starting to feel more and more like my gender is “autism”
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Equipment for keeping kids occupied
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.
“It’s basically just a repackaging of traditional gender norms with the labels on what’s good and what’s bad switched around.”
That.
The first time I heard the phrase “feminist epistemology” I crawled out of my skin.
Yeah. Thank you for this!
I’m like you, @funereal-disease. I like looking feminine–twirly skirts, long hair, jewelry, lace, corsets, etc. When I first went through puberty, I used to hate my body and was disgusted by the idea anyone might be attracted to me–but TBH, the problem was really having a physical body at all, not its sex. Currently, with the exception of periods, I like having a female body. “She” feels fine; “he” would feel ill-fitting.
But since I was a little kid, so many gender norms made zero sense to me and felt imposed from the outside. I remember when I was about four I complained to my mother that I was bored out of my mind because one of my friends just wanted to brush her dolls’ hair all the time. Why would anyone want to do that? I was told some variation of “it’s a girl thing.”
My reaction then, and now, is, “what does having a female body/hormones/etc. have to do with liking to brush hair/the color pink/makeup/fashion magazines/celebrity gossip/etc.”
I genuinely liked nerdy and intellectual stuff (reading, talking about special interests, etc.) and couldn’t have cared less about “girly” stuff. So in reaction to having it pushed in me, I developed an attitude of “I don’t care about this shallow stuff, not like the other girls.” In my mind, making an effort to look nice (grooming myself, doing my hair, putting on makeup) was about appeasing other people and conforming to societal expectations, so I actively resisted doing it. (I also lacked the motor skills to do it well, and individualism was a great excuse to avoid confronting that). The idea that it could be a fun way to express myself and feel good about myself never occurred to me, and certainly no one ever told me. It took until my mid-to-late twenties to get it.
In short, being exposed to narrow gender norms gave me the unhealthy idea that being girly means being shallow and immature. My attitude was that being substantive means being gender-neutral, and is possible for either men or women, but girly stuff is beneath us.
I saw a really interesting post here recently (EDIT: LINK HERE) about how the villains in books and movies are the ones who put effort into their appearance and the heroines, like Hermione or Mia in The Princess Diaries, get a makeover handed to them. And I realized, that’s absolutely true, and I bought into that cultural myth big time.
So I ended up presenting as very cis while seeing myself as gender neutral, which probably confuses and annoys everyone.
Why should “girly” be forever pitted against “intellectual?” It probably makes people who naturally like girly things feel unaccepted should they try to develop their minds, and it makes nerds like me look down on other women and neglect an entire side of themselves.
And don’t get me started on Baron-Cohen’s empathizing-systematizing dichotomy bullshit. It’s extremely anti-autistic but it doesn’t do non-autistic people any favors either–it makes them sound stupid.
And I’m a living exception to its basic premises. I’ve been off the charts on both since day 1. I was constantly developing special interests and learning about them, but an essential part of learning was expressing something in the form of art, stories, whatever, and I’d even go so far as to say that was part of the point. Learning about dinosaurs meant learning what it was like to be a dinosaur which meant writing stories about dinosaurs, drawing dinosaurs, pretending to be a dinosaur, pretending to be a naturalist studying dinosaurs or an archaeologist, etc. And the kids with special interests I’ve studied were also off-the-charts in both empathizing and systematizing.
Every resource on gifted kids that acknowledges that it involves more than just a high IQ score emphasizes both the social/emotional part and the ability to learn and reason logically. The really good resources acknowledge that the former is the engine driving the latter.
And like, logic is a good thing, and having an intuitive sense of morality (a moral compass) is also a good thing. Soviet Russia is a great example of what happens when you follow logic and throw your sense of the value of human life out the window as a “bourgeois construct.” Things like refusing vaccines or stoning gay people out of what amounts to gut feelings happen when you follow your intuition and throw logic out the window. Why shouldn’t we encourage everyone to develop both?
Women are supposed to be good writers. Well, guess what? Logic and cause and effect are important for writing.
And how did we get the idea that the balance of estrogen, testosterone, and other hormones in the brain has anything to do with either Emotion/Expression/Socializing/Narrative or Logic/Learning/STEM, because as far as I know there’s neither evidence nor any conceptual relationship?
And this whole idea that we’re intrinsically Kind and Compassionate just because we’re women…come on. How can anyone observe themselves and their friends and actually believe that? I don’t think most women believe it –when I go to the bathroom, I hear how they talk about their alleged “friends” and they’re way more vicious than the average man. I see myself being selfish, judgmental, dishonest, hypocritical, just like everyone else. I see other women doing the same. Of course women do crappy things, because women are people. This Marion Zimmer Bradley Women Are Perfect thing just dehumanizes us.
By the same token, whenever somebody sends me the profile of some entitled woman with double standards from Tinder with a misogynistic comment attached, my response is always, “that’s an entitled/hypocritical/whatever person. Women can be like that, and so can men, because we’re people.”
And suppose for the sake of argument women were actually able to understand, sympathize with, and form relationships with other people better than men–perhaps because of how we were raised. It doesn’t automatically make them good people! It could make them more dishonest, more manipulative, etc. Kids start lying when they start passing false belief tasks for a reason.
Lots of people go into caring professions in order to have power over others they see as weaker, and they know no one will call them on it because we as a society don’t expect better for old or disabled people. Want to be a serial murderer? Best place to do it is at a hospital or nursing home. “They were going to die anyway, and you put them out of their misery.” You better believe people who have “great theory of mind” can figure this out and take advantage of that.
Supposedly men are more likely to be psychopaths. I believe that’s only because people aren’t sophisticated enough to realize how psychopathy manifests itself in people who are taught never to admit a desire for power because that would be “unfeminine.”
Sorry, this rant ended up going in far too many directions, only some of which were actually were on topic. TL;DR, thank you for the opportunity to rant about my pet peeves about gender essentialism. It feels amazing to meet other people frustrated with those who are supposed to be feminist pushing repackaged gender essentialism!
Great stuff.
I’ve considered most of the “gender” constructs—and moreso, their arbitrary association with physiologic sex—to be utter bullshit virtually since I was old enough to speak: most of these are simply “human” (or in some of the most primitive cases, “any living organism”) characteristics.
That my having and showing empathy (not sympathy, not soothing, but actively feeling what others feel) is somehow “non-masculine” disgusts me; and that it somehow (routinely) breaks people’s “gaydar” flat-out boggles my poor, little, size-of-a-planet-pea-brain.
the thing about tumblr that i think i’ll miss the most if it goes down is the like…quiet companionship on this site. i’m not talking about like knowing there are other people here who have the same views you do, or who don’t judge you for being honest and expressing yourself, though those are all good. i mean like…the mutuals you’ve had for years who you don’t talk to but you know. you might not know them well but it makes you happy when they post a cute selfie, or talk about something good that happened at their job. familiar names. little friendships. little connections in the vast sea of the internet, where you have to choose between total anonymity or sharing everything. we built communities in this hellscape and i don’t want to say goodbye to my neighbors just yet.
Someday Apple will probably bring back the headphone jack and market it as a high fidelity audio port.
This is why I am sticking with my good old SE as long as I can 😂
Apple will probably make up its own version, incompatible withr everything else