We are here, we are here!

This morning, my inbox was flooded with news about how the rate of autism diagnoses may actually be twice than previously thought: 1 in 38.

I'm not a scientist. I'm going to let the good folks like Steven Novella handle whether this is a hiccup in data, a sign of over-diagnoses, a wider diagnostic criteria, or simply what it is seen as now: A sign that we've been neglecting some with autism who manifest differently from what's expected.

All I have to say is this: If this is true, then it is critically important, now, more than ever, that we fight for the rights of autistic people in all areas: schooling, healthcare, education, employment, equal participation, and anything else which may have been previously neglected. Because if there is 1 in every 38 people with autism, we are going to need all the support and understanding we can get.

We are here to stay, world of neurotypicals. You can't sweep us under the rug anymore.

It's not easy, but it's not saintly

Lately, I've been getting a lot of comments from fans, telling me that I am "saintly" for accepting and loving my girlfriend as she transitions. Well, thanks to you all, I'm grateful to see the support, obviously. But it's not a task which I consider arduous, or worthy of sainthood. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't at all difficult, or if there weren't nights when I lay awake wondering about how it will all go, but anyone with an open mind, and open heart, and a healthy attitude towards love can do what I am doing now, whether as a family member, a romantic partner, or a friend. I'm hardly an expert, but these are the things which I have dealt with while she transitions.

I'd say probably the biggest challenge for me when I first realized that transition was going to be the route she would take was coping with how I, her, and our relationship would change in the eyes of the world. If you want me to be brutally honest, I was reminded of the scene from Fiddler On the Roof when Chava is begging Tevye to accept her love for her non-Jewish boyfriend, and he shoots her down, declares her essentially dead in his eyes. I haven't told any of my family yet, but I'm expecting just that, based on past statements about trans people and my mom's horror at the suggestion that I might be bisexual (That was my attempt at coming out, which quickly fizzled and forced me to abort all attempts to talk about it)

Family is one thing, and I have been building myself up mentally for the possibility of being disowned by them for several months now. Beyond them, I am also fearful of other folks, ones I haven't even met yet: Landlords, future bosses, coworkers, airport security officials, basically, I have internalized a fear of every stranger who may have power over my life and how I live it. When I read stories about trans people being deported when trying to travel abroad, having a difficult time being treated with dignity by healthcare professionals, or being denied housing/employment, I bite my lip, and try to remind myself that not all will be like that, that there is hope. But I worry often about our dreams of travel. She and I used to spend hours awake together, whispering "Let's go to Bahrain" or "Let's go to Ukraine" or "Let's go to Java", and detailing our adventures, the sights we'd see, the museums we'd frequent, the food we'd try, the bodies of water we would swim in.

Occasionally we would worry about some places being unsafe to travel, either because we are Westerners, or because I'm Jewish. But now, it's much more frightening to think, as two women travelling together, one of whom is trans, about our safety when travelling abroad. Hell, it's a nightmare to think about our safety in our very own neighbourhood! That has probably been the biggest shocker to adjust to, more than anything else. It's a truly unfair choice: Live as we truly are and be ourselves, or have to give up on a good portion of a dream we shared as a couple.

Another thing which I have had a hard time adjusting to is having to be patient. My girlfriend, bless her, she's a physicist. Her interest lays inherently in plotting things out, looking for the little cogs which make the big machine work, and carefully conducting step-by-step to get to the end. I'm the exact opposite. I am interested in results, fast. So when she began going to her therapist, I thought, "Well, that's great, we can get the ball rolling, put you in a dress, and I'll teach you how to wear heels without breaking an ankle."" No," was the answer I got. "We have to take this slow. Make sure to gradually begin to feminize [girlfriend's] appearance, little things, like growing out hair more, and then we can work our way up to electrolysis, feminization, and hormones."

That frustrated me. What probably aggravated me the most was the fact that my girlfriend was reluctant to "come out" to the world. As far as the majority of the world of our friends and acquaintances and people we see every day is concerned, we are still a heterosexual couple and my girlfriend is a red-blooded Canadian boy. I began to get impatient with the slowness, I was eager to come out, and we have probably had more fights over this issue than any other. I don't want to live in a closet, I argue, and why should we hide who we are from our friends? We have nothing to be embarrassed about.

But in making this argument, I was ignoring my girlfriend's right to control how she comes out and the pace at which she would feel comfortable. I'm an absolute jerk for doing that, I know. It was hard for me to cope with the slow pace, but that's no excuse for being so bossy and domineering over HER transition. When I realized this, I apologized, offered her a hug, and decided it's time for me to take Don't Be a Jerk lessons, if anyone's offering.

