Intersectionality and Autism
A few (brief) thoughts
TW: Brief mention of suicide and an offensive quotation
First, for some context: Liberty University was founded by Jerry Falwell Sr., founder of the Moral Majority. Falwell’s influence on Ronald Reagan and the evangelical movement’s foray into politics is at least partially responsible for the state of the GOP from the 1980s onward. Jerry Falwell was a well-known homophobe who blamed 9/11 on abortionists, feminists, and gays. His son, Jerry Falwell Jr, is a prominent MAGA supporter.
I was terrified.
No, this wasn’t my first rodeo. My public speaking career on autism-related subjects was well-established. I had close to one hundred presentations under my belt. But this one was taking place on the Liberty University campus. Liberty University! You know, the place where the founder of the college said this:
AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.
Jerry Falwell Senior was alive when I spoke there.
I was hardly a Nathan Lane drag queen who needed to “straighten” out my act, à la The Birdcage. I was decently cisgender in the way I came across. But I had not yet come to accept myself as a gay man even though I was — let alone someone ready to come out of the closet. Autistic rumination was not my friend here. What would the Liberty crowd think of me? I started fixating on the fact that I was not wearing a wedding ring. Would that be a giveaway? If someone in the audience asked me if I had a girlfriend, would my honesty in saying “no” let them know I was gay? Would all of these people think I was going to hell?
The prospect of speaking there brought back several intense flashbacks of my middle and high school years. Amazingly, I can never remember a student being punished by teachers or administrators for using the three-letter f-word in slurring gay people. Not once. There was no enforcement or accountability for using words like f*g or f*ggot. It was perfectly acceptable. There were no gay-straight alliances back then. The absolute worst thing one could surmise about you was that you were gay. I would have rather been doused with green slime and slipped on a banana peel, falling flat on my face than have someone think that I was gay.
I then had a clear flashback of my freshman year in college. My ethics professor, who was a Calvinist in the Dutch Country of West Michigan, thought that homosexuality was a mental defect and devoted some class lectures to expressing this opinion.
As I drove from Roanoke to Lynchburg in my rental car (because I had just spoken in Roanoke), I tried distracting myself with things to take my mind off my concern. I had my CD mix full of Gordon Lightfoot, Oscar Peterson, Paul Simon, Barbra Streisand (oops, no, I don’t want those vibes, click), Stevie Wonder, etc. I tried to take in the countryside’s beautiful green rolling hills, imagining myself as a brother trucker traversing from one delivery to the next.
Yet I could not shake the feeling that the people attending this presentation would think I belonged in hell if they knew I was gay. I tried playing mind games with myself to lower the anxiety I was feeling. “Many people you encounter daily would think the same thing,” I wanted to tell myself. “So this is no different. You face this situation every day of your life.” There was some shred of truth to these claims.
In my hotel room the night before the presentation, the Dante phrase came into my mind: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Then I would try to snap myself out of it by saying…”That’s wild, dude. Keep it real. This is a one-day thing. You’ll be in, and you’ll be out. You are not entering hell. Don’t be a drama queen! Sorry, I mean, a drama king.” ☺️
Walking through the vast conference center area and hoping my PowerPoint was already ready and loaded up, I looked around at the people as if I were from Venus and they were from Mars. “I wonder how many of these people will be in the audience,” I asked myself, staring intently into their eyes.
Interestingly, evangelicals are some of the most compassionate people, at least outwardly, when it comes to having a disability. “It’s not a sin; it’s how God made you,” is how many of them feel. This energy permeated the landscape and was palpable. I felt more love from this group than any other audience I spoke to. They sat there mild-mannered, tuned in to me, and I could tell they appreciated my time there. No one asked if I had a girlfriend. No one was curious if I would get married and have children, as I was often used to being asked at almost every other autism conference I spoke at. They were showing me God’s love.
But instead of appreciating what the audience gave me, I felt like I had dodged a bullet.
What did I learn?
Reflecting on this experience, I realize this was a “both-and” situation. My fears were both accurate and yet exaggerated. So what if someone there thought I was gay? Who the hell cares? I was never going to see them again.
On the other hand, being autistic and LGBTQIA+, as the literature indicates, seems to be more prevalent in our population, making many of us a double minority and the discussion of autism an intersectional issue. I was not crazy or delusional to be mindful of my double-minority status walking into a place like Liberty University.
