Ally's Academic Adventures

Preface: I’ve been reading lots of bell hooks recently, and I am sad about a lot of things as I feel my home is half the world away

This video speaks well to the notion that some parents hold so tightly: that either their child’s situation is all about themselves or their child by virtue of reproduction is solely an extension of them. The child is the one learning to interact with the world through a different lens than those who do not have ASD, yet the parents here are refocusing this to frame themselves in the centre, in some sort of perverted bitchy circle to complain of how their child (re)acts to the stresses that affect their everyday lives, rather than discussing how to support them or even just to appreciate them for the way they are. 

Sadly, it is not uncommon for parents to frame a child’s ASD as their ‘burden’, and in doing so they reduce autism to a negative aspect of the child’s character, unproductively openly punishing or quietly resenting the child’s way of being, doing nothing to productively support the child and letting themselves play at being ‘victims’. The issue stems from parents having a preconceived notion of how they want their child to be, where they want their child’s life to go, what futures they imagine for their child and consequently themselves, etc., and autism has changed that for them, thus altering the parents’ planned and imagined identities and inhibiting a perceived normalcy which they had hoped for and still sometimes cling to. 

I understand that it is difficult for them, and I understand that some children will have very challenging behaviour, like many non-aspie kids also have, but I do not understand how certain parents cannot seem to fathom that the child, although connected to them in many different ways through familial ties, is a completely separate individual from them, on whom we ought to not impose our dreams and aspirations for, but rather we ought to praise, bolster, and support the aspirations, successes, and dreams of the child. It is not about playing the victim and consequently not understanding your child, the moment you start to see your child as a burden, you’ve lost any chance of being able to understand them, and quite frankly you are not being the parent they deserve. 

Yes, children can annoy you, upset you, hurt you, and be challenging, but if you see them as a protracted burden which enables you to facilitate a state of victimhood or martyrdom for being their parent you will lose any chance to have genuine connections and foster a relationship based on reciprocal love and trust. Your child is not there to serve you, but they can help you grow as you care for them.

NB: The video here is focused on ASD but a lot of my thoughts from it, I feel, can be applied to whenever a parent sees their child as ‘altering’ or ‘challenging’ their identity, or whenever a parent sees themselves the ‘victim’ of their child’s way of being, be it autism, other developmental issues, disability, queer(ed) identity, choice of career, etc.

A very good and succinct description of a situation of colonial legacy, race, identity, and even religion which bolster some of the less explicit and hence more sinister ways we experience race, identity, and power. 

He speaks about how we use race to hide sinister aspects of religions, such as persecution of homosexuality and issues of contraception, because it is easier to say it is a ‘black issue’, ‘African issue’, and/or ‘Caribbean issue, rather than an issue of Christian fundamentalism because that is held up as ‘white’, othering the issue through race as if it does not belong to the Christian community. How those who have historically held power start to feel that power slip to those they branded as other by a construct of categorization which is race, they feel oppressed as they lose privilege, giving rise to an angry, disenfranchised, white working class who see themselves victims of oppression, and yes they are in some ways, but pinning this hardship on race because society seeks equality/equity is both divisive and unproductive. How we often speak of racism in small-scale individual acts, which is important, but this leaves a lot of people, a lot of people in privilege, who don’t experience these acts to view things as more progressive than they are, detracting from how both structural and systemic racism are deeply embedded in British society, favouring those who historically held power whilst disadvantaging those who were, and are still by many whether consciously or not, othered.

Akala is pretty wonderful.

Gina is a very bright and thoughtfully cautious lady, and I feel this is a very good piece for countering some fundamentalists’ beliefs against trans identity. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for the discussion she describes.

I write and think a lot about trans experiences (acceptance in oneself, coming out, etc.) but I very rarely think of it within the sphere of Christianity, despite it having played a role in my schooling. I don’t do this chiefly because it does not affect me as I am not Christian, so I always find it interesting to see how people have used their faith to help accept and validate their own identity. I feel, unless you take the Bible and its contradictions as fact by engaging in Biblical literalism, there exists enough ambiguity and selective practices within the Christian community to simultaneously validate or invalidate anything one chooses. As Gina points out, we can have either a wrathful god or a peaceful god depending on how we read and interpret the scripture. Gina makes a good point of this here, with the relative ambiguity, contradictions, and selective practice creating a needs-based form of religion which allows for both affirmation and rejection depending on what one takes from the scripture.

