In January of last year (2023), I gave a presentation to the Berkshire OLLI Gender SIG (Special Interest Group) on the topic of gender in the local indigenous culture [click here to see a recording of that talk, and here to access the accompanying slides].
This year, Ellen Croibier, who is coordinating the SIG, asked me to produce a similar take on gender attitudes in the autistic community. I agreed, but pointed out that sharing my observations would not take a lot of time, so maybe I could also talk about other experiences of mine that relate to gender roles. This post summarizes what came out of the resulting discussion, and you can see the recording here. [Ellen later emailed me this comment from one of the Gender SIG members who couldn’t attend “in person"]:
"Just watched Michael Wilcox's whole presentation, and am so glad I did; he's a really thoughtful, kind, insightful and warm person. THANK YOU!!! and thanks to Michael for sharing so much of his personal story.”
Ellen asked me to provide a short bio so she could introduce me. Since she has facilitated many of my OLLI courses, I figured she knows me well enough to invent her own introduction.
Instead of providing the traditional list of educational and professional credentials, I thought it would be fun to spoof the format and list some of the things that have defined other aspects of my life. I did not intend for Ellen to repeat all of this, since I had emailed it to the group ahead of time. Much to my embarrassment, she went ahead and repeated much of this, and then my friend Cathy chipped in with some comments about QWAFAFEW and playing blackjack in Carson City.
I am a hopelessly heterosexual cis-gendered male. I do have some redeeming features, however. I identify as Autistic, for example. I am a feminist. I am a pacifist and an anarchist. I am a vegetarian and a pantheist.
I grew up in poverty, and later in life became one of the 1%. I have spent my life trying to make this world a better place, mostly because I live here. When I was twenty, I headed a national student organization dedicated to ending the Vietnam War and creating world peace. (I ended that war, but the peace bit is still a work in progress.)
In my professional life, I created a society called QWAFAFEW, which is dedicated to breaking down the barriers restricting the flow of what has been called intellectual property.
I spent many years as a political activist and as a disability rights advocate. I crafted legislation to require the Commonwealth to provide services to autistic adults. I served on many boards and commissions, and I facilitated support groups for individuals and couples. I have been a student of local indigenous culture and language. I am a hiker, a skier, and a horseback rider. I play bridge and poker, I have played blackjack in such places as Monte Carlo and Macao.
I have been a supporter of many dance companies, and I could tell you about my photography as well as making friends with many of the principle dancers of companies such as the Boston Ballet and City Ballet.
But today, I'm here to tell you anecdotes about how I suffered discrimination for many of the attributes I have mentioned, and to share observations about attitudes toward gender in “groups of which I have been part”.
As Winston Churchill is said to have observed, ending a sentence with a preposition is “... the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Okay, “groups I have been part of”.
Before discussing perspective on gender within the autistic community, I thought I should start with an explanation of what it is like to be autistic. I provided a few pictures of myself over the years as a prop for explaining the development pattern of autistic people. I joked that I haven’t changed much since this picture was taken in 1946, except that I had more hair then.
Actually, in some important ways, I have not changed much at all since early childhood. In recent years, someone asked me “When did you first realize that you were different?” Without any hesitation, I answered, “I have always known that.”
In preparing my slides for my OLLI conversation, I created a couple of versions of pictures of me (mictures?) at different ages. My first try included only two pictures, one at age 7 months and the other in my early 70s.
Then I added in 4 more pix from years in between those extremes. The two school photos in the top row are probably from when I was 9 to 12 years old. The two pix in the bottom row were probably taken in 1988 and 1990, as a guess — in other words, about 30 years later.
All of this has little or nothing to do with gender. The pix were mostly for entertainment, but I also wanted to make a point about aging and autism. One characteristic of autism is that autistic people are slow to develop (our brains eventually grow to be larger than average — mostly because of more “white matter” — myelin — connective tissue. This does not imply greater intelligence, only a more elaborate network of connections, which perhaps explains some of the slow processing typical of autism).
Autistic children are often a year or two behind their neurotypical age cohort in some skills that require cognition. This tendency led to the misconception that autism and intellectual impairment were somehow connected. By the time autistic people reach full maturity, these differences have disappeared.
Also, because of that “catching up” as autistic people mature, it was long thought that autism occurred only in children, and therefore was a “childhood disease” — autism is not a disease at all, but a lifelong neurological difference.
On the older end of the life cycle, I’m told by clinicians who have worked with hundreds of autistic people that it is common to see autistic folks intellectually alert and engaged when the reach an age at which most people are slowing down. A study by the Harvard Medical School of their records found not a single autistic person who had developed Alzheimer’s disease. Clinician friends tell me that such people do exist, but that they are very rare.
