How the Human Services Profession Failed Me Based on Gendered Assumptions
I, like many other people, needed help when I was growing up. Being on the autism spectrum, I had a harder time knowing how to interact with other humans. It was thus harder for me to make and keep friends and to figure out what I wanted in terms of relationships. Though I received in-school services in elementary school to help me develop social skills, it was not until middle school that I really felt like my social life was going badly, and at a certain point adults decided I needed to be in therapy. I received many support services for the rest of my childhood, and this is the story of how these support services did not help me as well as they could have for one primary reason: assumptions about me based solely on my gender label.
At this point in my life, I had not been telling adults everything that was going on but I felt like I really wanted a girlfriend. Though I later figured out I was aromantic after thinking more critically, I think I had gotten the idea that I needed to find a girlfriend from popular media as well as from my sister who was influenced by popular media. She constantly wanted to talk to me about who I liked and once asked me the loaded question “How do your girlfriends kiss you?” which I had no idea how to respond to as the question’s underlying assumptions were false, but my sister seemingly assumed that because I was older than her and in middle school I must already be dating. This led to a feeling of pressure that made it hard to tell the difference between what I genuinely wanted and what I had been told my entire life I wanted or would want as I got older. But there was another factor driving my feeling of wanting a girlfriend without me being able to explain it at the time: wanting a closer relationship with a girl.
I had never understood why the peers around me seemed to be friends almost exclusively with their own gender. That had never been how I was inclined to do friendship. I was labeled as a boy but always felt more comfortable interacting with girls for some reason. I think the reason was a combination of my nature and the way boys were more likely even from a young age to expect certain masculine traits in their fellow boys. Wanting to be friends with girls felt natural to me, and before observing how my classmates made friends, the only thing I had been taught about people preferring one gender for anything was that most people wanted to marry someone of the opposite gender (I had only been taught that there were two genders). I therefore believed that it was the norm for people to prefer to interact with the opposite gender, and my observations of classmates went against that belief.
A number of occasions in elementary school made it clear that it was not normal for a boy, which I had been told was what I was, to mainly want to be friends with girls. For example, I was once called “girl lover” by a boy in my class after, when we were asked to write down five people we would want to be in a group with for an activity on a class field trip, three of my five were girls. Another time, when students were allowed to form into their own groups for a gymnastics unit in gym class, I had been mostly joining a group with girls who I thought were my friends. Though they kept grouping with each other, at a certain point they wanted a group without me and got the gym teacher to tell me to find someone else, making clear they wanted more distance from me than from each other even when I felt differently. Incidents like this combined with media and my sister sent the message there was only one way I was allowed to get as close to a girl as they could to each other: date one of them.
Feeling like I needed a girlfriend but no one wanting to date me led me to feel upset in ways that led me to act out since it was harder for me to explain what was going on due to my autism. Not only did I not know how to actually form a romantic relationship other than asking girls if they wanted them but most of the girls in my grade felt less ready for that kind of relationship than I thought I did. I had gotten to be best friends with one boy who was more interested in me than any girl at the time was, through a combination of his actions trying to be friends with me and my wanting his help after learning a girl I thought I wanted to date liked him romantically when he liked someone else more. After getting close to him, I had also gotten to be friends with a girl who said she did not want to date until at least 10th grade and seemed more open to close friendship regardless of gender than most people I had gone to elementary school with, yet by the time I started feeling close to her I already had a firm idea that I wanted a girlfriend.
Though the therapy practice adults put me in had many therapists, the one the practice identified as the clear best match for me was a man. It was likely a factor that he regularly rode the local bus system when transportation was one of the things I was most interested in, yet I believe it was also a major factor that he was a man despite me never having indicated any preference for boys or men over girls or women for anything. Though I had some good conversations with him about buses, I never told him the details of what was really going on with my wanting a girlfriend and dating-related problems with friendship. First the boy I had initially become best friends with was dating a girl for a few weeks and during that time I felt less like I could stay best friends with him due to feeling like he had “succeeded” while I was still “failing.” I think I felt this way largely because a major part of that friendship had been talking about interest in girls. Later, around the end of 8th grade, the girl who had planned not to date until 10th grade and who I had gotten to feel like really close friends with for a while stopped talking to me as much. I soon found out she suddenly was saying she really liked a boy romantically when it was just over another year until what she had previously decided, something I found hard to understand as my autism led me to expect people to stick to their decisions and I had never really understood romantic feelings despite being convinced by the media and my sister that I must be developing them. All this happened while I was seeing this therapist, yet I never really opened up to him about it.
The first time I told adults more about what was going on was in a short-term program I went to in 9th grade for students who were struggling. After I had been there a while, I told the woman who provided counseling to all students in that program about my troubles with friendship and people dating. She was not selected specifically for me but was just the counselor for everyone in that program and I had known her almost a year less than my out-of-school therapist, yet she, not the therapist I was individually matched with, was the first adult I felt comfortable enough with to talk about what was really going on. I think gender might well have contributed to the reason why, and in the exact opposite way from how the people who made my individual therapy match assumed it would work.
