Gender Critical Bigots Have No Rights over the Transgender Autistic Narrative: That story belongs to us
By: Paint A. F.
Tags: Self Determination, Nonbinary, Trans Story, Autistic, Transgender Rights

CW - trauma, rape, assault, near death experience, psychosis, dx struggles, gender critical TERFs

How we tell this story is not going to be perfect and never going to be perfect, especially by their standards. They are intent on misunderstanding us, disbelieving us and disempowering us.

I am, in their eyes, “an extreme case” by which identity politics itself has served to traumatize me and I am addicted to this trauma like a drug.

My trauma is not something they are entitled to and honestly, I don’t care how identities are formed. I don’t. We become who we are throughout our lives, through our biology and through our spirits but that process of knowing and discovering is sacred. I’m not out here looking for converts. I’m out here looking for decency. I haven’t been given any. So I don’t give much back.

I knew my gender was not cis before my trauma happened. I moved in with a person hoping it would be a safe place to discover and get to know my gender and my disablity. It was not. I was in a situation of rape and violence because no safe place existed for me to explore my gender. I had a near death experience that if I had not survived, I would have been a transgender person murdered without even a name or a number or an acknowledgement to be included in the TDOR of 2014.

I knew I was trans. The guy who assaulted me knew I was trans. I don’t think he was trying to kill me, I think he was trying to control me. He had previously been experiencing unrequited love towards me. Upon realizing my Autistic nature as part of this broader picture I remember the first time we had sex I wanted to leave, I thought his lips looked gross because they were so chapped from vaping and I definitely didn’t know what to do. I realized later, that my shut-down had an explanation, it was not my fault.

The doctor sitting across from me this summer who did survey after survey confirming my Autistic nature still circled around attempts to deny it, questioning if I was even bipolar at this point, if I was even anything. I was just too well socialized. I was “functionally not" autistic, she reasoned, because I have learned to cope so well. This is of course, after a year of being unable to work, developing new routines and anxieties all the time. This despite the survey’s saying I “should be" non-verbal, after this, I realized the times in my life when I became non-verbal, like the time I was raped by the guy who eventually cause a near death experience. I bring this information back to my psychiatrist and my therapist and they can see and hold space for the complexity that unfolds from my trauma and the liberation of why even in my early 20s I couldn’t break social rules even when they would save my life.

My psychosis liberated me from gender. I was barely holding the mask I now remember building for others since I was 4 years old, the mask I made to fit into a world that do not match me. I do love the thrill of freedom, of queer love. You don’t know what freedom is until you experience it. You can’t fight for something so intangible unless it is within your imagination. What is freedom to me but to push the bounds of who I am and be filled with so much.

I do not deny these intricacies and difficulties and fluctuations in my abilities. I do not deny this madness. Though perhaps chaotic to the outsider, or orderly, depending on which direction you look at me from, it is all systemic, thought-out, organized, optimistic, realistic, soul-crushingly aware.

When it comes to outsiders perceptions of my identity there is being perceived enough or in such a way to be able to survive,

And then there is seeing me.

Gender Criticals do neither, they attempt to write over a life time of experiences, personal authority and self expertise based on strangers they know nothing about.

They talk about us as if we are helpless brainwashed girls often (as is the case when they attempt to label Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, a false concept I will not engage) inciting the use of both misgendering and mysogyny to make their falsely feminist point.

I can not speak to all points, but I will say, it is perfectly fine to be Autistic, Trans & Mad.