan. “You even look like a teacher these days,” he said, not meaning that as a compliment.
Teachers’ college recruiters must have agreed because here I was. At teachers’ college.
I could tell you a lot about teachers’ college. But here are the main things to know about early 2000s teachers’ colleges:
- Half the year is spent on campus, the other half in schools, working under ‘associate teachers’ (who write your report and who make or break you).
- You don’t get to choose where they send you to practice. It could be anywhere in the entire country.
- Campus time is notorious for its role plays. Role play after role play after role play, which does not in any way prepare young teachers for the many challenges you face in a real classroom in front of real teenagers.
- Many trainees drop out; a significant proportion are told to leave. Teachers’ college may be easy to get into, but after the college takes your funding and fees, they start failing a whole bunch of people who should never have been admitted in the first place.
- Trainees are required to be or to become a very specific sort of person: reliable, friendly, animated, caring, conscientious, smartly presented, enthusiastic, and confident. If you’re lacking in one of those areas, you’ll be told about it, and you’ll be expected to change.
Confidence was my problem. This was picked early on. Alongside about 15 other trainees, I was enrolled in a special class designed solely to teach body language and facial expression. That’s not how it was sold to us, but that’s exactly what it was.
As it turns out, this was the single most useful course I did at teachers’ college. The words ‘pedagogy’ and ‘lesson plan’ were never mentioned once. We were instead given very detailed, very practical advice on how to manage a classroom of unruly teenagers. We learned where to stand in the classroom when saying certain things. (Note: TV always gets this very, very wrong.) We learned timing. We learned how to project and care for our voices. Teachers aren’t supposed to drink coffee, apparently, and for years, I didn’t. I didn’t dare touch coffee until after I had left teaching, five years later.
That’s how compliant I was.
And as it happens, being Autistic and all, I found this course illuminating. Never before in my life had I been told in such wonderful detail how to act if I wanted to be taken seriously.
What can I say? The course worked for me. It worked a treat.
Later in the year, I was taking a class with a lecturer who specialised in training teachers to teach in low SES (‘low decile’) New Zealand schools. I hadn’t been asked to join this course, though it would have been super helpful for me, as I did, in the end, get a permanent job teaching at one of Aotearoa, New Zealand’s most disadvantaged schools. Teacher trainees in this guy’s course tended to be from low-income backgrounds themselves, and I’d had a pretty charmed run so far.
Here’s what this lecturer told us: Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are super attuned to body language. So when teaching the ‘hard’ classes, body language is very important. Body language becomes more important than spoken language.
Decades later, I have a better understanding of what he was getting at. We all hear the word ‘trauma’ more frequently these days. What we might say now: Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are frequently traumatised. They often come from violent backgrounds. Rather than teachers simply utilising this for crowd-control purposes — looking ‘confident’ (read: dominant) perhaps we should be putting a whole lot of extra time and effort into making schools feel 100% safe for those students?
There’s much to be said about the specific trauma of being Autistic, too, even without a particularly violent family history. Simply existing as Autistic can, in itself, lead to a kind of hypervigilance around people’s body language. I crave some studies to back me up here, but here’s what’s possible:
- Autistic people love to know what’s happening next and we’ll take any cues available to us. If we are at all able to harness body language cues, we definitely will.
- Autistic people often have a history of social exclusion, in at least one arena. Although I don’t consider myself a particularly excluded person, there have definitely been times in my life when I was. This is why I told you about being ten years old, and my experience with Miss J. When adults in control of you react negatively without warning, without good reason, this, over years, accumulates as a kind of trauma. Children from violent homes become hypervigilant to body language; we may therefore also expect that many Autistic children become hypervigilant, too.
Note: Best practice for teaching and caring for traumatised children is pretty much exactly the same as teaching and caring for Autistic children. In which case, wherein lies the difference?
Our lecturer who specialised in disadvantaged students loved his role plays, of course. One day, after making us do role plays, he seemed exasperated.
“You lot,” he started, “hopeless! You’re all mooching around, no eye contact, no confidence. How do you expect teenagers to listen to a word? Buck up your ideas, people. This is no good.” Then he paused. He was searching the room for a face. “Except for one person. Ah, there you are.” He pointed directly at me. “Your body language was excellent. You commanded the room.”
In a different class, the lecturer asked me a question. I couldn’t answer.
“What happened?!” she exclaimed. “Where’s that confident teacher we just saw in roleplay?!”