Having already expressed what was going on to an adult made it easier to talk about with the next therapist I was matched with, a psychiatrist who had a private practice that was mostly talk therapy. Though this was also a man, I have less of a sense that I was matched with a man intentionally this time as he was not part of a larger organization. However, though he understood the basics of what was going on for me, he developed perceptions of some stuff that were clearly based on gendered assumptions. For the first year and a half I was seeing him, I had no close friendships as my middle school ones had fallen apart for reasons related to romantic relationships. Around this time I decided that romantic relationships were not for me. I had seen lots of drama unfold related to them with my friendships, I also failed to see the appeal in tongue kissing which I realized is a norm within them, and having experienced a little of what felt like close friendship with a girl who had no romantic interest in me left me not understanding how romantic feelings were any different than just wanting to be close to someone like that. Not too long after that, I learned the term “aromantic” and it fit me. But as I started trying to develop close friendships again, which I struggled to keep, the therapist I was now seeing noticed a pattern in what gender they were. He was absolutely right about the pattern being there and not a coincidence but absolutely wrong to assume the reason had anything to do with romantic desire. His only argument that it did was that it was statistically significant that the friends I was finding were mostly female, evidently thinking it was self-evident that the only reason I, who my birth certificate clearly said was a boy, could actually prefer female over male friends was if what I really wanted was something romantic and that this overrode anything I had said about my identity.
In addition to this, the only thing it ever occurred to him to suggest if I brought up the concern that friends in romantic relationships would deliberately limit how close they would get to me to prevent emotional cheating, a concern I wrote extensively about the implications of in my previous Medium essay, was that I could avoid that by just looking for male friends. Evidently it was incomprehensible to him that a gender other than a person’s own (as defined by their birth certificate rather than them) could be preferable to them for anything not romantic or sexual, yet preferring one’s own gender for friendship seemed completely normal and a sign of psychological health to him. The way he both made this suggestion over and over again to me, enough to feel like pressure, and expressed the belief that I could not be aromantic unless I was at least as likely to find male as female friends combined to feel like a form of coercion: “Make the kind of friends I tell you to make or your identity label is invalid.”
Talk therapy was not the only service that was provided to me in a certain way based on gendered assumptions. I also received one-on-one community support to help me develop life skills including social skills. In this service, a person called a skill builder would take me various places in the community to engage in activities with me. The person who was coordinating this service for me explicitly said she would look for a guy for this. By this time I had internalized enough the message that the norm was for people to interact with their own gender that it felt like not my place to even question this way of matching me even though the whole goal of the service was to benefit me. Though I had previously known I preferred interacting with girls and women over boys and men, I had basically already been taught not to acknowledge that even to myself. I had learned that the gender lottery was, as my elementary school teachers had said about things like juice boxes, “you get what you get and you don’t get upset,” so I got who they gave me for that service without saying anything. Though he was a nice guy and fun to hang out with, I think that, given the difference between typical socialization styles of men and women (which there are definitely some exceptions to but are the general pattern), this program was significantly less effective at helping me develop the social skills I needed for the friendships I was actually seeking than it could have been.
Though the skill building service was provided because of my disability, this program offered the services to families rather than just individuals, probably to help others in the family deal with the impact of one member’s disability, and therefore my sister got the service as well. Though the skill builder the program matched me with was a man, the one she was matched with was a woman. Not to discount the benefits this program may have had to my sister, but it does seem a little backwards to me that when I was the one who more needed the social skills help this program was intended to offer, the person who got the service solely by being in the same family as me was paired with a skill builder who would very likely have been more able to help me develop the social skills that would benefit me most than the one I was paired with was able to.
Though this program was only offered for up to about a year, I got similar services through a different program in my senior year of high school. Even though I had started looking for friends again at that point and people could see who I was making friends with, the two main people who were assigned to work with me in that program were also men. This suggests that even when more information about my patterns in self-selected friendship was available, my gender label still took precedence over anything known about me as an individual in decisions pertaining to me.
After this, I went on to college. At the community college I started at, I still had little luck forming lasting friendships, but that changed at the second college I went to. I was still attending as a commuter student, this feeling easier than being away from anyone I knew with the trouble I had with friendship and being automatically assigned to share living space with guys, who I was starting to more consciously realize were not who I felt most comfortable with. I met a fellow commuter student who did not have a lot of friends and developed with her my most stable friendship probably ever. With that friendship helping me be more emotionally stable, I have now found multiple good friendships of the type I want. Additionally, I learned in my Introduction to Sociology class, which I had an amazing professor for, to think more critically about how my experiences related to larger social systems, and took the same professor’s Human Sexuality class where I learned more about gender identities. Though it still took me time to figure out my gender identity, a conversation with an adult student about how her husband’s friendships seemed less meaningful than hers helped the pieces fall into place.
Though I am doing a lot better in life than when I first started getting therapy, this is largely despite, not because of, the support services I received. My first Sociology professor was the person who really got me thinking critically about things I had previously been trained not to question. It was thanks to her that I became more able to explain why no, looking for male friends would not solve everything that was wrong in my social life and I could be inclined toward friendship with women for entirely platonic reasons (and to my therapist’s credit, he did actually listen to what I had to say about this once I could articulate it). I had a phase of being really into a woman YouTuber who vlogged about her life including interactions with friends and got to observe how women socialized with friends in her videos. And I have a lot to thank my now-best friend for as her being highly understanding of and empathetic to my severe anxiety allowed that friendship to survive the kind of stuff my previous friendships could not. But though I got through and out of the worst part of my life up to this point, the worst part of my life up to this point was made a lot longer and harder by the inability of the programs meant to help me to affirm my social desires and identity, to help me develop the social skills that would benefit me most, and to tailor the provision of services to me to who I was as a person over what I was categorized as.
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