Morgana is an autistic trans woman.
Autistic Lack of Self vs. Gender Identity
TW for childhood trauma, denial of agency, discussions of transphobia and so on.
As a lived experience trainer with The Productive Pessimist, I read 35 pages of The Cass Review to get an actual feeling for what was being said and the tone being taken. From that point onwards the report seemed to move more into the models it would recommend NHS England initiate for clinic sites and a discussion of statistics, neither of which were particularly relevant to my role. Writing therefore from my position of lived experience, let us discuss what I feel this report missed.
First and foremost, I must confess that I feel that the report focused on trying to treat everything else other than the gender distress of the children and young people in question. I am aware this may seem a little snide, so I would like to note the report's concern both at how many children and young people turned up to clinics having already engaged in some form of social transition (name change, clothing change etc), and how worried the report seemed about the 'dangers' of puberty blockers. This being despite their use in a variety of other contexts outside trans healthcare, with no such concern. Both of these factors led me to feel that the report was attempting to frame this discussion more as a discussion of 'Well, maybe these autistic children just 'think' they're transgender'. That is why I want to write this piece from lived experience. I may not know specifically what these children and young people think, but I know what my lived experience has been and hopefully it will be relevant.
What is the distinction between the two things mentioned in the title then? How is an autistic lack of sense of self not the same thing as gender identity? (As the report does try to imply the two are the same, for autistic minors at least, given the context I mentioned above, being a tone that maybe these children and young people are not trans but actually just confused or mentally ill).
Put very simply, an autistic lack of self most commonly relates to how one experiences wants, desires, needs and feelings, while gender identity is very specifically the feelings and self knowledge one has around how they want to interact as and be interacted with by the wider world in a gendered sense. We all know what gender entails, we just like to forget that we do when it comes to trans people.
Unfortunately my childhood experiences, like many autistic people of my generation and unfortunately even of current generations, were very much defined by trauma. A lot of this was from parental abuse in a variety of ways. Other parts of it were wider interpersonal trauma from interactions with peers and coming to understand myself as someone people looked down on for being neurodivergent.
I feel I should ground this in something a bit more practical. I am aware that there may be much sneering about 'lol 'trauma'' and 'did life hurt your feelings?', so it is important to clarify. In medicine, physical trauma is understood to be related to the body in some way, while various other kinds of trauma are a variety of stressors (stressors causing trauma) which result in psychological and emotional trauma and so on.
Physical trauma is fairly straightforward, the body is in some way damaged. For the impact of non physical, especially enduring trauma, imagine literally all human brains are like rats in mazes. The rat experiences something unpleasant and decides to try and avoid a repeat experience. The maze gives the rat an opportunity to escape from the nasty thing... or it seems to, only to place it in the path of another nasty thing, and so forth. Eventually, the rat will be so desensitised to being hurt, it either runs into danger or gives up.
On a subconscious level (which informs our conscious mind) this is much the experience of a human brain and prolonged trauma. Except with the intricacies of human manipulation and trickery. Parents who want you to be 'more normal', school peers who seem to want to befriend you only for it turn out to be a joke at your expense. I don't say it to be dramatic, I say it to make you think. Consider how many neurodivergent people currently identify with non human tropes in some way (robots, fae of the Tolkien variety and so forth). Now consider how you as a person think about animals, and how you think about neurodivergent people. If you think animals are funny and you make them perform for you and you chortle about how ridiculous neurodivergent people are... you come to understand some of the pain you have caused us and why, as you consider yourself human, we don't want to be anything like you.
Needless to say, it should become clear that this kind of extensive trauma can lead to a dulling down or failure to develop of ones' interests, hobbies and so on. Especially if someone has been bullied for these during formative years. Couple this with the fact that a significant number of autistic people struggle with actually naming and feeling our emotional states and you have all the parts needed to create the vacuum of an absent self.
To a casual observer, this may look like 'having no gender', but the truth is that autistic people can have exactly the same gender experiences as neurotypicals. It just may take us some time to work out what that means for us. With that said, what does gender identity feel like?
First and foremost, I struggle to call what I have an 'identity' because I feel like an identity is something that can be played around with. If you enjoy drama or acting you may come to identify with your character, you maybe have similar traits. Experiencing your gender isn't that. It's more fundamental.
Though I didn't know it at the time, in hindsight, what differentiated my emerging gender as a child from my lack of self was in fact what I felt vs what I didn't. Being autistic and lacking a self meant I was highly agreeable to what others demanded or expected of me. By contrast, my gender emerging as that of a fairly regular gender conforming girl (even though I couldn't be a girl at that time) was more about what made my heart happy, so to speak. There was a sense of peace and comfort in the characters in media I identified with. That was missing in the rest of my life, where interacting with other people I was always doing socialising 'wrong' somehow. In retrospect, my emerging sense of gender provided a kind of certainty. Albeit, one I had internalised I had to keep hidden.
In short, I feel that the reason people may find being autistic and being trans so difficult to differentiate from the outside (especially if we have had abusive family), is because we are stacked with so much trauma. Even when our family is supportive, the outside world is really not to either trans children or autistic children. Especially not both. By the time I came to recognise in my late teens and early twenties that I was in fact trans, I had picked up a significant amount of subconscious trauma about that too. If I already had guilt and shame about socialising wrong, then this was compounded into 'existing' wrong, by dint of being trans also. Autism meant a feeling, that I was failing at understanding and being people. Being transfeminine specifically, was a terror that if anyone found out the Forbidden Thing (that I was actually a girl), there would be severe consequences. Of course, this latter feeling especially is one I can gain in hindsight. The truth is, pre transition I was so heavily dissociated from experiencing myself as a person that all I felt was a grey apathy that was just normal to me.
Yet at the same time, this also leads into the ways in which autism and being transgender can overlap. In both cases, people knew before I did. Nasty or abusive people knew I was autistic and treated me poorly. Those same people took advantage of my being a girl who didn't know it yet and happily used me for labour, but always on their terms. Always with the escape hatch that I was actually a boy or (again denying agency), not autistic but too sensitive and reading too much into things.
Are there ways in which autism and being transgender overlap? Yes. In the main, because one requires a mask where you pretend that know you how to be neurotypical, more or less. While the other requires that you wear a shell around you labelled 'boy' and you pull the levers and you make the smile happen and you desperately try to pretend that this puppet isn't driven by a girl who is frantically flipping through the call centre book marked 'Boy Things', hoping that some piece of script will sound right.
Both will also lead to accusations that you're too functional to be autistic or too pretty/ugly to be a 'real' woman.
Morgana is available for coaching on Gender and Neurodiversity Inclusion, as well as for peer coaching with individuals who are newly experiencing a neurodivergent or transgender experience, or who are struggling with aspects of that identity. She is able to take on-site coaching sessions in Lowestoft, Beccles, Great Yarmouth, and central Norwich, as well as remote sessions across the UK. To book Morgana, please email theproductivepessimist@yahoo.com,
or telephone: 0748 2017 927
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