Born This Way

Some book I read a long time ago --- it may have been Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate --- maintained that, in the US, conventional wisdom has swung back and forth on whether differences between people that show up in adulthood have been present since birth, or whether they are acquired during childhood and adolescence.

It's usually intelligence that gets discussed in this way, almost always in the context of racist, sexist, or otherwise inequality-justifying theories about some groups being naturally smarter than others, but there's been a similar periodicity in thinking about other things, like personality traits. (Gender differences in cognitive style, interests, and personality are some of the things that are now widely believed to be present at birth; see Cordelia Fine's book Delusions of Gender for a lot more about these ideas' ubiquity and the still-ambiguous nature of the evidence they're supposed to be grounded in).

Right now, I want to talk about how this idea has gotten established in two different subcultures to which I belong: the autism community* and the gay community.

Autism and homosexuality have somewhat similar recent histories in US culture: both either are, or have been, considered mental disorders, both were thought in the 1950s and early '60s to be caused by some warping of the normal bond between mother and child (either, as with autism, too much distance between them, or with male homosexuality, not enough), and papers from the 1960s, '70s and '80s document various attempts to "treat," with aversion therapies that would now be considered abusive, children showing signs of either one. (One researcher even worked on both projects: O. Ivar Lovaas, who has done famous, if controversial, work adapting Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) for use with autistic children, has also co-written several articles about "feminine boys," and using ABA to normalize their behavior).

Homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but there are still people who consider it (or anything deviating from straight, married monogamy, really) a pathological condition, and therapists who specialize in trying to turn gay people straight.

In contrast to that idea --- that gay people can change, and therefore should change --- the gay-rights movement has embraced the idea that sexual orientation is inborn. (And most mental-health professionals, including groups like the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Counseling Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the American Medical Association, pretty much agree with them that no sexual orientation is inherently pathological, and that you can't change a person's sexual orientation through therapy).

The picture is somewhat different for autistic people. Not only is autism still considered a disease, and a pretty serious one, by almost everybody, but the idea of innateness, when it comes to autism, doesn't have the same implied corollary of "... and therefore you should accept us the way we are" that it has in reference to sexuality.

No, the shift from "psychogenic" to "biogenic" theories of autism happened for two reasons: first, and probably most important, the evidence (what little there was in the early '60s) didn't fit well with the psychogenic model**, and fit better with the biogenic one; another factor was activism by parents, who were fed up with being blamed for their children's condition, and who called for more research into potential biological causes.

Here, Boston University law professor Daniela Caruso, who has written an article on the history and legal impact of autism advocacy in the US, describes the relationship between the nascent field of biomedical research into autism and the beginnings of the US's major autism-advocacy groups:

It was only in 1964 that Bernard Rimland put forth an alternative explanation of the syndrome, based not on psychodynamics but rather on neurobiology. In 1965, Rimland founded the American Society for Autism (ASA) which is, to this day, a major center of advocacy.

Following Rimland's work, activism in the name of autism began to flourish thanks to both grassroots efforts and power houses. Some groups - most visibly Cure Autism Now (CAN) and the National Alliance for Autism Research (NAAR) - coalesced around genetic research and investigation of toxic substances potentially related to the surge of autism. It is no coincidence that such movements emerged in a context of burgeoning environmental activism. Many other capillary initiatives focused instead on the reality of living with autism by developing information centers for parents of newly diagnosed children, and starting awareness campaigns aimed at educating the public about this poorly-understood phenomenon.

(See also: this post, which discusses another article on the history of autism advocacy in the US. I also found another recent article about the role of parent activism throughout the history of autism, but I can't get at the full text of it).

