I wrote this in February 2022 and it remains relevant, although I might choose some different ways to express things now.
Being gay has affected my life intrinsically, even if it hasn’t defined it. I realised that truth about myself the year I turned 25, over half my life-time ago.
I was gay before I realised it, of course. When I look back at my teens and early twenties I can see so many clues. I wrote about that journey in my essay published in the wonderful Queers Dig Time Lords.
My gayness intermingled with my mostly subconscious take on gender expression. I’ve never been girly, and because the butch/femme binary dominated the lesbian scene when and where I came out, I took on a vaguely butch aesthetic. It didn’t fit me quite right, which I think was partially to do with me wanting to fit in at work. Or, to be precise, I didn’t want to stand out at work even when I was out as gay.
I was well into my forties when I learned about gender queer ideas, and the concept of being non-binary fits me a lot more comfortably than anything else. For the record, I’m a woman. I’m a lesbian, but I prefer to describe myself as gay. My style, in so far as I have one, is casually masculine. I have no idea what my chromosomes actually are because I’ve not had those tests done. Understanding what they probably are is not the same thing as knowing for sure.
For most of my life, I attributed my awkwardness in social situations to my queerness, with a dash of societal sexism thrown in. For twenty years, I worked in the white cis het male-dominated field of law enforcement. I’m white, and haven’t experienced racism the way my co-workers from the diversity of non-white backgrounds did and do. I am the daughter of a Dutch migrant to Australia, and later became an EU migrant to the UK. I am now a naturalised Brit. I never hid my sexual orientation—why should I?—and in the UK advocated for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA people in workplaces.
Despite my attempts to blend in, I did stand out at work. My work with Stonewall and numerous co-workers gave me the strength to be my authentic self at work. I’ve written about that elsewhere.
I am also autistic. My formal diagnosis came through at the end of 2021. I have loads to unpack and re-assess about my life, and I am glad to have a terrific support network. I’ve debated about ‘coming out’ with my diagnosis, and for a lot of different reasons it feels right for me to do so.
The overlap with queerness is interesting even if not all queers are autistic, and not all autists are queer.
The history of autism and its definitions/diagnostic criteria is fascinating. I reviewed Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes back in June 2021, and found it to be a pretty comprehensive history of autism in the global west from the early 20th century to the time it was published in 2015. I highly recommend it as a good, solid introduction, written in an accessible style. Warning: large parts of the history is appalling—the US psych industry has a lot to answer for—and Silberman does not shy away from detailing it in a factual way. The chapter about early SF fandom in the USA is enlightening through this different lens. Silberman’s empathy and sympathy for autistic people, and their parents/families, shines through and the book ends on a hopeful note.
There are a lot of definitions out there, and one from Dr Nick Walker struck a cord with my experience. While I will link to her website version, written in 2014, I won’t cite it for the reasons given on her website.
The key point I took from Walker’s work, and Silberman’s, among others, is that autism is a neurological variant that begins in utero and influences an individual’s development on multiple levels throughout our life. It’s genetic, and affected by a variety of external influences that are unique to the individual. It manifests in both cognitive and sensory ways, but how much and in what ways depends on each person, even as we share a neurotype. It’s disabling for many people, but not everyone, and that can vary across time. Some of that disability lies in the ways in which societies are set up, but for many people that disability is intrinsic to particular traits. Diagnostic criteria, and the labels, have changed over time and diverge between countries—all of which are debated, even now.
It’s messy and complex, because human beings are messy and complex.
My formal diagnosis came from a clinical psychologist using the DSM-V and ICD 10 criteria, applied in an affirming and queer-friendly way. They also tested me as a 53-year-old adult, rather than a three-year-old child. The fact that such a practice exists is testament to how much progress has been made recently in this field, as uneven as that progress remains. I am immensely grateful to the growing numbers of people who have shared their own experiences and journeys—good, bad, and everything in between. I went for a formal diagnosis for my own reasons, and was able to do so. Not everyone can, but it is possible to work it out if you have access to a range of material available. It’s not easy to navigate the garbage out there, though. It’s painful to read through research material that somehow got ethics approval even as they deny a group of people their humanity.
There is so much more that I could write about all this here, but I’ll stop now. I know I will return to this subject again, with better understanding of it generally and personally. It is who I am and have always been, and since it’s the way my brain’s wired—to use a well-fitting analogy—it affects the way I view the world and write about it.
© 21 February 2022
Leave a Reply