Happy Pride month, Cripple Magazine readers! While many of us will not be attending Pride events this year, I hope that each of you is able to celebrate and uplift the LGBTQ+ community in your own way while staying safe.

This Pride month, children’s author JK Rowling was called out for liking, retweeting, and making transphobic tweets. Since this fits into a larger pattern of Rowling using her platform to promote trans exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) talking points and voices, people rightfully asked her for an explanation and for her to disavow her statements. Instead, she wrote a lengthy essay entitled “TERF wars” explaining her beliefs. While this essay was incredibly misleading, transmisogynistic, , and hurtful to the trans community as well as harry potter fans who were shocked by her bigotry, that is not what I’m here to talk about. As someone who was assigned female at birth, I am unqualified to talk about transmisogyny. If you’re curious, seek out the voices of trans women (esp BIPOC trans women) and uplift their narratives. However, Rowling’s essay was also very ableist, and as the token autistic queer in my friend group, I feel qualified and obligated to discuss how her essay is damaging to autistic gender non-conforming people. Additionally, I’m going to discuss how her ableist inclusion ties into the larger patterns of autistic people being talked over, gaslit, and denied our right to self-determine.

Here is the passage in question:

“The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. (…)The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.” (Emphasis mine)

That’s weird.  She’s saying here – or at least implying that girls in the UK are being pressured into pursuing medical transition by societal forces (the typical TERF talking point is that afab people transition to escape misogyny and lesbophobia). But why does she highlight the inclusion of autistic girls in her point? It’s notable, but not expounded upon in the essay. Instead, she lets the readers of the article discern her meaning.

To me, and to many other autistic readers, the meaning is clear. We have to protect autistic girls (when Rowling uses girls she means “people assigned female at birth”) from being manipulated and tricked into transition by… someone. Doctors? Authority figures? The offending party is unclear.

She mentions autistic girls, instead of just focusing on girls in general, to garner sympathy, and to invoke an image of a naïve, disabled, vulnerable autistic girl being duped to transition for the trans agenda. After all, how could we be expected to know any better? We’re autistic.

Yikes.

First, I want to talk about the facts of the statement itself. A lot of the things Rowling states in the essay are very misleading or outright lies, but her statement about the overrepresentation of autistic afabs seeking transition are actually rooted in truth. Many sources note the overrepresentation of autistic traits in trans populations as well as the overrepresentation of transgender and nonbinary people in autistic populations. While the nature of the connection is unclear- Does autism lead to being trans/nb/gnc or are they just correlated?- it is undeniable. And it makes a certain sense. Autism, while having many varying symptoms, is characterized strongly by a lack of awareness or knowing disregard for social roles. Gender, as shown by many sociologists, biologists, and scholars, is at least in part characterized by social interaction.

For example, a theory in sociology called Micro-interactionalist theory proposes that an important part of gender in society is not how it is ‘had’, but rather how it’s done. For example: a woman goes out in public. In order to ‘signal’ to others that she is a woman, she (often unconsciously) may speak with a feminine-coded inflection, may give off feminine body language, and the like. Therefore, other people will perceive her as a woman. So, gender is not had but performed. However, gender is also an internal phenomenon, since trans people do exist in society and some people have genders that are difficult to perform, like nonbinary people. And gender is complicated by what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in your society, which changes depending where you are in the world. Some cultures, such as certain Indigenous American tribes, don’t even have a gender binary at all- they can have three or more genders. And we know that gender, sex, and presentation are all connected in our society. I say all this not to confuse or upset, but to highlight how entangled the subject is.

This relationship between autism and gender-nonconformity has not only been documented by autism researchers, but by autistic people ourselves. Lydia X. Z. Brown, a nonbinary autistic activist, wrote an article for the National LGBTQ Task Force discussing their relationship between their gender and their autism by coining the term “gendervague”:

“Someone who is gendervague cannot separate their gender identity from their neurodivergence – being autistic doesn’t cause my gender identity, but it is inextricably related to how I understand and experience gender. ”

Within the autistic trans community, we are able to recognize the connection between our neurodivergent status and our gender-nonconforming presentation and internal sense of self.

This stands in opposition to the gross insinuation that JK Rowling makes. She does not acknowledge that the autism community has a biological and social reasons for an unconventional relationship to gender. In fact, she does not cite any autistic voices at all in her essay, even though she references conversations with members of other communities in the same work. Instead, she chooses to insinuate that we are being manipulated, tricked, or coerced into transitioning. On the surface, you might wonder why that’s not ok for her to do. What if she’s just looking out for a vulnerable population, and using her voice to speak up for us? Hell, maybe she thinks that she is sticking up for us with her essay. But regardless of her intentions her choice to include us in her essay- especially as she does- is incredibly problematic.

