Asexuality/Aromanticism and Autism: two sides of my same coin
Four conditions intersect at me: asexuality, aromanticism, agenderness and autism. The four names start etymologically with the Greek letter alpha. The first three ones, the alpha is the so-called “alpha privative,” a prefix that, in these cases, indicates sexual orientation, romantic orientation or gender identity towards none. The etymology of “autism” is also Greek, and it starts with the alpha of “autós.” Therefore, the four relevant conditions that intersect at me start with alpha.
The three first-listed conditions (asexuality, aromanticism and agenderness) belong to queerness, while autism belongs to neurodivergence, which in turn belongs to disability, because society is designed to work for neurotypicals and turns its back on neurodivergent people. Autistic people are expected to “mask” for surviving in a hostile society, which is a kind of forced closet. And even are expected to get us pathologized in order to get recognized a minimal part of our rights.
So, for the sake of this writing, I will conceive my identity as a coin with asexuality and aromanticism in the heads and autism is in the tails. In the following sections, I will tell what happens in the different outcomes of the flipped coin.
Heads of the coin: Asexuality and Aromanticism when diagnosing as Autistic
As I mentioned before, we are required a professional diagnosis of autism in order to get part of our rights granted. But, despite being forced to get pathologized ourselves, we find that in the public health system there are very few specialists in autism, with a long delay in attention, and specialized in autism in boys. Girls and adults are despised, and non-binary people not even recognized to exist. So, I had to resort to a non-profit organization that claimed to assess for autism in people of any age. It was a good move, but not everybody can afford a private diagnosis, even through a non-profit. This is a classist filter for accessing our rights.
The professionals that assessed my autism were really concerned with the age issue, but I felt them a bit heteronormative and thus queerphobic, so I locked the door of my asexual and aromantic closet. When asked about having had a partner, I was only asked about the gender opposite to the one I’m read. And I was asked insistently about the feeling of love in very amatonormative terms. So I mentioned my ex queerplatonic partner as a former friend and the professional got satisfied when I described that our friendship could resemble a partnership from outside for the time spent together, but I denied any romantic feeling without lie from my part.
I omitted the explanation that I am asexual and aromantic, but I didn’t want to enter into a discussion with a professional that could pathologize me further, especially with the queerphobic atmosphere I perceived, so I let it be. I wonder how people not aromantic are evaluated on autism. I don’t regret of having shut my mouth on my orientations, and fortunately we didn’t enter the gender issue, because I don’t know how it would have developed.
Tails of the coin: Discrimination of Autism within Asexuality and Aromanticism
I joined a group gathered around Asexuality and a common interest like videogames. In the beginning they were very welcoming and we even played together several times. They were, of course, welcoming to aromanticism. They appeared to be welcoming to gender diversity and to neurodivergence, with specific forums. I felt very well, sharing my interests for months in an environment that would not discriminate by my orientation and that seemed to be safe for agender and autistic people. And also, it seemed a group with international vocation.
The organization of the group seemed well balanced, with a wide staff of admins and mods, so that the founding people would be no longer the overlords of the group. And I repeat “seemed” because this façade fell down when one of the supposed protected topics clashed with a personal fight of the founding overlords of the group. The naive questions were read and replied as attacks since the optic that their fight was superior to any other social-justice fight, including those explicitly recognized in the group. And also, from the position of imperialist superiority of the Anglo-Saxon language and culture, requiring foreigners to know every detail of the Anglo-Saxon countries.
As no activist is obligated to educate everybody and we have a web to spread the word, I did my best for finding descriptions of that particular fight for foreigners, without assuming any Anglo-Saxon context. The results were that the writings about this fight were addressed only to their own country with no intention to contextualize the fight in the world. I gave up of educating myself in what nobody around the world had any intention to describe, but I made the mistake of trusting the staff of admins and mods. My words were twisted in such a way that they fit the overlords’ position. Moreover, many people criticized me for the comments I received without paying any attention to my original posts, just for loyalty to people before than to truth.
They managed my anxiety in order to maximize it until I decided to leave for my own mental health. It was definitely a mistake to disclose my autism, since it was used against me, despite being a supposedly protected category. Moreover, those who expected me to know the subtlest detail of a fight restricted to a context that no accessible writing explained, they dealt with autism spectrum guided by prejudices and misconceptions. Though pathologizing, there is canon for defining this spectrum through its symptoms, called DSM-5, which is the bare minimum for speaking of these conditions. The explanation in this handbook is so brief that it easily refutes those prejudices and misconceptions even in the first page devoted to the spectrum. Moreover, there are hundreds of resources explaining faithfully autism, created by the people on the spectrum, many of them aimed to people outside thereof.
Sideways of the coin: Agenderness and Autism
In the heads of the coin, it was useful to remain in the closet, for my own safety. Conversely, in the tails of the coin, it was a mistake to come out, for my own mental health. But I am a non-binary person, so I couldn’t close the writing without considering that the coin may fall sideways.
The coin falls sideways when I consider my agenderness. How does agenderness intersect with my asexuality and aromanticism, and with my autism? Different surveys show that asexuality, non-binary genders, and the autism spectrum overlap much more than if they were independent variables. Why? We cannot discard that awareness of being out of the norm may lead to more questioning, since there are a lot of unaware people in these spectra. But in the concrete case of autism, I wouldn’t discard a failure of society (for good) in passing its toxic values of the cisheteronorm, either.
If the society relies on the innate neurotypical social soaking for passing these cisheteronormative values, it’s natural that it has failed with autistics and that I find them absurd because we observe them from another optic. So, trying to teach them to us, depending on the methods, could be as toxic and worthy of banning as the conversion pseudo-therapies, which share origins with other pseudo-therapies like ABA, widely used against autistic children.
