What is auti-gender?

This is a full transcript of 1800 Seconds on Autism: What is auti-gender?, as first broadcast on 28th January 2021. Presented by Robyn Steward and Jamie Knight.

[Jingle: 1800 Seconds on Autism. With Robyn Steward and Jamie Knight]

JAMIE - I’m dressed as Tigger today and it’s the microphone bouncing off of the buttons on my onesie.

[Music]

CHRISTA - When I was a little kid I would sleep under the cushions, like, in the couch, to have that pressure on me and just pile all the toys on top or just pile anything on. It just feels so good.

[Music]

MADGE - I love the concept of auti-gender, I think that’s brilliant, ‘cos I do feel kind of in between the genders.

[Music]

ROBYN - Positive flapping over here.

[Music]

JAMIE - It’s the podcast that makes you think about how you think. I’m Jamie Knight.

ROBYN - And I’m Robyn Steward. We’re half way through series three, can you believe it? Well, I can because I’ve been doing it. Anyway, we’re still recording from home with the support of our support animals, humans, microphones, chocolates, and Emma, our producer.

EMMA - Hello.

ROBYN - And of course, your emails. Please keep them coming, to [email protected].

JAMIE - The UK is, once again, in a lockdown. In this episode we’ll be discussing COVID-19 testing, and we’re also going to talk to autistic YouTuber, Neurodivergent Rebel, who’ll be explaining what auti-gender is. Stay tuned.

ROBYN - How are you coping in this third lockdown, Jamie?

JAMIE - Er… So far, so okay I guess? We had our first instance of somebody very close to us needing a test because they thought they were infectious, and frustratingly, or alarmingly, it was one of the support people. So, because they’d been here a couple of days before they went for their test and then they were feeling ill we had to isolate suddenly, as if somebody had returned a positive test. In the end the test ended up being negative, but it was definitely a couple of days where I couldn’t really make any plans about my life and that turned out to be very poor for my mental health, let’s put it that way.

EMMA - There’s a really strange noise. Is anybody else hearing that, it’s like a…

ROBYN - Yeah, clicking.

JAMIE - That one? [Clicking]

ROBYN - Oh!

JAMIE - That’s a button on my… I’m dressed as Tigger today.

ROBYN - Stop pressing it please!

JAMIE - Sorry. I’m dressed as Tigger today and it’s the microphone bouncing off of the buttons on my onesie.

EMMA - I think that might be the best excuse I’ve ever heard.

ROBYN - You mentioned your mental health, Jamie. If you’re comfortable would you tell us about it?

JAMIE - Sure. I’m talking to friends. I didn’t have my normal routine for about four weeks, five weeks, and one of the ways that that affects me is I have less energy, so I’ve got basically nothing done, ‘cos anything I touch I tend to break because I’m really tired all the time. So I haven’t built bikes, I haven’t done any coding or anything, ‘cos I just make so many mistakes. And that, plus being always tired, tends to let the depression build up a little bit.

And the way it tends to affect me the most is when I wake up in the morning I find it incredibly hard to be positive. And it takes, you know, 45 minutes to an hour for that positivity to kick in. And on the two days or the day and a half where we were waiting for the COVID test that depression didn’t clear, in fact it got worse as the day went on, which wasn’t the response I was expecting and was a little bit alarming.

I was already quite low when we found out it was negative, but then also the speed at which it sprung back the very next day, like yesterday when we went to go for a bike ride that had been cancelled three times, postponed twice, and we finally made it out to this soggy, wet, damp forest. I was the wettest, dampest thing in the forest with the biggest smile. It was just brilliant, because it was finally getting outside, finally having a sense that I had some sort of control over what I did with my life.

ROBYN - What is it that concerns you about getting a test?

JAMIE - I’ll be consenting to it, obviously, but it is quite a violation of, like, sensory stuff and bodily autonomy, so to speak. The worry is that if we go for the test it’s probably going to knock out my speech. Even going to the dentist tends to affect my speech for a couple of days, or I have much more difficulty communicating. Combine difficulty communicating with a generally depressive mood and a lack of energy and it could take literally weeks to recover. If everybody around me is positive then I need to isolate regardless because I’m in a household bubble with someone who’s positive. So actually doing the test doesn’t benefit us in any way, the only benefit I guess is the government get an extra one digit on their number, but the numbers are in the tens of thousands so that’s not a significant thing anyway. So it’s kind of weighing up the personal ramifications versus the benefit. Does that make sense?

ROBYN - Yeah, but what about if you did the test at home?

JAMIE - It’s the nature of the test that’s the problem. Sticking long things into my body. The likelihood that I will be able to put something long in my nose without it horrifically affecting my speech is very low and we don’t want to find out whether that means that I’m fine and I’m verbal an hour later, or whether it means that I don’t have any speech for three weeks. It’s not worth us finding out. You’ve mentioned before that you’ve had multiple tests. Could you, like, tell us about those and kind of why they happened?