As the research shows:
A total of 41.2% of autistic adults reported a sexual minority identity. Autistic adults reported a diversity of sexual orientations, including asexual, bisexual, gay, and pansexual. Sexual minority autistic adults reported more depression, anxiety, and stress compared with heterosexual autistic adults. Sexual minority autistic adults reported poorer subjective quality of life across different areas of their lives compared with heterosexual autistic adults. Sexual minority autistic adults reported having less energy and more physical pain than heterosexual autistic adults. Sexual minority autistic adults also reported feeling more negative emotions and having problems with thinking/concentration. Sexual minority autistic adults reported more concerns about things such as having health care and transportation and greater worries about feeling safe in their homes and neighborhoods. Finally, sexual minority autistic adults were more likely to report that they faced barriers in their everyday lives (such as sensory sensitivities making it hard to grocery shop).
As to why more research needs to be conducted in this area:
There is little research on mental health and quality of life in persons who are both autistic and identify as a sexual minority. Sexual minority autistic adults may be exposed to more minority-related stress than heterosexual autistic adults. People who belong to minority groups face added stress created by society. This added stress is referred to as minority stress, which includes things such as discrimination, rejection, or violence. Minority stress could increase risk for poor outcomes.
While my one-day excursion to Liberty University was survivable because it was time-limited, what about double or triple minorities who are autistic, LGBTQIA+, black or Hispanic, Arab, Jewish (me), etc, forced to tread water in an allistic society where surviving requires permanently hiding who you are every single day? My one-day trip to Liberty encapsulates the pressure plural minority individuals face when struggling to stay afloat.
We cannot even begin to solve the problem until we start addressing bullying, which is a subject I have been writing about for close to twenty years. The trauma and scars associated with being bullied due to having minority status carry over into adulthood. According to a 2020 article in Axios:
Previous studies have shown that people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder have an increased risk for suicide attempts and deaths, but research on the condition has historically focused on cisgender boys…”Even though current research into sexual health and sexual orientation of autistic adolescents and adults is limited in size and scope, it is clear that differences in these areas may leave autistic individuals vulnerable to wide-ranging negative consequences with regards to both mental and physical health,” researchers wrote in a 2021 study published in the journal Autism Research.
As regards trauma and bullying in adulthood carrying over to adulthood, one autistic individual wrote:
The bullying went from a couple of name-calling incidents to more physical tactics. I had gum in my hair, a “paper wasp” (not the insect kind) hit my eye, chemicals sprayed in my face and more. Still, I pushed through…The rest of my high school life was so traumatic that I literally can’t remember it. Even when I try to, it’s like a black screen in my mind. But if I visit the actual high school building again, I immediately have flashbacks that are so vivid I panic. And all I know was that every time I had asked for help, the teachers and staff would say I needed to calm down and that I was “fine.” Nobody seemed to listen to me. So I just quit trying to put into words how desperately I needed support.
Much has improved in the area of intersectionality from the time of my childhood. There were no gay/straight alliances in high school back in the 90s. Organizations have now formed with autistic members who are deeply aware of developing intersectional networks, incorporating intersectionality into their educational curricula, pushing for intersectional representation in the media, advocating for DEI programs in all spaces, and implementing “train the trainer” programs with specific modules targeted towards healthcare, education, the criminal legal system, and other settings.
Yet, when I take the pulse of the country at this current moment, I am scared. 2024 is better than the 90s in one way but more ominous in another. Make no mistake that there are still people who think individuals with disabilities, those who are LGBTQIA+, and other minority groups are the enemy. As Rachael Maddow has eloquently pointed out, much of the 1930s in the United States could be a prequel to what the present moment is pointing toward. The individuals at Liberty University, who were very outwardly gracious towards me, had toxic beliefs I thankfully was not exposed to on that day. But the difference between today and then is that they now feel more emboldened to express their beliefs through dog whistles, signaling, or outright saying the quiet part aloud. Hate crimes against LBGTQIA+, disabled people, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Blacks, and Jews are all rising. While all of these crimes are not being perpetrated by Liberty University students, graduates, or professors, they are committed by and large by straight white people.
We sink or swim together.
