Dopey Autistic Trans Woman
I’m a trans woman. When I first came out, changed my name, my pronouns, my look, everything but my physical self really, I was alert to rustles in the bush; “hypervigilant”. Ordering a coffee, the din of the breakfast rush is pierced by a “he” from table 9. They are talking about me. I’d turn, inspect the speakers for signs of transphobia, and turn my squinting face back to the barista, adding this moment to the burgeoning list of evidence that I was loathed and in grave danger.
I’m mocking freshly cracked me. Poor blighter. The trouble with this mockery, isn’t that I was just a newborn. It’s that I wasn’t wrong to be paranoid. Plenty of danger lurked. Not from table 9 though. Moments of no gravity, like this one in the cafe, were of… no gravity. I was safe because nobody much cared for an outcome. No, the trouble was all in the moments when something was at stake. That’s when I was in a new kind of danger. I wasn’t ready for it at all.
I thought people were as interested in others’ wellbeing as their own. You see, I am Autistic, and back then, naively so. Some say it’s a bit “us and them” to say Autistic people are kind (implying that allistic people are not). I’m afraid they are wrong about that. It’s a deep dive to understand, in this one particular case, why “x people are y” is not divisive. I’m going to go on that dive right here.
Autistic folk have not got the hang of neuronormativity. We don’t make the eye-contact that’s deemed polite and trustworthy, as that’s painful to many of us. We don’t modulate our voices accurately to the best social standards. And we don’t understand or properly participate in small talk. We are, you might say, not really getting it. And it’s the “it” that I want to talk about.
Our culture is a mess folks. If you haven’t noticed, it’s built from class-capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism, slavery, petrochemicals and white shame. We’ve pretended for a long time that it wasn’t and with that pretence came the pretence that we’re rooting for each other, but we’re only nice to each other as long as we don’t mention the truth. Here’s how one modern twitter poet sums it up:
“The more you embody the ideals of the community, the more social power you amass and the more protection you can expect. Again, not just from consequences, but from criticism itself. For certain kinds of people, social power easily becomes structural power, adding additional layers of safety and shelter. People raised this way carry this framing with them, unless they specifically do work to dismantle it.”
The framing that the author is referring to is better known as whiteness. Indeed, I deleted the prefix, “white”, from the word “people” in a couple of places there, so the more fragile ones could get to the end of the concept without battoning down the hatches. What I’m saying, and I want to be clear about this, is that people are trying to get one over on each other, while smiling and shaking each others’ hands. Literally.
Us Autists fall for it. When we grow up in families that adhere to the bullshit just discussed, the white social contract, we believe the fake smiles are real. We believe the performative caring is earnest. We don’t perform it and fake it, we give it back. For real. And for masked Autistics, it then takes a big part of our lives to notice what in the actual fuck has happened. We spent all that time naively thinking we were doing stuff right, smiling and meaning it, while being taken for an absolute ride by people who can smell our (people)pleasing odour a mile off.
And so back to the cafe, table 9 may or may not have been a couple of terfs talking deliberately about me as a “he”. Who cares. They weren’t going to fire me, ghost me, sexually assault me, malpractice on me, give my details to the police, gaslight me, or concern-troll me. Those properly dangerous things would only be performed by people with a real stake in the game —people i was in relationship with — people i trusted because they smiled at me while we talked.