As time goes on, I know other issues are going to come up. Hormones can make people grumpy or curt, medical procedures are difficult to deal with, and all those years of integrated prejudice and bigotry aren't going to come off with elbow grease alone. But I have to keep growing, keep learning, and realize above all else: It's not about me. It's her journey, and I'm just a helping hand. I'm not a perfect partner, but I've got to do my very best to make this as easy and pain-free for her as possible. It's my honour and my duty to love my girlfriend and help her be at her happiest as a woman. Our relationship with each other, society, our family, and just about everyone else is going to change, but we'll still be the same people, and still have love and unbreakable friendship as a foundation of our togetherness.

It's not been all champagne and chocolates. But it's quite the interesting journey, if you can learn to not be a backseat driver.

O, Children

For some reason, a lot of people assume right off the bat that I don't like children and don't want any children of my own. When pressed, people have told me that the reason they assume this is because I would likely have an autistic child, and wouldn't that be hard? They also tell me that they feel that parenting would be too hard for me because of my disability.

In a world as screwy as this, I'm just somewhat grateful to see people acknowledge that autism most likely has a genetic cause. But this implication still bothers me.

It bothers me because it treats a disabled child like an inherent curse, instead of seeing a planned child, no matter what their ability or neurotype is, as a blessing and a treasure. It bothers me because it assumes that disabled people are de facto bad parents.

One of the most screwed up reasons I've heard people assume I didn't want children though, was the idea that I would be "incapable of showing love and affection to them." In fact, for most of my teen years, I made a vow to never become a parent, because I swallowed this idea that I couldn't feel, show, or express love, and I worried that I would be a ruinous parent for this reason. Now, I know that that stereotype is just that: A cruel, malicious presumption based on a misunderstanding of how I think, feel, and love. But the idea that I would be a bad parent because of this lingers, and it upsets me greatly.

I do have my reservations about having children. I'm too young to think about it now too deeply, but I'm concerned about the environmental implications of having children, I worry about losing out on living many of my dreams by having children, I worry about how I as a person with Sensory Processing Disorder would handle labour pains and pregnancy, I'm concerned about how I would choose a proper "donor", and I am concerned about my child being bullied, not just for being autistic, but for being the child of two lesbians, one of whom is trans. These reasons don't mean that I don't want children because I'm autistic. They just mean I have a difficult time intellectually with meshing my life as it is now with the life of a mother.

Whatever the case, disability does not mean that someone will inherently be a bad mother. Ever. Neither does weight, age, race, neurotype, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, religious background, past history, or military status. We have to stop thinking that there is only one "right" type of mother. It is this type of narrow mentality which also creates the paradigm of the "right" kind of child, which has led to much suffering, grief, and anguish for all involved when it comes to autism, for reasons I don't believe I need to elaborate upon.

My Reality versus Your Normality

You want to know what really irks me? When people say that I "constantly remind people" of my autism, or my Jewishness, or my queerness. That I "always bring it up", and that they don't mind that part of me, in fact they love me very much, they just wish I didn't "constantly bring it up."

At first, I took this admonition seriously, and more or less stopped talking about autism, Judaism, queer issues, and myself in the context of the two. But when I was making a concentrated effort to not talk about these aspects of my personality, I started observing what happened when neurotypical goyishe heterosexual people talked about themselves, and- chee! They drop hints about their religious/ethnic background, their sexuality, and their neurotype all the time. They talk about going out to dinner with their girlfriend, whether or not it was a "proper girly gift" to get her say, a Nintendo DS, about possibly getting married and having children, about going to concerts, plays, and other events where I need earplugs, talk about social interactions and make sweeping generalizations about how people act in these situations, and talk about how they are going to spend their Christmas, or what they're going to have for Easter dinner with their families.

Really now, how is that any different from when I talk about my girlfriend, about our somewhat limited choices in terms of marriage and children, about why I can't eat bread today because it's Passover, or how I usually date within my own neurotype simply because it's more compatible?

The answer didn't come to me until I started thinking about what these three qualities have in common, besides being shared by me: The problem lay in the fact that neurotypicality, coming from a Christian background, and heterosexuality are considered the "norm". When you talk about them with "I" or "Me" language, you are simply describing something you assume everyone, or the majority, shares with you. When I talk about my three differing traits however, I'm seen as asserting a difference, and that makes people feel uncomfortable, because it pushes away their expectations of what's "normal" and expected.

