Cat! has movedYou don't need permission to be trans.
A lot of transphobia hinges on the dehumanising notion that your identity - your very sense of self - should be subordinate to someone else's self-declared authority. Transphobes present this idea that a "natural" hierarchy exists whereby who a trans person is is subject to cis people's approval.
It's been disheartening to watch the furore over GRA reform, because nobody's arguing about the actual GRA. Transphobes treat a Gender Recognition Certificate as a "licence to trans," solely because they believe there should be such a thing, controlled and restricted as it is. But that's not what a GRC is; that's an authoritarian fantasy. In reality, a GRC helps to protect your privacy: the opposite of what a licence does.
You don't need permission to be trans.
I was reflecting on my journey. I haven't "always known" I was trans, although in hindsight I was in deep denial at the signs. Where did that denial come from? I grew up in a culture that acknowledged trans people exist, but told me I wasn't "supposed" to be one of them, because the cultural presentation of trans people was editorialised, mediated, spun and distorted by cis people who, at best, didn't know what they were talking about (but in many cases were more actively and intentionally hostile). It's almost funny when transphobes spin conspiracy theories about "institutional capture" when what they really mean is "loosening the decades-long grip of institutional transphobia."
Then two things happened in quick succession. First, I was diagnosed with autism, and second, I saw a tweet that said, "If you want to be a girl, you can just be a girl."
I don't think autism made me trans; I actually think autism kept me cis for so long. Knowledge of autism, though? That certainly helped. Having an understanding that masking was something I was doing at considerable cost to my health, I started to inventory the behaviours I was slavishly following to "fit in." I started to question whether the expectations I felt I needed to meet were actually of service.
And then I saw that tweet. It's important, I think, that that tweet came from a trans person. By that point I had only had a few years of hearing trans people speak on their own behalf without cis interference, but I had already started to smell the bullshit on the stories I had been told growing up.
And she... She was not giving me permission; she was saying I didn't need permission. And in that moment I knew that one of the big masking behaviours that was holding me back was "being cis." I knew I was only being a boy because it was what people expected of me, and I knew that it was harming me, and I knew that I didn't have to do it.
You don't need permission to be trans.
I don't remember the name of the guy who said it because he doesn't deserve to be remembered, but there was a guy in gamedev a few years back who suggested that developers should try to hire undiagnosed autistic people because they're easily exploitable. All the ableism that surrounds autism about how we don't really know ourselves or what we need or what we're doing notwithstanding, it's important that he specified 'undiagnosed.' Now, for one reason and another I do think self-diagnosis is valid, so I'm not necessarily talking about clinical diagnosis, but I do think that knowing we are autistic makes a huge difference.
And that applies to being trans, too. We don't (and really, can't) know how many undiagnosed autistic people are trans because, by definition, we don't know they're autistic. By the same token, we can't know anything about patterns in closeted or especially 'latent' trans people because we don't know they're trans. When we talk about any link between autism and trans people, we are therefore talking only about the subset of autistic people and the subset of trans people who have been empowered to know themselves. That's the classic "third factor" explanation for why correlation does not imply causation.
But maybe, for allistic people, it is easier not to question it. Maybe pretending to be who they are expected to be is less exhausting and traumatic for them. What I would say to them is: Just because you find it easier than I do doesn't mean you have to do it.
And this is where I went wrong in my journey. Knowing I was autistic, knowing I had extra difficulty with living up to the expectations I felt, offered justification for questioning and in some cases abandoning those expectations. I felt like knowing I was autistic gave me permission to be trans.
But you don't need permission to be trans.
#trans #lgbtq #autism #aaw2024 #autismacceptanceweek #autismawarenessweek
TransActual