All of this ties in with the first bullet point in my outline of possible discussion topics. I didn’t expect to have time to cover all of these, but I thought it would be nice to mention at least some of them in passing.
The Autistic Mind
I’ve already given a bit of a preview. To continue:
I gave a couple of quotations from two of my autistic heroes, who share a commonality that will become apparent when I reveal their identity. The first one has to do with (slow) learning, and the second with (excessive) curiosity. I suffer from both of these conditions. The second trait is often (especially in children) diagnosed as ADHD. This is neither a “deficit” nor a “disorder” but is just another name for autism, as far as I’m concerned.
The first one has to do with learning. I could give the game of bridge as an example. About a year ago, I began to relearn how to play, after an absence from the game of nearly sixty years. Remembering how to play was not an issue; the problem was that I remembered all too well, and the game has changed a lot in the intervening decades. So I had to unlearn some things, or, to stay with the metaphor, rub out that steel plate and inscribe new instructions.
The second quotation describes a common (if not universal) modus operandi of the autistic mind. There is nothing that I am not interested in. This can, at times, make it very difficult to focus. In pursuing one chain of thought, it’s all too easy to fall into one random rabbit hole after another along the way.
During my presentation, no one ventured to guess who the authors were, so I revealed that the first quotation was from Abraham Lincoln, and the second one from Thomas Jefferson. A question was posed in the chat as to how we would know that these two are autistic. My answer was that it is my opinion. A web search will reveal differing opinions on this. Jefferson is probably more likely to be accepted than Lincoln.
In 2013, on Lincoln’s birthday, I wrote this post to explain my reasoning. The date of his birth, btw, is shared by another autistic genius, whom I did not mention in my remarks — Charles Darwin. He was famously anti-social, preferring to avoid the crush of people in London, and stay on his farm to study earthworms.
The reference to “sliders” is meant to evoke (for me) the image of a sound-mixing board.
I think we’ve all seen variations of this technology in studios or performance spaces. I find this to be a useful metaphor for thinking about personality traits. There are probably an infinite number of traits; some we think we have control over — others are so deeply buried in our subconscious that we have little awareness of them. This subconscious category includes our reactions to physical stimuli, such as heat or noise.
I think of a slider being in the middle of its range as representing the “typical” setting in the human population. Veering to one side or the other will produce a trait that is more or less prominent than its typical display. In my experience, autistic people tend to have many (if not most) of their sliders set close to the extremes.
“Neatness” is not a single personality trait, but by pretending there is such a thing, I can use it as an example. When I discuss this with autistic friends, I notice they are usually at one extreme or the other. Some, like me, could care less if there is a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Others would not tolerate such a thing, and wash them and put them away, or rinse them and put them in the dishwasher.
In my office, I have piles of papers, books, file folders, boxes of photos, and other odds and ends. I once visited the office of a friend in Princeton and he had to move a pile of books and papers off of one of his office chairs so I could have a place to sit. Other autistic friends of mine would have an office with no clutter at all.
I could give countless other examples. Some autistic people are fairly impervious to pain, others recoil at the slightest touch. My point here is that those sliders are set toward one end or the other, though not all autistic people share which end that is. We are atypical in many ways.
GENDER IN THE AUTISTIC COMMUNITY
Gender is another of those sliders. Actually, gender is such a complex issue that there are many sliders involved. One set of them has to do with other-identification (our attitude toward how we or others identify people) and another set is related to our self-identification.
In the video (linked above) I tell of an autistic friend who did a survey among autistic people to see how they self-identified as to gender. To her surprise, she received dozens of different answers. This squares with my experience in getting to know hundreds of autistic people. With many of these, I have been able to discuss the issues of sexual and gender orientation.
My overall impression (anecdotally, in other words, not as a result of a scientific study), is that autistic people tend to be more likely than neurotypical people to see themselves as being outside the strictures of a binary male/female choice. They also, regardless of their gender identity, tend to me more tolerant of all people (autistic or not) who see themselves as being of a nonbinary gender. I also think this is more true of young people than of older people, although there is not a dramatic differential.
The reason for all of this, I think, is that people who have a lived experience of being misunderstood (and often mistreated) will have a high degree of empathy with other people who are different.
I have come to know dozens of indigenous people during my time studying their language and culture. The very same observations I have made about autistic people apply here, and for many of the same reasons. Fortunately, in Abenaki, the dialect I have been studying, the choice of pronouns is an easy one. In English, the use of “they” as a third-person singular pronoun instead of “he” or “she” can be confusing, but in Abenaki, there is only one such pronoun. The word “agma” means “that one” or “the other one” and has no gender.
STORIES OF MY EARLY DAYS AS A FEMINIST
I know I’ve been too wordy when Substack warns me that I’m approaching the gmail size limit. I will resume my narrative in Part Two — stay tuned…