On first coming out, and, unfortunately still, my mother was of the persuasion that this is not something she can accept, at least – at the very least – without challenging. She questioned why every authoritative source or guide on dealing with your child coming out as trans said that the first thing one must do is accept one’s own child as they are. She didn’t, and still can’t, understand why one must accept it without challenge, and I feel she is missing the point if she believes challenge doesn’t exist (she has and continues to challenge this at every opportunity, I think she doesn’t see why she should accept this), though I appreciate that the types of challenging of this identity change varying on the age of person.  I will discuss the effects and outcomes of challenging over affirmative parental behaviour towards their trans children at three different age intervals: young child (pre-puberty), young teenager (puberty), young adult (late puberty/post-puberty) [these are rough ambiguous categories to be taken with a pinch of salt and some of things are universally held between them]

If a young child identifies as trans, the parents’ priority should be the child’s health and wellness, and more often than not this should be managed through affirmation, social transition, and facilitating gender therapy; the challenging here comes from both therapy, where the gender therapist will be able to help the child understand their own feelings - there are many types of gender therapist and, as you are the parent, most likely it will be you choosing and you may choose one that aligns more with your thinking, and if the idea of a child being trans is unacceptable for the parent then they may seek someone that encourages repression over affirmation. However, what I would caution is that ‘reparative’ therapy prioritises the parents’ comfort over the child’s happiness, whereas, affirmative therapy works only to prioritise the child’s happiness and health - and allowing the child to explore their identity socially and psychologically with no real and tangible commitment to it. By allowing the identity to be lived by the child we are prioritising the child’s physical and psychological health. If we deny the identity of the child not only do we put them through unnecessary stress, but we also deny them the opportunity to experience, live, express, and either challenge or affirm their identity.

If someone in their early teenage years identifies as trans, once more the parents’ priority should be the teenager’s health and wellness throughout the turbulent time of puberty. At this point we should acknowledge that the young teenager has greater agency and understanding of how they identify, that is not to say that young children don’t, but it is to say that young teenagers have gone through the formative years of social understanding. If a parent wants to challenge this identity they should understand that if someone of this age is identifying in this way challenging will most likely not change any outcome, and their challenging and rejection of the identity is more likely to damage the young teenager over actually helping, though in a warped way parents may see rejection of the identity as a way of expressing care for the child, but once more rejection is prioritising the parents’ comfort over the child’s happiness and physical health. As we enter these important and turbulent years of puberty the parent must acknowledge the damage rejection of the identity could cause and mustn’t be surprised if their child suffers from poor mental health, reduces familial communication, reciprocates the rejection, or attempts suicide as these are the lived and protracted consequences of rejection. The ideal approach to a young teenager coming out as transgender would be socio-familiar affirmation of the identity and seeking an appropriate and affirming gender therapist to facilitate the medical intervention of puberty blocking hormones to facilitate a reversible exploration of their identity and prevent the pain of a dysphoric puberty. The effects of puberty blockers are reversible and give the young teenager more time to think about their identity, the effects of not intervening are, to be blunt, horrendous, not only does no intervention force a child to go through the psychologically damaging event of experiencing an unwanted puberty, but also increases their risks of experiencing violent crime when they transition as an adult as they are seen to transgress gender boundaries to a greater degree.

If a young adult identifies as trans, once more the parents’ priority should be to their child’s health and wellbeing, and at this point challenging the identity is nothing but futile as the young adult will have not only been thinking about this for a long time and come to a strong conviction in their identity but also may well have started the processes of coming out to friends to develop a support network who seek the happiness of the child and thus have some hard earnt social conviction on which to stand on. Challenging their very identity is fundamentally harmful, and if a parent is to continuously do this then they mustn’t be surprised when relationship with the child deteriorates or when the child is no longer in their life, either through leaving them through reciprocal rejection as an unaccepting home environment becomes unliveable and unbearable, or through suicide, in which, to be blunt, I would argue the parents become culpable in manslaughter for such abject familial rejection which leads to this. I am by no means saying parents should not ask questions of their child, which is in a very broad sense challenging the identity, as that allows the for the parents to understand the needs of their child and what they should do – that is if they are willing to prioritise their child’s happiness over their own comfort and way of thinking – but what I am saying is challenging which either begets or is intertwined with rejection, or anything which does not affirm their child’s identity, is the most ill-advised approach and I would contend that this, in a protracted sense, is equitable to abuse. The ideal reaction, naturally, is an acceptance and affirmation of their child’s identity, one which allows the child to take charge – as they are a young adult – and in which the parent is supportive of the journey their child chooses to take socially and medically.