I also found this snippet in Rimland's book itself (that part of it I could see on the Internet, anyway; I don't own the book), discussing why he thought so many researchers were reluctant to consider the possibility that autism had a biological basis:

In discussing the obvious prejudice against the hereditary viewpoint, Nolan Lewis (1954) points out, "It would seem that most of the prejudice against genetic inheritance stems from a feeling in the realm of wish fulfillment, based on the idea that acceptance of genetic factors would create an attitude of therapeutic hopelessness." Williams (1956) cites this point among others in his attempt to penetrate the prejudice against heredity. He notes that hopelessness is by no means justified by the evidence, and cites the ready correction of diabetes, phenylketonuria and hypothyroidism as examples.

So, that's kind of interesting --- that, at the outset, there was reluctance to adopt a conception of autism as innate and biologically based because of worries that that might mean it was impossible to eradicate through treatment --- but the answer to that wasn't, "so let's not try to make them non-autistic, let's just try to integrate them into society to the best of our, and their, ability", it was "don't be silly, of course we can make them non-autistic!"

I'd also want to point out that the two competing narratives of autism came from the same source: medical professionals, whether psychoanalysts or biomedical researchers. This is in contrast to the two competing narratives of homosexuality, one of which came from medical professionals and the other of which came straight (heh) from the people they were trying to describe. It wasn't until much later that autistic people's own viewpoints were even known to exist, much less taken into account by medical professionals and policymakers.

So, while as far as I know most autistic people do think they were born autistic, that idea doesn't have the same liberatory subtext for autism that it has for sexual orientation. (Indeed, the switch over to a mainstream view of autism as innate and biologically based had already happened when research into "extinguishing" autistic behaviors was at its peak.) The biggest thing it did was to free parents from guilt at having caused the autism, which is important and was definitely needed, but it left the position of the autistic people themselves unchanged.

*I'm using that phrase --- instead of "the autistic community" --- because I am mostly talking about parents. I've made this distinction before: the autism community, which includes parents/caregivers, healthcare workers, autism researchers, and educators; and the autistic community, which is the autistic people themselves. Sometimes the latter group is included in the former, but mostly it is not, and sometimes the two groups are at odds with each other.

**See Chapter 3 of Rimland's 1964 book, Infantile Autism, for a discussion of what those findings were and how they conflicted with the psychogenic model of autism.

Doubly Deviant: On Being Queer and Autistic

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This is a very long, rambly autobiographical post about being bisexual and being autistic: it compares my experiences coming to terms with both of these facts (always knowing about the autism, vs. having to figure out the sexual orientation; and also, doubting the possibility that I could *have* a sexual orientation because I thought autistic people didn't date or have sex, or even want to do either of those things) with those of Amanda Forest Vivian, who is a lesbian, and autistic, and has written about those things at some length at her own blog. I also discuss the ways being autistic has complicated being gay for me --- besides my initial difficulty realizing that what I felt about girls was, in fact, sexual desire, there was also a profound isolation from the larger Gay Community, which I never felt like I could (or would want to) join.
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Amanda Forest Vivian has a post from a while ago about this --- being gay (Amanda uses "same-sex attracted", to encompass lesbian, gay, bi-*, poly- and pansexual folk, and also people who don't really fit into any category but "queer"), but also being different in another way (like having a developmental disability) that might make it harder to navigate an LGBTQ** an LGB social scene.

Here's her description of coming out in high school ---

When I was in high school, someone who wasn't my friend said this to my (secret, closeted) friend, who then told me: "Everyone could see that something was different about Amanda, and then when they found out she was gay, they had an answer."

When I was in high school, the word dyke or lesbian was a way to easily quantify all the things about me that didn't seem right. When I was in high school I felt very alone.

When I was in ninth and tenth grade, I actually brought all this on myself by not denying that I was gay or bisexual, and presenting in a masculine way. I felt this was an important thing to do because other kids needed to see that queer people were just regular people. The problem with this idea is, in hindsight, obvious: I am not a regular person. Being openly queer in a heteronormative environment is a noble thing to do, but maybe not if you have anxiety about pretty much everything and have trouble talking to people.