ROBYN - Yeah, so I went to hospital with probably COVID in April but I wasn’t able to get a test then. Then I had what I now know to be long COVID but I thought was a relapse in June, so I had one then, and then I had a bit of a temperature in September and it was around the time I was supposed to have a blood test so I had one then. So I’ve had two.

JAMIE - That makes a lot of sense.

ROBYN - Oh, and then I had a blood test for the antibodies.

JAMIE - Okay. How have you found the tests? Have they always gone smoothly? How do you find the sensory side of it?

ROBYN - That’s a good question. I don’t really like it, and I don’t think I’m very good at it, but it doesn’t last for very long. The biggest thing is, I wish I’d understood that the gagging thing is going to be really unpleasant and you just have to think about something else while you do that for a few seconds.

JAMIE - Hearing from another autistic person who has had that experience and can say, “It’s unpleasant but I’ve done it multiple times,” is really reassuring, so thanks for telling us about that.

ROBYN - You’re welcome. I’ve talked to my doctor about that because, like, as a woman I have to have a cervical smear every three years, and that’s really unpleasant. Like, that is a lot worse than the COVID test, and I have to do it to make sure I don’t have cancer and I hate it. When I have something like that coming up the doctor gives me medication and it helps me relax. And I find that that sorts it out because it dampens down my responses and so I’m sort of less bothered.

JAMIE - The sensory thing seems to be not related to anxiety or stress, it just seems to be like when there’s a big sensory thing, whichever part of my brain that is normally a little bit fragile for language just gets blown away and takes time to come back.

ROBYN - I think it probably was COVID, I’ve never had anything like that before. And I definitely have all the, you know, a lot of the common long COVID symptoms like dizziness, the fatigue, oxygen saturation levels that bounce up and down quite a lot. Now that kind of seems fairly stable now, but for ages it was like that and sometimes I would just have to stop work because I’d be dizzy and need to take time off. So I think it’s very likely that I had COVID and it certainly fits with…

JAMIE - I think that’s the first time we’ve discussed that, like, on the recording, and I’m really sorry to hear that and hopefully we can help support you with that. It’s kind of terrifying.

[Jingle] Send any questions or thoughts to [email protected]

JAMIE - Something that a lot of people have asked us about relates to gender identity in autism, so when we saw a recent YouTube video from the blogger known as Neurodivergent Rebel explaining something called auti-gender, more on that in a second, we asked them to join us for a chat.

ROBYN - Neurodivergent Rebel is also known as Christa Holmans. Have I pronounced that right?

CHRISTA - Yes.

ROBYN - An autistic self-advocate from Texas. Hi Christa, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Apparently, I’m immediately distracted by the bio on your blog which says you live in an RV. [Laughter] I’m not at all distracted by that, but it’s an interesting fact. RV stands for recreational vehicle.

JAMIE - Camper van in the UK.

ROBYN - And I’m sure that Jamie in particular would love to know about it, because Jamie likes things with wheels.

JAMIE - I have many, many, many thoughts about building little self-contained small living spaces, inspired by battleships and submarines and stuff like that, but I should probably park that special interest for another day and talk to you about it another time. But yeah, small living, portable RV stuff, that’s very interesting to me.

CHRISTA - I love it. Living the dream.

JAMIE - Yeah, it sounds it. Do you move around in the RV or do you kind of stay mostly in one place?

CHRISTA - We moved around a lot more before COVID and everything else of course, and now we don’t really travel very much because, you know, there’s a peak over here where it’s getting kind of bad, so we’re trying to stay in one place. But it’s a good life for social distancing, we’ve been social distancing long before COVID was a thing because it was just kind of the lifestyle. We’d go park in the middle of the woods or somewhere beautiful and be away from people and in nature, which is my happy place.

JAMIE - You used the phrase, ‘we’ there, so is there somebody else with you in the RV or is it a cat?

CHRISTA - Yeah. Well there’s four dogs and then my partner lives with me as well.

JAMIE - Wow.

CHRISTA - It’s a full house. It’s a bus, it’s a forty foot long bus, it’s about the size of a city bus. It’s a large one. We’d go smaller if we didn’t have four dogs, but they needed room to be able to kind of run around and play. So maybe someday we’ll do a van.

ROBYN - Is it an old school bus?

CHRISTA - No, I wish, that would be cool. No, we bought an older luxury coach and it needs a lot of work, but that’s why we bought it.

JAMIE - How does that intersect with being autistic and gender?

CHRISTA - Oh, yeah.

JAMIE - Is there a story there?

CHRISTA - Really it relates to living a more affordable lifestyle and living minimally. I think if anything, as an autistic person, a lot of us are either underemployed or unemployed or maybe for whatever reason we can’t physically handle a forty hour work week, or sometimes people expect you to work 50, 60 hours a week, and some of us can’t handle that anymore, and I could handle it a lot better when I was younger than I can now. But it allows us to live with a lot less.