The answer, of course, was simple: While sitting down, I was me. While roleplaying, I was fully masked.
And that, folks, is how I got a job. By faking it. By acting. I had been channelling my favourite high school teacher, specifically — a wonderful art teacher who I had loved. This teacher walked with a mild limp, a result of a car accident — and I am ashamed to say that as I was channelling this teacher’s confidence some years after last seeing him, I also mimicked his subtle limp. This was entirely accidental on my part. I believe it’s called method acting.
When I utilised the body language training I had been actively taught and also channelled my most respected high school teacher, this proved a winning combination, especially with my Amélie hair and my fancy clothes, and most recently, a new pair of shiny shoes, which I’d found in town on heavy discount.
I got a job at a girls’ high school. My tutor didn’t trust I’d hold up with boys. Sitting at a café table in one of Aotearoa’s smaller airports, she said, “You’d do well at a girls’ school. I just get that feeling about you.”
I was ‘clearly a feminist’. Ya know? Still couldn’t shake that one. Looking back, I suspect my ‘feminist’ reputation came about at least partly because I was clearly uninterested and unmoved in the presence of young men. The assumption was: lesbian. In fact, I am asexual, agender. Not that I knew the words for that, then. Nor did anyone else. ‘Feminist’ was the closest word they had.
One day, during an obligatory teaching practice dinner with my tutor, I mentioned the name of my friend from another class at the teachers’ college.
“Is S. your boyfriend?” she asked, without a beat.
I’m sure I screwed up my face. “Nooo.”
This was, of course, entirely her business.
A tutor’s main job is to suss everyone out. It’s an important job. A tutor of teachers’ college trainees must rid the profession of potential bad actors — people who might, say, abuse their power. So you can imagine what nosy cows these people are. Over the course of one year, tutors do their best to learn your essence. Tutors visit your classroom when you’re on practice. They drive all over the country to do this. They watch you teach and write notes. They give you shit-sandwich feedback in excruciating detail. Then they take you out for the weekend because you’ve been sent to some small town, and now the tutor is also stuck in this small town, and you go to visit the gannets together or whatever.
You can guess what I read in her feedback: My face wasn’t moving enough. Hence, the extra course.
Here’s what I also learned on my final teaching practice after I’d already been offered a job when far less was at stake. My associate teacher signed me off and handed me my final report. He also made sure, very deliberately, to let me see a little note scribbled in the margin of an introduction sent to him by my tutor:
“Larre is difficult to get to know but improves upon knowing.”
My tutor had been sending notes about me to teachers who were then expecting to get a certain kind of person. What else had she said about me to previous associates? How else had she made my life difficult?
And if I’m so hard to get to know, is that not a failing on her part? Could it be that straight, cisgender people would naturally be far easier for her straight, cisgender self to work out?
The associate teacher who showed me that marginalia was my final and my favourite. He was giving me a message, loud and clear: “This is who you’ve been dealing with all along. See for yourself.”
Fortunately for me, my Reflection Journal saved me. I’d written a bunch of things I’d never meant anyone to see, but during a one-on-one, my tutor grabbed it out of my hands, threw it onto a pile on her office carpet, and said, “I’ll read that later.” I almost snatched it back, as I hadn’t realised we’d be handing those in. But my writing has always saved me, one way or another, and after reading my journal, she understood me much better and what had been going wrong.
I could say far more about the torture that is teachers’ college, but let’s skip forward a bit.
Somehow, against all odds, I become a Real Teacher. I was offered three jobs. I took the one at a girls’ school. Now, I was paid to talk all day about my special interest. Everything fell neatly into place: Suddenly, I am the full-time permanent Japanese teacher at a girls’ high school, far away from my hometown. I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to, even though my mother said to me after I’d secured the job, “I didn’t think you could do it.”
Twenty-three years old
I now think it’s ridiculous that any twenty-three-year-old is to be trusted with the enormous role of teaching and caring for teenagers at any high school, let alone at a low-income high school not far from a prison, where for the first time in my life I really did encounter a different culture. I had grown up in a very white part of Aotearoa. Now I was immersed in Māori and Pasifika culture. I’d known nothing of my own country when I was studying in Japan, while acting as an obligatory youth ambassador, giving lectures about Aotearoa in Japanese, answering a constant barrage of small-talk questions about fish and sheep and what-have-you.
