a parliament of owls

life with asperger's

Reading Aspies through a Conventional Lens






Gender Dysphoria and Bodily Estrangement

A small study based in a gender dysphoria clinic has just found that “almost a quarter of kids with gender dysphoria” are “likely to have Asperger’s.” At least one other study has found that people with Aspergers have higher than baseline rates of the same. Few people who are wired conventionally are aware of how much that wiring affects a basic sense of self, such as one’s relationship to the body. For me, the body is an alien entity, a vehicle that carries my consciousness even as it synthesizes and synergizes its production. Without a neurologically based rewards system for social thinking or feeling, I also have no additional inclination to conform to received views about the body or how I should relate to it. Therefore, my sense of gender and sexuality is based on my partially independently formed concept of these rather than the vehicle or what I’ve taken in about it from others directly or via media.

From a very early age, I did not identify as female, and I often feel a negative response to social conventions that attempt to identify me as one (such as the label “Mrs” or being called a “mother,” when I am only my son’s mother and my marital state does not define me any more than it does a “Mr.”). I am also equally attracted to males and females and have been for as long as I can remember. But physical touch, presence, and relations are unimportant to me, and in some ways undesirable unless I already have significant emotional intimacy with the other person. I find that other Aspies vary to the degree to which they would say the same, but there’s a tendency toward all of this in us that I believe is shared.

I remember with what joy of recognition I responded to a question on one of the extensive diagnostic inventories I took during my medical diagnosis for autism. It asked something about whether I was sometimes uncomfortable with having arms because I didn’t know how to position them or what to do with them. I had never told that to anyone and couldn’t believe anyone could imagine the same enough to ask another if that were the case.

One artist who does express this sense of bodily estrangement is David Byrne, also a self-described Aspie. If you are interested in this, read his lyrics to “Glass, Concrete, and Stone.” Here’s a taste:

Skin that covers me from head to toe
Except a couple tiny holes and openings
Where the city’s blowin’ in and out
And this is what it’s all about, delightfully

Everything’s possible when you’re an animal
Not inconceivable, how things can change, I know

‪#‎aspergers‬ ‪#‎autism‬ ‪#‎genderdysphoria‬