A lot of my coming-out process happened when I was on a lot of medication and overwhelmed by the relationships I was in. By the time I was in eleventh grade, I was more able to clearly see what was going on, and I knew that I'd made a mistake by not being closeted. My school was very small, and some people were genuinely afraid to be friends with me in case someone said they were having sex with me, and I wasn't a person who could charm my way out of this stigma. But my school wasn't violently homophobic and I feel like a more normal person could have made a difference. It would have to be a person who fit in every way, except one.

--- which reminded me a lot of these much older posts by elmindreda and one of the other Amandas whose writing I love, Amanda Baggs, which postulate something called the "difference slot."

elmindreda:

[M]any of [the people I spend my time with nowadays], even though they seem superficially informed about basic disability issues, seem to believe in the difference slot.

The basic idea is that each and every person has their difference, and it should be respected. Note the singular form, however. When they learn of my autism, which is usually the first major difference to come up in conversation, they seem to think "oh, so that's her difference". They then proceed to fill in my difference slot in their mental table, and everything is as it should be.

Or so they think.

Then, a little while later, I happen to mention some other thing that makes me different from most other people, and their belief system collides head-on with reality. Usually, it's another one of my disabilities that triggers it. This is when they almost invariably go "..." for a while, only to finish with "you have that too?" In other words, "your difference slot is already filled, and you can't have another one."

Amanda (Baggs):

What I'm writing about is similar [to elmindreda's idea of the "difference slot"], but perhaps from a different angle. A phenomenon I've seen over and over again runs something more like, "Please violate only one stereotype at a time."

This can apply even if you have only one "difference" (be that autism, physical disability, whatever).

If you have several differences, of course, the problem becomes exponentially harder to deal with.

What Amanda Forest Vivian is describing --- being in a very normative environment (hetero- and otherwise) and trying to figure out, and come to terms with, how you deviate from those deeply-entrenched norms (which you do in multiple ways that you either cannot yet identify or are struggling to identify) --- sounds a lot like what elmindreda describes: the first difference you name to other people defines you, and explains Everything That's Weird About You, and people resist learning that there's more to the story than that One Thing That Explains Everything.

When you're very young, that first difference you name might not actually be the difference that's most relevant to your day-to-day life, either, but may simply be the first difference you know how to name. This is especially relevant to people whose differences are either a) internal or invisible, something you have to find out about yourself rather than something that's always been generally known about you or b) disabilities that affect your ability to put things into words, or even recognize all the ways in which you differ from most people. (Cultural differences might also factor into (b) --- if you come from a culture that does not discriminate between X sorts of people and Y sorts of people, and you immigrate into a culture that does, you may find that you don't even know whether you're X or Y, and that makes it difficult for you to navigate a social setting in which lots of important stuff hinges on whether you're X or Y.)

I had almost the opposite experience from Amanda's --- my first difference was my autism, which has been generally known about, and accommodated, and I've been able, to varying degrees, to talk about, for as far back as I can remember. As long as I remember being able to think in terms of "me" and "you" and "them" (which for me happened rather later than for most people, I suspect), I knew that I had a thing called autism which meant I was different from most people. As I grew older, I came to understand how I was different, and to be able to tell other people about it, but I always knew that I was different.

I had a very elastic understanding of this difference of mine, probably because I learned I was autistic before I could have any real idea what "autistic" meant, so I pretty much equated it with "whatever I am," adding on "whatever [other autistic person I meet] is, too".

(I had always had plenty of contact with other autistic children, both older and younger, and I also always had books written by autistic people about their lives on hand, so I never really fell into the "autism is *ONLY* what I experience" trap that some autistic people fall into --- it seems to be the flip side of the "impostor syndrome" that many later-diagnosed autistics have).

So, for me, being queer was the late-manifesting difference that made it harder to quickly and easily account for everything odd about me, and accordingly I had tons of self-doubt when I first started wondering if maybe I was gay.