There, for the first time, I encountered a genuine feminist. This feminist was the principal of the girls’ high school where I now worked, and happened to be the person 100% responsible for employing me. She hadn’t made me fly up for an interview. Instead, she told me this: “I spoke at length with your tutor, and I feel I have a handle on who you are. Also, you were wearing pearls in your profile picture.”
(I hadn’t been wearing pearls, but a chunky metal necklace which appeared to be pearls in the black and white photo of myself which she requested.)
As it happens, my Feminist New Boss was herself a non-smiler. So I like to think I’d have passed her test even if she had put me through the rigour of a job interview. One evening after prize-giving a father (it’s always a man) approached this principal and told her she should smile more. She was both amused and highly annoyed by this.
Hearing her talk about it afterwards in the staffroom, I told Feminist Boss that, at teachers’ college, I had been taught to be a bit careful about smiling. If a teacher spends all day smiling, it’s readily apparent to students when you suddenly stop smiling. It pays, therefore, to spend your day with a fairly neutral look on your face, otherwise students can bait you. (I had observed this myself in one of my associates the previous year — an easily triggered, very shouty woman who had no idea what was going on at the back of her own classroom, but who had been scathing and critical of my every move.)
Feminist Boss agreed with me wholeheartedly, and made the observation that men never quit telling you to smile, even if you’ve worked your way up to school principal.
In some ways, I had cracked the code. I had worked out how to hold my face. Teaching is exhausting, for many reasons. People talk about the admin load. But teaching is exhausting mainly because it is acting. And for some of us, the persona we present ‘naturally’ just isn’t good enough, so we are required to act a lot. I very much felt that my days were spent acting. When I put on my maquillage each morning, I was now in role. (That’s the other French word I know.)
But every now and then, the mask would slip. This would usually happen when I was taking a break, well, a ‘break’, on yard duty. It is no coincidence, then, that the man now telling me to smile was the old bloke paid to tend the garden beds. Each time I ambled past him, he’d pop out from some shrub and tell me to bloody smile.
Aotearoa is a small place, so you won’t be surprised to learn I ran into this gardener in a completely different town. At an airport, as it happens. When he saw me, I was with my teachers’ college friend, S. It was the middle of the school holidays, one of us had cracked a joke and I was laughing heartily with him.
“Finally, a smile,” muttered a random old fart, shuffling past. Then I realised it was the gardener.
The fact is, I cannot smile and concentrate on something mentally taxing at the same time. If I’m required to think about how to hold my face, I cannot be expected to do hard mental work. For example, marking essays, or lesson planning.
One day, on a staffroom computer, another old man (a geography teacher, dead now) walked past and told me to smile. By this point I’d had about enough and I said without flinching, “Don’t tell me how to hold my face.”
Another teacher —a married woman who happened to be having an affair with old geezer, though I was last to find that out—happened to be working at a nearby computer. She threw back her head and laughed heartily. “That’s you told!” she said to him. Then to me, “Haha, what an excellent reply!”
It was nice, for a while, to work among (mostly) feminists.
TWENTY-SIX YEARS OLD
Then I was no longer working among feminists. Long story short, I met the wrong man. I married the wrong man. He worked at the same school. One of us had to leave.
I now understand that my first marriage — my first ever relationship — was coercively controlling. But we didn’t know words like that then.
Why was I such a mark? Like many young Autistic ‘women’ who have no idea we are Autistic, I was the perfect mark. The man in question was much older than I was, and held a senior position at the school where I worked, though he was not my direct boss. I was away from my hometown, and had been groomed until then by the culture — and finished off by teachers’ college — into becoming someone else entirely. I had completely lost sight of the ten-year-old I had once been — the agender, asexual kid who was allowed to wear gender-neutral tracksuits and zoom around the neighbourhood on skates and bikes. For a while I entirely lost who I was. I hadn’t been allowed to exist as that person.
I couldn’t wait to leave town. Hell, I wanted to leave the entire country. So once again, that’s exactly what I did. This time I flew to London, like many other middle-class Kiwis in their 20s who are eligible for a working visa, but only until the age of 31 (at the time).
Figured I could just do supply teaching. I had no other plans, other than to get away.
I still didn’t realise I was Autistic, you see. Mark Haddon’s book about the Curious Dog in the Night-time was everyone’s idea of Autistic. Looking back, I taught quite a few Autistic students and those kids always were my favourite. But no one knew that then.
In any case, waking up each morning in London with no idea where you’ll be going until you call the recruitment agency is no one’s idea of fun. It is definitely no Autistic person’s idea of a good life. I was grinding my teeth very badly. Every morning, a headache.
