starting to feel more and more like my gender is “autism”
to expound on this (it’s okay to reblog the expanded version):
I like living in a female body. I like my sexed characteristics. I like presenting femininely. I like being referred to as “she”. I have always been uncomplicatedly cis by pretty much every measure, and I don’t think that has changed. What’s changed, I think, is what all those things *mean* to the world around me.
“It doesn’t feel good when people say ‘everyone’ and they don’t mean you.” I heard that the other day, and I haven’t been able to let it go. It crystallizes what I’ve been feeling over the past year: that autistic women, or at least high-systemizing-low-empathizing women, are being increasingly defined out of womanhood itself. I’m seeing a return to frankly disturbing essentialism among women of my generation. It’s of a piece with that “feminist astrology” post I wrote a while back, but it’s more than that. It’s a creeping woo-ishness in the gender discourse that’s beginning to make me nauseous.
It seems, to my admittedly untrained eye, that despite constant pretenses at breaking down the gender binary, millennial and Gen Z women are not just enforcing it – they’re widening the gulf. The general mood is that there are things women know that men just can’t understand or even truly empathize with. On the more overly woo-ish end of things, there’s astrology and “feminine energy” and literal goddess worship. But the essentialized dichotomy shows up in more mainstream media, too. It underlies every thinkpiece on “how women feel” about X, Y, or Z. It’s there when women of my cohort make fun of STEMlords and “well actually"s and hyperlogical white dudes and expect me to laugh along with it. It’s not even subtle in posts like “women’s atheism is fundamentally different from men’s” and “women don’t say what they mean and that’s okay”. It’s present in every piece of emotional manipulation disguised as activism that women, being The Nurturing Ones, are supposed to fall for.
Obviously the stereotype itself is nothing new – what’s new is the enthusiasm with which my generation has seemingly decided to lean into it. I fear that by the time we’re fully in control of the media and the public narrative, women like me might be defined out of womanhood altogether. And I fear that responses to this concern will run along the lines of “it’s okay, just admit you’re non-binary”. I’m *not* non-binary! You fucks just moved the goalposts! Narrowing what counts as “woman” isn’t okay just because claiming non-binary genders is becoming more of an option. It’s still defining people out against their will.
tl;dr my gender is “too femme to count as male but too high-systemizing for The Sisterhood”
This may be recency bias on my end, but goddamn, today’s gender essentialism makes everything surrounding the concept of gender so very confusing. The worst part is that it’s gender essentialism dressed up as ‘breaking down the gender binary’. It’s basically just a repackaging of traditional gender norms with the labels on what’s good and what’s bad switched around.
But not quite. A lot of the vitriol directed at what they think is typically male is just slagging on autistic people. When you tell them this, they’ll look at you funny and say that of course they don’t hate autistic people, they’re not ableist!
But that’s because they don’t know what autism is, they don’t know what it actually looks like in the nitty-gritty, beyond the idealised image they have in their heads.
There’s a lot said about how autism is severely underdiagnosed in women because the behaviours that indicate autism are generally expected of women in society, yet I see a lot of these people stereotyping all men as having these autistic traits, while not realising they are autistic traits, and then unilaterally (or at least, without any concern for the scrupulous, which is to say, many autistic people) declaring all these traits to be bad and in need of changing.
And there’s just so much collateral damage in that approach! They’re hurting so many people that they don’t even mean to hurt and I just want to scream at them to stop doing that.
But then I’d just be aggressive, I guess.
A part of the gender thing on here, in particular, seems to be the repackaging of any action or feeling or concept related to gender not stereotypically on one side of the male/female dichotomy as non-binary. I am aware that there are non-binary people, but no every woman who presents as/likes sterotypically masculine things is non-binary and the same with men and femininity. It seems like, out of an effort to broaden the gender spectum, some people have been reinforcing gender essentialism, instead.
THIS. It’s not that non-binary identities aren’t real. It’s that some people are using them as yet another box instead of a reason to complicate the idea of boxes in the first place.
Holy shit funereal, are you me? This is exactly my problem. I don’t mind having a female body and a feminine appearance and wearing feminine clothes and pretty jewelry and loving cats and horses, but when society tells me that I also have to be nurturing and spiritual and unstraightforward and only have female friends and live in fear of others’ aggression or else I am A Man, I get real tempted to say “Welp, guess I’m A Man now”.
On a related note, can someone explain to me and the people who do this what is gender if it’s not how you behave and it’s not your personality? Does anyone even know? Is it just a gut feeling people have?
My usual definition of ‘gender’ is ‘the archetypes people most strongly identify with, sorted into neat categories for ease of use’.
King vs. Queen, knight vs. damsel, lord vs. lady, wizard vs. witch. Or for more modern examples: Batman vs. Batgirl. Lara Croft vs. Indiana Jones. Xena vs. Hercules. He-Man vs. She-Ra. Butch vs. femme vs. futch.
Everyone vibes with some kind of archetype, some outside influence they use to define the kind of person they are. It can be an ideology, an aesthetic, a fashion style, a fictional character, a career, whatever. But everyone has a role they’d like to play, and everyone defines themself accordingly.