Lastly, as there is a trend with some formerly authoritative – a polite way of saying now discredited – figures pedalling a pedagogy of gender variability in autistic people, if an autistic child comes out as trans, please see above for the best approach. It is ridiculous to believe that autism renders trans identity a rejectable variable to some, which, if the autism is supported, will go away; this is preposterous and there has been no compelling evidence to suggest the validity of this. Moreover, if a parent is to hope that their child is not trans, rather they have some other diagnosable issue which will, if ‘treated’ and/or supported, reduce the child’s performed gender variance, then they have a perverse hope. They have a hope in which their desired outcome is developmental difficulty on their child as they find that more comfortable than their child’s gender variance, and that is a perverse hope. Moreover, parents that use things like autism to simultaneously show the ‘source’ (obsessive tendencies leading to a fixation with gender) and invalidate a trans identity in a child, they are unlikely to be supportive of any special needs the child may have for autism, and I question both why they would have children and their own moralistic ground in which they stand as they use a developmental issue for their benefit, placing themselves before their child.

Overall, a parent should accept and affirm their child’s trans identity as it prioritises the child’s health, happiness, and wellbeing, it is, medically speaking, the most sensible approach, and it mitigates against the risks and damages rejection and aggressively challenging parental behaviour can cause. If parents want the happiness of their child, they must understand that by rejecting, dismissing, or aggressively challenging their child’s trans identity then they are telling their child, ‘yes, I want you to be happy, but only in a way that is palatable to me’. Although the parents’ love may target the authentic individuality of their child, the parent is telling the child that they love them, but they can only love them in an ‘ideal’ image of them which they have assigned to to the child (this is usually a preconceived notion of what you want your child to be and in this case lacks contingency and fluidity), and if the child cannot be that ideal the parent is thus telling the child that they are not loved, they are telling them that in order to have the parents’ love and support the parents get to define the child’s essence and it mustn’t vary from this preconceived vision they have, and in this circumstance the child sways from this vision and the parents’ notion of love will result in mutual damage. Thus, don’t ask your child to compromise for your own comfort or idealised vision of your child, rather accept and affirm your child, watch them blossom into happiness.

To believe that autism and a trans identity cannot be held comorbidly (for want of a better word which isn’t rooted in the pathology of each) as the former negates the latter, is to believe that autism can be the only expression of development in the composition of the body and therefore it cannot be queered as it is already lesser and cannot understand itself. Holding this view not only restricts an individual's autonomy, but, in a more sinister way, invalidates a way of being of which the subject has no control. To say an autistic person cannot be trans because they have ‘obsessive tendencies’ or ‘special interests’, and reducing the dysphoria to a perceived fixation of gender wholly intertwined with an autistic legacy of which neither can be validated in the presence of the other is to undermine one’s own right of agency and our own introspective and individualistic subjective understandings of being and becoming. 

If you believe autism has such a profound influence on someone’s trans identity, your belief that the former simultaneously begets and invalidates the latter is steeped in the developmental and social ideas of how autistic people perceive and interact with the world around them, but that idea that this has something to do with a trans identity is fundamentally flawed as it neglects any notion that this is profoundly a bodily issue. I believe there is a certain logical thought that comes with autism, and yes that may make it extremely easy to see the illogic of a normative gender binary, but that does not beget how one feels about one’s own body, which, under a logical thought, remains separate from the social realm. By implying that an aspie’s view of the world is that in which ‘gender identity crises’ may manifest due to fixation and obsession is simplistic and unproductive as it is often used with the view of de-queering with little empathy for how the person feels. De-queering is an excercise of potent sovereign power which is about making the ignorant comfortable whilst neglecting the happiness of the queered individual by means of ‘correction’ and repression, a proces which, in its quest for alignment with perceived normalecy, does nothing more than hurt the individual through these sinister methods of repression and ‘correction’. 