So I took a long-term supply job, because then, at least, I’d be going to the same campus each day, even if I hated it. And oh, I did hate it.
This was not your usual UK school. It was a very unusual type of school — neither public nor private but a sort of hybrid, based on a new, experimental model of education. The school was not run by career teachers and that, folks, was the main problem. It was run by industry professionals. It’s like what happens when a country elects a CEO as Prime Minister and he runs the entire country like everyone is an employee at his company, treating local councils like branch offices. Kiwis know exactly what I’m talking about.
Without identifying the UK school, let me just summarise:
- I was the sixth teacher of that position in two years. No one stuck around.
- According to my new head of (English) department, a previous teacher had nicked off with many items from the resource room (questionable) so she didn’t give me access to anything in there.
- Nor did she give me my own photocopy card, in case I abused such privilege.
- On my first day I was thrown into classroom teaching without so much as a timetable to look at, let alone a staff manual. Looking back, this was absolutely a test. “Thank you for coming back,” she said to me the next day, as I dragged my weary self back in the school gates. “Not everyone does.”
- The student population was 80% boys because a nearby boys’ school had recently closed down for failing its OFSTED, and suddenly there was an influx of boys at this one. Campus wasn’t big enough. Electrical wires hung out of the walls. The classroom walls were thin. You could hear noise from adjoining classes, which would interrupt your own class at the most opportune times.
- I was 26 years old, but still regularly mistaken for an 18 year old. In fact, I’d been mistaken for an 18-year-old on the flight over. I sat next to an 18-year-old New Zealand girl who was flying to London with her mother. We’d been chatting for a while before she learned I’d already been a teacher for four years. She had assumed I was her age.
- Due to nothing more than terrible mismanagement of human resources on their part, I was not teaching my area of expertise. The Japanese teacher at that UK high school got his hands on my CV somehow, then told me he was keen to hand off the job to me because he had a doctorate in chemistry. He would rather be teaching that. Meanwhile, I was told to teach English. I am perfectly capable of teaching English, but I needed time and support to learn the curriculum in a brand new country, where I had no access to the resource room.
- Teaching days in the UK are ridiculously, needlesssly long. In England the teachers don’t actually get any more work done and they don’t get better results than New Zealand teachers, but they stay at school for 10-12 hours per day. My head of department worked from 7am to 7pm. with a lot of bitching and spluttering about it. Before and after those working hours, I had a one hour commute by train plus walking.
- Classroom teachers at that school were not left alone to do their job. Each hour, the deputy principal, who reeked of body odour and never seemed to realise the back of her head needed combing, would bluster in, disturb my class and ostentatiously mark off on a clipboard whether the students’ diaries were on the desk and whether I had yet got around to writing the lesson outline on the whiteboard. This tiny, shrieking woman seemed to enjoy the spectacle of confrontation, and would take great delight in dressing a student down in a public part of the school. Rather than talk quietly to a student in her office, she would yell at him in the corridor right outside her office. Likewise, if she saw misbehaviour in my classroom, she’d step right in and undermine me, making it clear to the students that she was the real boss here; I was just a temp.
- As a supply teacher, I was expensive. Not because I was being paid a lot, but because my recruitment agency was skimming quite a lot off. So I was given no hours during the day to plan or mark. My every hour was utilised to cover various absent teachers. The librarian saw what was happening and on the odd occasion I hadn’t (yet) been earmarked for crowd control or whatever, she recommended I utilise a ‘secret’ little room attached to the library where I could hide out and get some admin work done. She also told me, “You won’t last long here. You’re far too nice. You remind me of a previous teacher. She’s married now. Much happier.”
- I enjoyed teaching the seniors. I enjoyed teaching the year sixes and sevens — my natural age fit, I believe. But the year nines and tens made my life hell. I was teaching boys for the first time, at the worst gender ratio. I had taught at a boys’ school on practice, but a classroom of 100% boys is more manageable than a class of 80% boys. The existence of a few girls (including me, perceived as very young) changes their behaviour. They would not let me finish a sentence. I was constantly interrupted. I would walk into a classroom and it wouldn’t matter what I did, which body language techniques I utilised, nothing worked. At that school, it was as if I didn’t exist. Career teachers will tell you: About once a term we have such nightmares. Now my nightmares were real. I literally couldn’t control two of my classes. I wasn’t the first in this position, and I’m sure I wasn’t the last, but no one was backing me up.