And because of the way our society works, because our society is full of roles formed by archaic divisions of labour based on AFAB people bearing children, that hypertrophied into a huge morass of traditions and rules, these archetypes tend to be split into two groups: ‘male’ and ‘female’. Certain qualities- for example, “this person has a penis”, “this person is aggressive”, “this person has long hair and breasts”, or “this person is nurturing” - determine which box which archetype goes in.
If a person vibes with more archetypes labeled ‘male’ than ‘female’- if they’d like to play the roles traditionally defined as masculine, have the body parts traditionally defined as such, be seen as such by others- they’re likely to define themselves as ‘male’ or ‘masculine’; the reverse is also true. It’s not 100%, of course; there are plenty of people who strongly identify with archetypes of one gender who see themselves as a different gender. But they tend to call themselves things like “gender non-conforming” or “butch/femme” - which are themselves archetypes you could sort into one box or the other; ‘drag queen’ and ‘lesbian lumberjack’ are gendered archetypes, after all.
I don’t think it’s an accident that one of the most popular Tumblr-nonbinary jokes goes something like this:
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’m a pirate.”
“But what’s in your pants?”
“Booty!”
(With many many other variants of this joke based on different occupations: ‘scientist’ seems to be a popular one, and I don’t think that’s an accident.)
NB people don’t (…seem to) vibe with any of the ‘traditionally’ gendered archetypes. They don’t fit into any roles in any of the boxes. So they find archetypes that exist outside those boxes to build themselves around, whether it’s archetypes that are traditionally androgynous (like elves or shapeshifters), archetypes that are too recent to have the full weight of Traditional Gender Roles behind them (like ‘programmer’, especially back in the day), or archetypes that don’t have anything to do with humanity (different sorts of animal, aliens or robots).
There are NB people who do vibe with roles within the traditional gender boxes, but they tend to call themselves things like “demi[gender]” or “nonbinary [gender]”. Again- not a one-to-one perfect matchy thing; there are plenty of NB people who do vibe with specific roles inside the gender boxes. But in general, it seems to correlate.
In this day and age, gender is less about what you do in society and is more a form of self-definition, or even a form of self-expression. It’s the way you want people to see and react to you. It’s the way you want to see and react to yourself. And because people need stories, a lot of the time, they build their self-definitions as a story, made out of stories and ideas that already exist. So, your gender is a combination of all those stories and archetypes that feel Like You.
Really well said, Earl. Jumping off that, I’ll point out that autistic people seem likelier than NTs to be drawn to nonhuman archetypes (animals, aliens, robots, etc). So it’s not just that our archetypes are nongendered – it’s that the entire concept of human gender renders our identities incoherent. You can’t be a woman if you’re not even a person.
OK, now I’m confused. This narrative/archetype-centric model of gender conflicts strongly with my own native thoughts on the subject, but more importantly, as far as I can tell it conflicts strongly with all the points you were making earlier in your original post.
It’s possible to have “cross-gendered” stories and archetypes, which are specifically about existing as a member of one particular gender while partaking heavily of tropes associated with the other gender. “Lady knight,” “spunky adventuresome princess who hates embroidery and loves swordplay” (which maybe just collapses to “tomboy”), “nurturing heart-of-the-team house-dad.” These are very popular; lots of people identify with them heavily. Which suggests that there is something in play other than “‘knight’ is a boy archetype, ‘princess’ is a girl archetype, you figure out which you are by looking at your favorite archetypes.”
…which seems to be exactly the argument you were advancing earlier. “You don’t get to tell me that I’m not a woman just because I don’t want to play princess; my femaleness inheres elsewhere.”
It’s a lot more consonant with my own intuitions, and (as far as I can tell) with the personal narratives provided by trans people and others who have had to Face Down Exactly What Gender Really Is, to say something like –
It’s an ineffable sense of who-you-are, which is largely detached from abstract cultural concepts. It’s probably rooted in this biological physiological actually-mostly-a-binary that defines our species, such that most people can’t escape their inherent sense of male-ness or female-ness regardless of their preferred roles and archetypes, and a few people have dysphoria due to wonky wiring or something. It is shaped and constructed and refined by countless cultural stories about What a Man Is or What a Woman Is, and people lean into stories those to a greater or a lesser extent depending on their personalities, but it’s actually really hard to make the jump from “I like Gender X stories” to “I belong to Gender X.”
autistic people seem likelier than NTs to be drawn to nonhuman archetypes (animals, aliens, robots, etc). So it’s not just that our archetypes are nongendered – it’s that the entire concept of human gender renders our identities incoherent. You can’t be a woman if you’re not even a person.
I know some people who wouldn’t agree. Animals, aliens, robots., etc., all of them quite gendered.
It seems like an attempt at an asinine Internet pwn, I know, but this is actually an important point vis-a-vis identity construction; people can and will gender things. They will say “the robot is definitely a boy, never mind that it doesn’t necessarily make any sense, because I identify with robots and also I’m a boy.” Which means that “the thing didn’t start off gendered” is not serving as an obstacle to people both identifying with it and maintaining a strong gender-sense.