Either way, I can't not talk about these things. They are a part of me and my life. I just hope they will some day be respected as normal and acceptable to talk about without being seen as "pushy" or "constantly reminding" every time I try to have an ordinary conversation. What's normal for me may not be normal for someone else, and that goes for everyone. Nobody's back story or facts of life should be treated as the absolute norm, because it inherently builds a fence around a rather small section of a very big, beautiful garden.

On Feminerds and Asperger Syndrome

Jarrah of Gender Focus has a new series on nerdiness, womanhood, and feminism going up at Bitch Magazine. One of her first posts details the ever-so-popular stereotype on the hyper-male brain as it relates to autism, specifically, Asperger Syndrome, and nerdiness. What I find interesting, not about the post itself, but about one of the topics discussed, is that while Sheldon Cooper has been labelled as autistic by fans (I'm not disputing that, I'm a fan of the show, and boy howdy, as someone with OCD and autism...) his "friend who happens to be a girl", Amy Farrah Fowler, played by the delightful Mayim Bialik, has not been given the same demand for diagnoses, even though she is essentially a female Sheldon. I relate more to her than to Sheldon, because she was more pragmatic, practical, less arrogant, and is shown, unlike Sheldon, to have a sex drive. I would say she is autistic as well, but because she is a woman, has learned out of necessity to juggle social situations better than him. This is common in women with autism, myself included.

It's a good post, although a tad short, I hope to see more on this so-called male-female brain dichotomy as the series continues. Now, allow me to make my own contribution to the talk on nerdiness, autism, and the so-called male brain. This is a topic of interest to me, since I am a woman, autistic, queer, nerdy, and dating an autistic, queer, nerdy transwoman. Both of us have experienced erasure owing to this idea that autism, specially Asperger Syndrome, is inherently male, and, for some reason, the idea that AS means that you must be good in the hard sciences. Please note I am not a neurologist, a psychiatrist, or therapist. I'm merely a person with autism who distrusts this idea that we must fit into such narrowly prescribed categories. For a downtake on autism and this hyper male brain stuff from a less folksy and anecdotal POV, I recommend the always excellent Lindsay, at Autist's Corner.

To get it out of the way, my girlfriend is a theoretical physicist, and as an undergrad, she double majored in Mathematical Physics and Medieval History. I myself am almost finished with my undergraduate degree, and I'll be graduating with a B.A in Pacific & Asian Studies, after which I intend to pursue a Master's in International Relations, after deciding that I just wasn't cut out for Law. Both of us have our strengths and our weaknesses, my strengths are in languages, linguistics, art history, and Indigenous cultures. Her strengths lie in mathematics, physics, European history and literature, history of science, Middle Eastern culture, and we have overlapping interests in poetry, writing, and art, as well as a plethora of nerdy non-academic interests which are too long to list here. :-)

Neither of us see our interests as inherently male or female, and we didn't even before my girlfriend came out and was living as a presumed man. They were our passions, and they were not limited by our gender or sex. Our strengths are, in our eyes, provided partially by our environment. I grew up in a household that was absolutely rich in art books of the coffee table variety, owing to growing up in a town with many galleries and having a family who knew many of the gallery owners, hence my interest in art history. My girlfriend however, is the child of a mathematician who grew up surrounded by books on maths. Both of us had fathers who presumably have/had autism, and their interests were just as different and varied as ours are. The only thing connecting them was the love and passion with which they pursued their interests.

That's just a big huge disclaimer there. Now, let me explain what stereotyping autism as being a "male" brain means in both the practical and emotional aspects for me.

There is a huge problem with girls with autism being overlooked for a diagnosis. This led to a once common belief that autism affected males more, but the truth is, that gap is slowly closing now. It turns out, the real reason there has been such an imbalanced gender ratio had less to do with genes, and more with different manifestations of the symptoms of autism and the overlooking of girls who did not display the traits in an identical fashion to their male peers. We are all, in other words, Amys to the Sheldons of autism, being more or less ignored for diagnosis because we may have different ways of expressing our autism or may have become better at hiding the more obvious manifestations, owing to the greater societal pressure on girls to be polite, sweet, tender, matronly, and submissive, traits which don't come naturally to me, or, I imagine, other autistic girls. When we talk about autism in terms of male brains, we condemn these undiagnosed girls and women to a life where a diagnosis may not ever become tangible.