- It seemed I was the only ‘feminist’ in the general vicinity. One day I was walking up the stairs when I realised a large group of boys under the open stairs had a clear view up my skirt. When I mentioned this to another young female teacher she said, “Yeah, if I’m wearing a skirt I use the other stairs.” I thought of the female students, all of them wearing short skirts as uniform. This wasn’t good enough. So I went to the male Deputy Principal (DP) and told him what was going on. He agreed that boys shouldn’t be congregating below the stairs and told them to move along. But it was too late. These boys had already seen right up my skirt. And I heard what the DP said to them. He simply told them it was inappropriate to stand under the stairs, and they needed to move along. No one called these boys out for doing exactly what they were very clearly doing. Keeping boys out from under those stairs was an ongoing nuisance of a job. I felt personally harassed, even though I was ostensibly the person with the power, and my students were ostensibly without power. The boys were taller, bigger, stronger, with more resonant voices. They said inappropriate things. When I told other teachers, they didn’t see it as a big deal. Part of the job, they said. Perhaps, on some level, it was my own fault, for looking 18. Like a potential conquest. But I’d come from a feminist girls’ school, where I was respected and supported. This wasn’t my normal. This wasn’t normal.
Privately, my reproductive cycle shut down and my hair started to fall out. I knew I was in trouble. I needed to manage my stress. I couldn’t see how. I avoided buying a weekly train ticket to work. The guy at the station told me it was far cheaper to get a pass rather than to pay for a daily commute. I deliberately left my best boots at school so that I would be forced to go back and get them. Every morning when my train arrived, I considered not getting on. Then I thought of my boots. I wasted far more money than I should have on day-by-day train fares.
The final straw: I developed irritable bowels. A wonderful teacher friend who I met early on in London warned me how a former colleague of hers had developed stress IBS back in Australia, which became permanent when the stress of her teaching load didn’t let up. I didn’t want that to happen to me.
One day between classes I only just made it to the staff toilets when the fire drill alarm shrieked. I knew it was a scheduled drill and, as a supply teacher, I didn’t have my own form class to wrangle on the field, so I made the decision to just squirt it out quickly. I had only just positioned myself on the toilet seat when I heard a familiar shriek. The deputy principal had poked her scruffy head into the ladies’ toilets. “Evacuate now!” she hollered, seeing my closed cubicle. But she didn’t mean my bowels. “Fire drill!”
This job, this woman, had quite literally given me the shits, leaving me no time to actually shit. If you’ve ever been ordered off the toilet while suffering from diarrhea, you’ll know why I quit.
Meanwhile, my face had once again gotten me into trouble. One thing I really couldn’t stand about this school (among many other things): The hypocrisy. One day at a packed, whole-school assembly, the male DP gave a lecture on the egalitarian nature of the school, where students are afforded respect as equals, not as underlings. “Everyone here is treated with respect,” he opined, against all evidence.
I had noticed that the Big Boss Principal (not a teacher, but an architect with a doctorate) got a silver service breakfast wheeled down to his office each morning. In contrast, teaching staff had to push 20p into a machine if we ever needed a squirt of hot drink. In Aotearoa, teachers were provided with a morning hot drink at no cost to ourselves. Fine. Schools manage budgets differently. Perhaps that tea money was going directly to students? Oh, no. I knew that wasn’t the case as soon as I saw that hot English breakfast making its way down the corridor one morning.
I saw this disparity as the ultimate slap in the face. The principal had his own tea lady. And now his sycophantic deputy was giving the entire school a lecture about… how egalitarian we all were?
I listened to this and scoffed. I know I did. Not audibly, but my face scoffed. In that massive hall, full of many people, the DP paused his speech and looked directly at me, sitting in the audience, my face scoffing. He stared very meaningfully at me, the way career teachers do. “I see you,” his silent face said back. “Watch yourself.”
Did I modify my expression? No. I was one thin line away from thrusting my hand in the air and asking, for rhetorical purposes, why the egalitarian principles espoused to students did not apply to teachers. Why did I have five bosses here, all of them entirely useless to me? Why did I have to pay 20p for my dribble of tea when the Big Important Principal was provided his own full English breakfast?