My relative lack of interest in boys (had one crush in middle school, on a long-haired androgynous-looking boy) as I was going through puberty didn't tell me anything --- after all, I was autistic! By this time, I had come to understand a bit of what "autistic" meant, and one of those things --- communicated mostly by my mom's not thinking it a priority to educate me about sex and relationships --- was that I might never have sexual feelings, or act on them if I did. This was a boon in some ways: I was never assumed to be straight, exactly, and it was never taken for granted that I would marry by age twenty- or thirty-whatever and have x number of children. I was allowed to develop sexually at my own pace, and in my own direction, rather than feeling like I had to fit a mold. But, at the same time, since I wasn't assumed to be a sexual being, I felt like I couldn't really be sure that the things I was feeling were sexual feelings. So maybe I *did* expect to fit a mold, but that mold was asexuality rather than monogamous, married heterosexuality.

Accordingly, I waited to come out until I had clear, unmistakable evidence that I was gay: a really intense, serious crush on a female friend of mine who was bisexual and "out" about it.

Once I was absolutely certain I felt "that way," however, I thought nothing of telling people so if it came up in conversation. (I never lied, or tried to hide it from anybody, but then neither did I feel like I had to go around telling everyone I knew that I was now a lesbian. Either they'd find out sooner or later, or they didn't need to know).

It did surprise me, though, when in my last year of college I ran into a girl who'd been in my high-school graduating class --- whom I hadn't really known all that well; we went to a huge high school and knew each other by sight and by name, but never talked much and weren't friends --- and she told me that she, and a whole group of other people I didn't know or didn't know very well, apparently thought I was probably a lesbian. This surprised me because, as I mentioned, I was only really "out" to my friends --- the people I talked to enough that it eventually came up --- and I had figured I was more or less invisible to the rest of the school. So apparently I differed from whatever my high-school culture considered a "normal girl" enough, and in enough of the right ways, that people would think I must be a lesbian without ever having heard me say it. Either that, or they noticed me sticking around the girl I loved like I was actually glued to her side, and figured I must be on rather more than just "friendly" terms with her*** ...

I was also not the only lesbian, gay or bisexual person at my high school, either, so I had none of the anxiety that Amanda describes about being the Queer Model Citizen who shows everybody that queer people are people just like everybody else. If people needed that lesson, there were lots of people at my school who were better qualified (i.e., more charismatic, more involved, more flamboyantly out) than I was and more eager to do it besides.

Here, from later in the post, is the part of Amanda's story that most closely matched my own:

Even though my school is ssa-positive, most of the people at my school are straight just like most of the people in the world. I have enough friends that I never feel lonely, but I don't belong to a group of friends (partly because I don't like groups), and I know very few ssa people because I don't have stereotypical queer interests.

A few years ago I posted on a lesbian advice forum saying I was depressed and stressed because I wanted to believe I would someday get married and have kids, but that I had never been in a relationship and didn't think I ever would be. People responded telling me that if I was on a date with a girl, I shouldn't tell her I wanted to have kids, because she would think I was creepy. One person went to my livejournal, saw where I went to school, and told me that my school wasn't anyplace to complain about and that I should "stop whining." She provided a list of various social groups and activities that would help me to meet "dykes," including eating in a co-op (which would mean being organized enough to eat at the same time every day, taking up a lot of executive function cooking and cleaning, and constantly interacting with a large group of people I didn't know).

While there are a few differences --- I don't want kids, and I never got depressingly counterproductive advice because I never thought to ask for advice in the first place --- this sort of inability to find other queer women even on a campus with a burgeoning, vibrant queer culture (well, for Kansas anyway --- I went to KU, which, while it might look straitlaced and boring to someone from California, does have a fair amount of gay-themed student activities) is exactly what I experienced at college, too.