Secondly, it ghettoises autistic women who have a diagnosis and have learned to accept it. In spite of the arguably most famous autistic person in the world being a woman, we are still frequently left out of the conversation about autism on a societal level. In children's books about autism, the out autistic characters are almost always boys or male-identified. Same with television, or literature, the only prominent character with autism who was a woman I can even think of in fiction was Lisbeth Salander, who never had the condition explained to her, but was instead whispered behind closed doors or in monologues. Women with autism, as much as autistic men, need to see a variety of representations of themselves, to help develop a positive image of themselves and their disability. Having only one female autistic role model can lead some autistic women to feel they must emulate the prominent autistic woman in every fashion, even if it's not what they truly feel comfortable with.

And finally, it completely and utterly shoves all autistic people into neat little boxes of gender binary which they will most certainly not fit in. Whatever the reason, I have noticed more autistic people are gay, bisexual, genderqueer, trans, or just more comfortable with gender experimentation than the general population. What good does it do to put these people into the "male" brain category? Their gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation has been misunderstood enough, and this just piles onto that.

One of the things which attracted me to nerd culture was the fact that I could, in most spaces, be myself. I was not expected to emulate the behaviour of a "proper" woman, or act in a way that made me uncomfortable or less than true to myself. I could chatter about phallic symbols in the works of Yukio Mishima, video games, and the best alien hairstyles on Star Trek without repercussion. Nerd culture is flawed, but many parts of it are much more liberating in terms of "Acceptable" behaviour than mainstream society. Why would you try to rob it of that trait in order to satisfy some poorly constructed theory towards disability?

ADAPTing to the election results: True Patriot Love

While I was sullenly contemplating the election results, I went out to lunch with a friend, a much older friend, who has been involved in disability activism since she was my age, so, for nearly 40 years, if my math is correct. She was keeping close watch on her phone, and showing me pictures and tweets from Washington, DC, of her friends and allies getting arrested while in Paul Ryan's office, fighting cuts to Medicare. My friend was recalling all the times she had been in DC herself getting arrested to fight for the rights of the disabled.
I was in awe. I felt like humbled, because hours earlier, I had been contemplating fleeing Canada in order to find greener pastures in Sweden or Norway for the disabled, queer progressive and her disabled, queer, trans girlfriend. But these people, my elders, including my friend, who has been a mother figure to me while I have lived in Montana, was showing me the proof of what can be done if you stay and fight.
I will never judge anyone who decides to seek out a better life for themselves in another country. But I have decided, after fearfully leafing through a Swedish dictionary, that I can and will stay to fight for Canada up to 2015 and beyond. I'm tired of running, for one. And secondly, I began thinking of how people like Harper and conservatives had stolen and modified the word "patriot" and created this artificial dichotomy between "true" Canadians and everyone else.
I'm a patriot too. I'm a Canadian too. And this is my country as much as it is for a conservative anglo Christian who was born in Canada. And I can no longer passively allow such language, such ideas, such exceptionalism run rampant at the expense of the happiness, safety, and liberty of my fellow Canadians, my beautiful girlfriend, and myself.
My elders in the disability community, thank you for giving me a valuable lesson in courage.

Meanwhile, up in Canada....

My heart is officially broken. I had set so much of my hopes on Canada. Compared to the United States, it is practically paradise. But after tonight's election, which has resulted in a conservative majority government, I am left wondering just how is this going to be an improvement, when the Tories are hell-bent on remaking Canada in the image of the United States?

I am not going to go too deep into politics here, because I'm sick of esotericism and abstraction in this process. I've really, truly, had enough of that.

What this election means for me is more than stuff like "the economy" and GDP points and numbers on charts. For me, this election put my civil rights, and those of my girlfriend, at stake. The Conservatives have made it clear that the rights of queer people and trans* individuals are something to be sneered at, if not actively opposed.

To hear the election described as such a detached, mildly interesting thing by cis straight people made my blood boil. Tonight, my girlfriend and I sat quietly in front of our computers, watching the results and crying. Yes, crying. Weeping for the realization that our dreams were crumbling before our eyes. We dream(ed) of a lovely house for two with a garden on Vancouver Island, of tenured work for her and respected work for me, of a lovely wedding in the Butchart Gardens.

What chance of that is there when gender identity and gender expression are only not protected, but the rights of our people will be seriously undermined on purpose? What chance do we have of getting a mortgage without the realtor refusing to sell to us? What chance do we have of renting an apartment from a bigoted landlord when we can't sue for discrimination? What chance do we have of having our dream jobs when we can be fired willy-nilly without having the chance to make it right? What chance do we have at a joyous wedding when our rights will be chip-chipped away at before our very eyes?

I believed in Canada. Now I don't know what's left to believe in, not even 2015.