Did I hear about it later? Yes, I did. At the request of the Japanese teacher who wanted to teach chemistry, I asked that Deputy Principal if I could teach Japanese instead. After all, the Japanese teacher wanted me to. And I’d be working with smaller classes, who would be immediately impressed by my language skills. Managing a language classroom is easy for that reason alone. You just need to find a way to impress teenagers. Young PE teachers might do a backflip, for instance. I had managed to impress an entire room of Year 10s back in Aotearoa by walking into the room and doing a huge and quick work of art on the whiteboard. It really doesn’t take much, so long as teachers are given the chance.
But the Deputy Principal said that the language teaching job was a permanent position and he didn’t want me working in his school because he could see… from my face… that I didn’t want to be here.
So I guess I started ‘smiling’ around him, because when I finally walked into his office and said, “I’m done. I quit,” the hapless fellow was genuinely surprised.
“But… I… thought you were doing better these days?!”
What I wish I told him, but didn’t: “You think you can read me. You think you know everything about me, from appearance alone. This is the school’s entire problem, you know? You’re all about ‘appearance’. The appearance of egalitarianism. The appearance of mutual respect. This asshole place is no such thing. Fuck off. You don’t know me at all. You know only what I choose to show you, and I’m super well practised at that by now. How do you think I got this job in the first place?”
When I got home that afternoon and sat down on the couch, I realised I had started menstruating. I hadn’t menstruated in months. My entire body had temporarily shut down. But now I had quit, my entire body started to relax. My cortisol had dropped. This shocked me. I had been treating my body abominably by expecting it to go into those classes and try to teach.
I knew I could not go back into teaching.
But now I was on the other side of the world, where I barely knew anyone properly. I was paying exorbitant London prices for housing, for everything, with no income. Not only that, I’d put a dent in my one year’s work allowance, so now I’d be stuck working minimum wage. No one wanted to take a chance on someone with less than a year on their working visa, except for the scummy jobs.
But you know what? It was okay. Because I enjoyed working for minimum wage in a basement. That was far preferable to my acting job, which I did on top of my teaching, crowd-control, report writing, assessment marking and lesson-prep job.
FORTY-SIX YEARS OLD
My face — at once expressionless and somehow also full of expression — precludes me from many opportunities. I know that.
How might my life have been different if my Autistic Face had been named for what it is, and accommodated from the start? How might my life be different if allistics did not require Autistics become someone different before they accept us as we ship?
What if everyone stopped imagining they know what’s happening inside other people’s minds?
How much is too much to ask? Of anyone?
A NOTE ON BODY LANGUAGE
Now and then, some famous man will get caught out for being the sexual predator that he is. Not an unusual story. Slightly less unusual: He’ll try to convince us all that he never meant to prey on anyone. He is quite simply Autistic. And we should take that into account, afford him grace. He is quite sure those women were consenting. He just couldn’t read their body language. If only they’d said, “No!”
I needn’t name the current Predator In Question. It doesn’t matter who he is. He’s not the first to cry “But my Autism!” and expect everyone to go, “Dear, dear, well that’s okay then. You didn’t really mean it.”
Why is it always a man? Because in order to get away with this bad behaviour you need power, and power comes from a combination of: money, celebrity, whiteness, masculinity, talent… It would seem that ‘masculinity’ is (mostly) prerequisite.
The current Predator In Question started to come out as Autistic quietly but publicly around the time allegations were bubbling in the background. If you look at the timeline, you’ll see he was fully anticipating that his predatory behaviour would be made public. By disclosing his Autism, he was… getting ahead of it.
Listening to interviews with his victims, I’m left in no doubt: This is a manipulative man with highly developed social skills. Not only did he persuade his own victims they had not been victimised; he went to great lengths to persuade his adoring fans how great he is, how feminist he is. He fooled many, many smart people.
It would also seem that he learned the powers of manipulation from his own therapist, then put them to use in gaslight-y ways. This man is a master manipulator.
In short, there’s nothing socially naïve about the current Predator In Question.
If you think I’m about to argue this Predator is Not Really Autistic, that’s not where I’m going with this at all. I have no grounds to question this person’s neurotype. Because you see, Autism can look (to others) like absolutely anyone.
A common stereotype about Autism: Autistic people can’t read body language.
The truth about Autism: For everything you think you know about Autism, the inverse also applies. Example: For every Autistic person who struggles to read body language, other Autistics are pretty great at it.
I hope I have persuaded you that I am one such Autistic. I’ve given you just a few snapshots of my life. I’ve omitted many relevant things. For example, I could have told you how I my favourite childhood books were the ones which taught me about human behaviour.