I wasn't closeted, and I wasn't isolated in general --- I just needed to socialize on my own terms, one on one with people I met in classes or in the dorms (or, sometimes, at the gym, which was my other main on-campus haunt), which might eventually lead to me joining a group of friends, rather than trying to meet people at huge gatherings of strangers (like a party or student club; I've never been much of a "joiner" because of my tendency to fade into the background and not enjoy myself at group events), so this ruled out my meeting other lesbian and bisexual women through formal channels, like the campus Queers & Allies club or gay-oriented parties and bars. Unfortunately, the informal, one-on-one processes I used to make friends --- and which worked really well in that regard --- never linked me up with any queer women. So I went through college knowing that lesbian and bisexual women were around, but I just wasn't meeting them.

Rather than belong to a lesbian or queer community, I just existed as a lesbian. (I didn't know I was bisexual until later in college). What I had growing up as an autistic person --- personal acquaintance with a number of other autistic children, access to autistic adults' life stories --- I did not have when I was coming out as a lesbian. I knew I liked women, but never met anyone who might reciprocate those feelings.

What compounded my isolation was my total lack of anything resembling gaydar. I really do have the inability to "read" faces, body language, tones of voice etc. that has become a stereotypical characteristic of autism, so I need to be literally told 1) that a given person is gay or bisexual or 2) that a person is attracted to me. I neither flirt nor perceive flirting in another person, which might well have told an unknown number of interested lesbians that I wouldn't welcome their attentions.

So when Amanda says this ---

I used to have a political problem with the way other ssa people behaved. Whenever I thought about it I got so upset I didn't know what to do. The way I saw it, there were two kinds of ssa people:

1. "gay" people (such as people involved in the HRC) who were very normal and wanted to have normal jobs and normal families. They didn't think much about trans people, non-homosexual sexual minorities, or anyone who wasn't normal.

2. "queer" people (such as a lot of people at my school) who were very into not being normal, playing rugby, performance art, co-ops, and so on. Many of them identified as trans but didn't seem to realize that some trans people actually take hormones and get surgery and are poor, and are not students at a liberal arts college who change their pronouns every week.
...
I felt weird because I wanted to get married but I wasn't normal and I felt like "gay" people wanted to help normal people get married and "queer" people were anti-marriage so neither one included me.

--- I nod because the feeling of not belonging, of not finding what one is looking for in a group, is familiar to me, even if the actual dynamics of gay-identified versus queer-identified groups fall far outside my own experience, which is of near-total**** isolation from other women attracted to women, whatever their chosen label or subculture*****.

*According to Genderbitch, it's actually possible to be bisexual (attracted to people belonging to either of two sexes) without one of the categories you're attracted to being the same as your own. When you consider a broader spectrum than just cis men and cis women --- one that includes trans men, trans women, non-binary trans people, intersex people and people in whatever other sex-and-gender categories there might be --- a bisexual person might be attracted to people in any two of these categories. So not every bisexual person necessarily fits under Amanda's "same-sex-attracted" umbrella, but I do (having so far only been attracted to cis women and cis men) and this post is about Amanda's (who is a cis lesbian) experience and mine.

**Edited to reflect a lesbian trans woman and an aspie's criticism in comments that, since I am talking about cis lesbian/bisexual stuff, I shouldn't use "LGBTQ" because it implies an inclusion of trans people that isn't in the post.

***I wasn't, as a matter of fact. I was in love with her, and told her so repeatedly, but she didn't love me. At least, not in a romantic way. We did come to be pretty good friends, though, even after high school!

****I did meet one other lesbian at college, whom I found nice, and attractive, and would certainly have befriended and quite likely have dated if we had ever met again. We just ran into each other one day, outside the dining hall, started talking, and kept talking for a long time eating lunch together. Then we went our separate ways and never bumped into each other again. She played rugby, and tried to interest me in joining, but I was unsure about how much extra time I could spare for practices --- I always took really heavy courseloads, tried to keep my GPA pretty high, and spent one to two hours in the gym every day. I figured if I did much more, I'd feel like I was stretched too thin. So, while I had good reasons for not wanting to add another commitment, I still feel sad about missing that particular opportunity. :(

*****Had I managed to fall in with the Queer Culture Amanda describes, I would probably have found it a more comfortable fit than she did, since the kind of alternative family structures she says they liked to try to create are just the sort of thing I'm looking for: I need kind of a lot of support, day to day, and don't think any one person could be everything I need and also have a life of hir own. So a poly family actually looks really good to me, and indeed my last relationship did somewhat resemble this.