A more progressive stance may bolster that old, sinister, and false adage that “oh.. it’s a girl brain, boy body kind of thing” (or vice-versa). However, that line of thinking is utterly demeaning, overly simplistic, and quite ridiculous as one simply has one’s own brain, with its own unique quirks, idiosyncrasies, and ways of thinking, and if that person is trans, then odds are they just have their own brain in a body which causes them dysphoria. The male/female brain belief is quite simply not true, and any research in this field is marred with retrospective controversy. This is physical is the sense that it is about the individual not the social which encompasses them. For example, a trans woman may hate every defining masculine characteristic she possesses, yet she may be partial to the social benefits being perceived as a man would afford her and the reproduced notions of gender which have granted her greater kinaesthetic awareness in herself as she was taught to ‘move like a boy’. 

This isn’t an issue of social pressures and social control per se, rather it is an issue of one’s own body and only they can have full knowledge of what it feels like to have that body, any shared or observed knowledge is only partial, and only the individual person can know what they need their body to be. Reducing a trans identity to some warped offshoot of autism attacks a way of thinking which isn't wrong and does nothing to help the bodily-emotional suffering of the individual, it just imposes a moralistic view of normative gender roles on to someone that cannot conform, which will give nothing but dissatisfaction and stress to all parties involved in those vile processes of so-called 'reparative' therapy.

Anyway... after a long rant which covered more areas than intended, my main point is:

If you think autism begets and therefore invalidates a trans identity then you are mistaken. They exist independently of each other, and although they may intersect in unique and relative ways, they are different ways of being, different categories which restrict whilst being productive for those not categorised among them. Overall, they are so radically variant it is baffling that there exists a label to encompass each respectively in the first place.

NB: if you know one autistic person, you only know one autistic person. If you know one trans person, you only know one trans person. My opinions are reflective of literature I have read and my own lived experience (a lot of this has been relavent to how I have been treated) and I appreciate they may differ from yours, and I would like to hear how they differ and how they are similar.

Butler speaks in extremes here and the commitment to extremes had me questioning, but the more I think about it the more I have come to realise what she means by using these extremes, that grief, in its nature, is an extreme. Grief - though sometimes small, sometimes subtle - is an extreme. Grief is an unbearable which we must bear, and different forms of grief all share the nature of extremes. It is the notion that, ‘what is unbearable is already more than one can bear, so how can there be any more of that which is already too much’ (Butler, 2014). It is in grief where we practice extremes of being and not-being, simultaneously being done and undone by that which is unbearable, that which continuously changes and (re)shapes us.

Throughout the reading, I couldn’t help but think of Pauline Boss’ notion of ambiguous loss and the destructive grief that can come with it, in a process which is set to appease the grief which ultimately ends in sacrifice of the self, and/or actively or passively obtaining physical grief for acceptance or destruction and thus passing on the burden, ultimatley ridding one’s hands of it. Whilst thinking of Boss’ ideas to fit with Butler’s here, I am thinking of the ambiguous loss a parent may face upon learning their child is queer. I think discussion between Butler’s destructive grief and Boss’ ambiguous loss in relation to the coming out process would be an interesting and potentially fruitful inquiry. I think I’ll write something about it.

Sandra Bartky (2002) in “Foucault on the Repressive Hypothesis” p 63 of Sympathy and Solidarity and Other Essays. You can read it here.

Hello friends,

I hope you are well. This is just a little note of introduction about why I am here and what’s to come (big questions out of context). I am a student with a wide variety of (extremely broad and oddly specific) interests, some of which are mere passing academic fancies and others are permanent interests. I just wanted a place to put my thoughts, opinions, and collect things I find interesting in the hope that someone else might find them of interest too. Some things will be rather dispassionate, others not so much, I won’t get bogged down in debate unless it will be productive, and I am always here as a friendly human should you want to talk about anything I post or just need someone in general. On that last point, I’ve been through my fair share of battles so I am here if anyone needs a friendly listener to remind them of how important they are.

Take care,