According to my mother, I had this book memorised at about the age of two:
Reading that 1970s picture book again now, it’s clearly meant to teach manners. And it did. It also functions as misogynistic propaganda, as all the little Raggedy Anns out there are taught from the cradle to care for the Raggedy Andys.
When I was about six, I was allowed to pick some books from a yard sale. I read them cover to cover, except for a few chapters which made no sense at all. Once again, these books served as misogynistic trainers, but also taught me how to function in the world. I overheard my mother chuckling with a friend: “Larre has been reading a complete set of 1950s Mormon stories.”
In Standard Three I read an entire set of library books which were not written specifically for Autistic kids — not back then, of course — but which I would now say are basically ‘social stories’. In these books, young readers were taught how to be good citizens of the world. Once title I remember: How to use a bathroom: “When showering, it is rude to use all the hot water.”
I spent my teenage years poring over work by authors such as Alan Pease. His Body Language book was purchased from Briscoes with my own money.
As a young adult, due of the requirements of my chosen profession, I learned — no, I was actively given — very specific and clear instructions on how I had to look and behave. After decades of practice — by way of active learning as much as by instinct — I am now very, very good at ‘passing’ as allistic, at least for short periods of time. This wears on me greatly and I cannot sustain it across years, but I can do it. I know how to do it. From childhood, the consequences of failing to conform to allistic cultural standards have been huge. These standards affected my life at school, and eventually affected my ability to earn an income. For those of us who can ‘mask’, rewards can be huge; the punishments are always severe.
If I were a sexual predator with too much money and many accolades, I too could manipulate, trick and gaslight on the level of any allistic. I might even be slightly better at it, since I’ve been actively studying it for decades. Note that when I very consciously aimed to ‘act like a teacher’, I was immediately marked as ‘better’ at ‘acting like a teacher’ than my allistic peers in the very same course.
Here’s what I see: The Predator in Question, like myself, has been studying this stuff very closely for his entire life. Unlike myself, his motivation is to stay out of prison, maintain his reputation as a Nice Guy and keep abusing. Pretty big motivators, I’d say.
If you think every single smart, Autistic adult in his seventh decade has trouble reading body language, re-examine what you think you know about Autistics.
Consider how a Predator in Question may himself be an author. He has spent his entire life immersed in books. Those books will have taught him a lot. A Predator may also come from a very particular religious background which gives very, very specific advice on things such as eye contact, say.
I see no evidence that The Predator In Question is bad at body language, or at reading people. If this guy’s Autism were visible to allistics, this particular man would never have been afforded the power and influence he has accrued so far. Society does not allow the visibly disabled to accrue such power. His power is, in itself, evidence of the Predator’s social prowess. The difference is: An Autistic predator has come by his skills differently. What comes subconsciously to allistics is learned differently by Autistics. This does not inevitably make us worse at these things. Insofar as ‘reading people’ goes, the various neurotypes tend to converge around middle-age. Many Autistics have, quite simply, caught up, but now with the following advantage: We don’t assume we can read other people’s minds. We know the only way to learn what someone else is thinking is to ask, and to observe very closely.
Most Autistics use these skills for good, as well as for self-preservation. We tend to feel things deeply, and most of us cannot sit at ease in the face of injustice. But every now and then you do get a Bad Autistic. Autistic people can sit at any point on the moral spectrum, just like allistics, even if we do cluster more heavily down the more moral end. (Injustice sensitivity is painful. We’ll make personal sacrifices to avoid it.)
The Predator In Question knew exactly who to target, by the way. How did he pick that some of his victims were so very vulnerable if he weren’t relying, at least a little, on their body language? This is not, in any way, to be interpreted as victim blaming. The fault lies entirely with him (and any of his knowing enablers).
If we’re talking about sexual assault, the body language of a victim is beside the point. Sexual predators who get away with abuse across decades have become expert readers of body language. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t get away with doing what they do. These skills are put to use when targeting and manipulating their victims, then put aside once they decide to assault someone regardless of consent. Victim consent is not the point. Consent was never considered. Entitlement overrides all else.
Moving away from sexual assault, let’s talk about the impact on the Autistic community whenever a predator claims Autism as excuse for his reprehensible behaviour. Why does the current Predator In Question consider it useful to blame the ‘tism?