As I alluded to above, her decision to not include the voices of autistic afabs she acts like she’s protecting is incredibly problematic. If she had talked to any autistic trans/nb person, like Lydia X.Z. -or hell, even me- she would have gotten the chance to understand or at least to be exposed to our unique and complicated relationship to gender. Rowling claims to have done the readings and the research but she certainly didn’t do the research of finding autistic trans voices and actually reading them.  She does not have the right to talk over us when we have prominent voices speaking up for ourselves.

Additionally, by talking over us, and implying we need protection from ne’er-do-wells who would trick us into transitioning (for some reason… she never gets to the reason) she is engaging in age-old rhetoric weaponized by autism parents, institutions, schools, the state, and popular consciousness. Autistic people are children who need to be looked after at all times, not adults and adolescences who get to make choices about our own lives. This may be surprising to a lot of allistic people, but autistic people have inner lives and our own thoughts, even if some of us have intellectual disabilities or needs beyond our allistic peers. While some of us may be a little bit more naïve that your average person, arguing that we are often tricked into transition suggests that because we are autistic, any choice we make should be questioned or ignored because we are autistic and therefore not able to make our own choices without allistic help, when this is demonstrably not true. I was autistic for the 19 years of my life before diagnosis and I was allowed to choose my place of work, my college, my majors, my career, my sexuality and my gender in that time. Why should that change now that I have a diagnosis? If diagnosis doesn’t change my ability to choose, why should it affect anybody else’s?

In fact, Rowling is engaging in a form of gaslighting that autistic people and disabled people at large are familiar with. Autistic people, especially autistic girls, femmes, and afabs, are often told that our lived experiences are not really happening, or that we are lying for attention or for special treatment. “You can’t be autistic, you’re a girl,” “you can’t be autistic, you’re so well behaved,” “you’re making eye contact,” “you seem normal,” “Just because you’re autistic doesn’t mean you can’t do this”, “You’re exaggerating your symptoms.” This gaslighting often goes so far as to undermine us when we try to share our negative sexual experiences with men, arguing that maybe were flirting or ‘asking for it’ and didn’t realize it. A so-called feminist like Rowling should want to avoid rhetoric that leads to the proven exploitation of autistic girls instead of peacocking as an autistic ally around a non-problem like transition, but alas. Not only that, but she contributes to rhetoric that exposes us to abuse by enlisting ableist families and conservative doctors to control our lives by denying us transition. I can see it now, “Honey, how can you be sure you want to transition? You’re autistic, I’m not going to let you make this mistake.” She seems to be implying that if these forces were employed, autistic afabs would not make the ‘mistake’ of transitioning. In reality, that means he wants to use ableist people to keep autistic trans youth from living our best lives as we see fit.

On many levels, JK Rowling’s barely-there allusion to the autistic community is harmful to both autism rights at large and the happiness of autistic trans and gender non-conforming people. Thankfully, a lot of autistic activists and autistic trans activists are standing up to this harmful rhetoric by raising their voices and speaking out on behalf of their community. Yet I worry it will not be enough. Rowling is a public figure with close ties to the British government as well as the popular consciousness at large. In fact, her influence is so great that American lawmaker Senator James Lankford from Oklahoma cited JK Rowling’s statement when blocking the Equality Act. This bill was a civil rights act, designed to “amend civil rights bills pertaining to employment, housing, public accommodations, jury service, education, federal programs and credit by adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to their lists of protected classes.” Because of Rowling’s influence, a homophobic, transphobic lawmaker found a good excuse to block this civil rights bill from senate consideration.

While her negative influence has yet to result in legal ramifications for the autistic community, especially those seeking transition, I can only assume the discourse has already been poisoned by her statements. Meanwhile, the autistic community is often spoken over and ignored in favor of listening to (often conservative, ableist and transphobic) “autism parents”. Or, we just get forgotten entirely. This is especially true in the LGBTQ+ community, where disabled people in general and autistic people specifically are frequently dismissed, unaccommodated, or not considered at all. This pride month, the autistic community needs to stand up for ourselves and our trans siblings as we strike back against harmful rhetoric like what Rowling is spewing.