More Hilarious Zeitgeistiness

Yes, I did say I had two wacky 1930s book ads to show you. You're not going crazy. It's just that I ended up spending a lot more verbiage than I had planned for (as usual) on the first one, so I thought I would break it up into two posts.

Here's other one, from the same magazine:

This time, the book being hawked is titled "STRANGE LOVES: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities." For sophisticated adult readers only, which is a slightly stricter criterion than "Sex Harmony and Eugenics" came with --- that one, they only would not ship to children. No sophistication required, as long as you were of legal age.

I am sorry I wasted the word "purple" on the copy describing "Sex Harmony and Eugenics," when it's now clear to me that that writing couldn't hold a candle to what's in this ad.

(I'd adjust my appraisal, and say that the copy in the earlier ad was merely "lavender," if that word with its more recent historical connotations were not so perfect for this ad).

Examples:

For hundreds of years men and women have talked with hushed voices about "STRANGE PEOPLE" --- men who are not men --- women who are not women. No one has ever dared to talk out in the open about THE THIRD SEX. Is it any wonder that the shocking lurid facts of this great social evil are unknown to the great mass of men and women?

The terms used here, besides being more reminiscent of a carnival barker's spiel than an academic or medical treatise (that's another thing about these old ads --- get a load of the absolute authority given to doctors!), are very confusing. Sometimes the copy seems to refer to gay men and lesbians, sometimes to intersexed people, sometimes to transpeople, and sometimes merely to men or women who do not act sufficiently masculine or feminine.

I imagine that in the author's fevered imagination, these categories overlap one another considerably.

Now a Doctor has dared to tear away the veil of mystery that hides the facts behind homosexuality. In blunt understandable words he describes the unbelievable facts. "STRANGE LOVES: A Study in Sexual Abnormalities," by Dr. La Forest Potter, noted authority, is a document so weird, so startling, as to amaze the civilized world. Dr. Potter says, "NO MAN ON EARTH HAS A CHANCE AGAINST A WOMAN ONCE SHE HAS SUCCUMBED TO ANOTHER WOMAN." A startling, provocative indictment against the false modesty that has been responsible for the growth of these fantastic strange amatory curiosities among savage and civilized races.

Look, there's false modesty again! This is an interesting aspect of early 20th-century American culture, with its pop Freudianism and its emphases on hygiene and on scientific homemaking and childrearing. The same deep fear and loathing of sex (and of women in general) still lurks underneath the modernized surface; it's just that, now, sex outside of procreative sex within marriage isn't sinful so much as unhealthy.

It's a bit dizzying to consider how the blame for "deviant" sexual practices has shifted over the centuries. You've got the medieval conception of woman as sensual, easily tempted Eve whose insatiable sexual appetite had to be carefully safeguarded by her father and husband; you've got the Victorian "angel in the house" who is ethereal, unworldly and entirely asexual, but whose duty it is to provide her husband (who is now the insatiable animal but, curiously, is not subject to strict control by the women in his life) with a suitable sexual outlet, lest he fall in with Bad Women who will lead him into utter dissolution; and now, with this hygienic, pop-Freudian conception of sex, it is repression of normal sexual development which leads to morbid fascination and unusual appetites.

(On a sillier note, I absolutely love the all-caps "NO MAN on EARTH has a CHANCE against a woman" --- why against? shouldn't it be with? --- "once she has succumbed to ANOTHER WOMAN!" I love the idea that lesbians are lurking out there in some dingy opium den or back alley, waiting to tempt some innocent straight girl from the path.)