Because he is socially astute. He understands how ableism works: Allistics roundly infantilise Autistic adults. And the Predator in Question has little else left at this point. His goose is cooked, at least among people who tend to believe victims. Still, he knows it is very much to his benefit if the bulk of his fans view him not just as an Autistic-white-man-genius-creator, but also, ‘inevitably’, as a vulnerable man-child who simply cannot read body language. This predator may need to convince a jury at some point. Juries bring their ableism into a court room. Crying Autism may be just enough to save him. Predators know the odds in a courtroom whenever they’re (rightly) accused of rape. This is why new, affirmative consent laws are (too slowly) rolling out around the world.
Yesterday I wrote about young Gus Walz, whose family have publicly disclosed the boy’s non-verbal learning disorder. Following on from that, Gus expressed unbridled pride at a convention, leading to public mocking from awful adults who should know better.
Many came to Gus’s defence by saying that no one should mock Gus because he has a learning disorder. (Many erroneously said that Gus is Autistic.)
Those from the disability community see straight through this bullshit defence. Speaking to Gus’s so-called ‘defenders’ one person captured the situation beautifully:
[Y]ou often deride people for certain behaviors and then say to some of them “that’s okay because this person happens to be autistic” but if the behavior in question is an autistic trait then we should take a second look at the condemnation
You’ve created your own problem by saying “we despise this behavior but we shall excuse it if the person is autistic,” well, other people who exhibit the same behavior are implicitly encouraged to take seriously the possibility that they, too, may deserve grace
— Ayo
Flipping it around somewhat, the same logic applies regarding Autistic Predators. No one gets to say, “that’s okay because this person happens to be Autistic”.
Until powerful Autistic adults are treated as fully-fleshed, fully-formed individuals, as varied, as potentially capable and as morally complex as any other neurotype, the few Autistic predators among us will use everyone’s ableism as a personal shield. Not only that, these men will throw their own Autistic community under the bus to save their own skins, promulgating stereotypes about What All Autistics Are Naturally Like.
I leave you with this image of convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein, making use of a walking frame once fully unmasked to the public as the dangerous predator he is.
MASKING IS NOT REALLY ONE THING
What we call ‘the [Autistic] mask’ is not really one thing, but is instead a combination of many things, including survival strategies, protective mechanisms, and social behaviours that develop over a lifetime of invalidation, negative social judgments, and being pathologized or treated as deficient because of who you are.
— Dr. Amy Pearson, Thinking Autism
DORIS LESSING ON WHAT MAKES A WRITER
Interviewer: It’s said you had a very lonely childhood. Was it then that you started to think about being a writer, or is it then that you started writing in your childhood?
Doris Lessing: It wasn’t lonely, so much. What writers need, as children, is…to have a very stressed childhood. They become people who always watch faces, watch hands, movements, body language. This makes a writer. Lonely is neither here nor there.
When we talk about different neurotypes, it helps to think along the lines of ‘culture difference’. Sometimes these ‘culture’ differences lead to disability, depending on fit between individual and society.
AUTISM IS A MUTABLE STATE
Aisha Edwards: I don’t really recall having a sense of self until I was in my twenties. So it’s really hard for me…I only had one really intense friend, but I didn’t start socialising until I was about fifteen. I remember getting to middle school and the kids talking about taking showers. I was still bathing every day. There are many ways I remember being very young. I sucked my thumb until I was ten. Just things like that. I sat in closets a lot. I still sit in closets when I’m overstimulated. [laughs] There’s a lot I don’t remember about my childhood because I was overstimulated.
Interviewer Amy Richards: I don’t know about you, but for me it felt like it was all happening inside me rather than to anybody else.
Aisha: Yeah, I think it was entirely the opposite for me. There was no ‘inside me’. I think I was profoundly dissociated. At this point in my life I have extreme sensitivity in my body, an awareness that was not present in my early life. In my patients I see people with that hyposensitivity in their body and I’ve seen that change over the course of my work with people…as we do various somatic interventions. And that has changed over the course of my life. One of the things that sometimes bugs me in the neurodivergent affirming community is this sense that neurodivergence is static. … Autism is a mutable state. It’s as mutable as any other aspect of ourselves. It evolves based on, what are we doing, with our body?
Amy: [This is the problem with talking in terms of support needs…] Most people would say I’m ‘pretty high functioning’. But they’re only seeing that version of me, the version I’ve trotted out for that couple of hours of being social or doing a job or whatever it happens to be. But they’re not seeing the underneath bit.
— Grief and validation: repairing the damage of autistic masking and finding a sense of self, The Square Peg Podcast
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand. (Also an audiobook.)