We had a house at one point and people call their houses a money pit, right? There’s always something in the house, and so now we don’t have a house payment because we have the bus. And we’ve got a bus that always needs work but it’s also, as a neurodivergent person, a lot easier to keep track of. I don’t have as many things to keep track of. My space is much smaller, so when I do need to clean up I can clean it up by myself fairly quickly from a little 40 foot nose to tail area. I just swipe front to back, it keeps it really simple. So my life has been simplified.

JAMIE - Our listeners will want to know, [whispers] and I want to know too, what make and model of bus do you have?

CHRISTA - Yeah, so it’s a 2004 Country Coach, Allure I think? I hope that’s correct, off the top of my head. We like our bus.

JAMIE - Well, I know what I’m googling at the end of this recording. So moving on to the actual script. You started up Ask Autistics which is a hashtag that invites questions about autism from people who aren’t autistic. Could you tell us a little bit about the questions that people have been asking? Is there anything that’s been surprising? Anything that’s made you laugh or anything that’s made you cry?

CHRISTA - You know, some of my favourite things are when you see a good question, regardless of what the question is, and people start talking and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one,” and they realise how much they have in common on a lot of the different things. Or sometimes they are the only one and it’s like everyone else has one experience and they’re going, “Oh, that’s not what it’s like for me, that’s somewhere I’m different.” It’s fun. Like I think recently we had a conversation and we were talking about, you know, there’s a myth that autistic people aren’t sexual beings, and it’s like, oh that’s not true, you know, we have sex, that’s where a lot of autistic kids come from, you know. [laughs] So it’s kind of fun to see these conversations happening because we’re humans like everybody else, you know.

JAMIE - The infantilising… Yes.

CHRISTA - Yeah, it’s gross, it’s creepy.

JAMIE - I’m never verbal around the social worker. I have periods of my life where I’ve gone years with no speech where nobody in my life knows I’m verbal, so they tend to often assume very infantilising things. So when I’m with someone like a social worker or I’m really stressed so I’m using assisted technology to communicate, I’m communicating through my laptop, and we were doing a care review via AAC and it came onto sex, in the forms like sex and relationships. And she went, “Oh, we can skip this,” and I started typing away and her face fell through the floor, ‘cos she was obviously expecting me to be making safeguard reviews and all sorts of stuff. And then when I finally showed it to her it was something along the lines of I enjoy that very much and I’m not willing to tell you about it. [laughter] It was great, brilliant.

But anyway. Ask Autistics, I follow that as well, and I’d encourage anybody listening, it’s a useful place to see different conversations. You were saying about how people sometimes have their own experience or the exact opposite. I find it interesting how often in the autistic community the exact same thing, like a sensory response, can be equally strong in both directions.

CHRISTA - Oh, yeah.

JAMIE - So I know some people who cannot tolerate heavy blankets in the slightest, their blankets have to be as light as possible because they hate the feeling of pressure, and then I know other people like myself where, to be honest, if a dump truck just reversed over me at bedtime I’d be pretty happy.

CHRISTA - Oh, yeah.

JAMIE - I’d go out very blissfully.

EMMA - Christa, that was an interesting reaction to Jamie saying he’d be quite happy if a dump truck rolled over him so that he could go to sleep. Why have you had that reaction?

CHRISTA - Oh my gosh. I love my, like, weighted blanket and my heavy blankets. When I was a little kid I would sleep under the couch cushions, like in the couch, to have that pressure on me and just pile all the toys on top, or just pile anything on. It just feels so good.

JAMIE - It’s just so nice to be squished. But one of the downsides, I have like an inflatable squish jacket…

CHRISTA - Oh! I’m going to google that.

JAMIE - Wonderful things. Although if you run it at the absolute highest pressure, as tight as it will go, and you’re wearing one that’s one size too small it will leave bruises. Wonderful, wonderful bruises. But it will leave bruises so, you know, warning.

EMMA - I would hate that. I would hate that, it sounds awful.

JAMIE - It’s the sort of thing where as you breathe in you can suddenly feel all of your body as all of the pressure builds up. It’s great. But don’t breathe in too far, otherwise, you know, it hurts a lot.

EMMA - What do you mean, you can feel all of your body?

JAMIE - I don’t know, you kind of breathe in and you know where your edge is. So I have this thing where I kind of walk around feeling like a big floaty cloud of Jamie and I then bump into things, because oh, I’ve got a bit of body over there, I didn’t know that, what’s it doing over there, but when I’m kind of all squished together or I’m wearing… It’s one of the reasons I like my mountain bike clothing. I’ve just realised, I could wear my mountain bike clothing when I’m not mountain biking. How come that’s never occurred to me before? Anyway. I’ve got this, like, riding top that’s really tight and when I put it on it’s like suddenly I have arms. And then when I take it off again I go back to being the amorphous floaty cloud of Jamie.

ROBYN - Moving on to why we invited you onto the podcast, gender and identity. I was watching your video, Auti-gender, and I found it really interesting. I think you articulated something that possibly a lot of autistic people would identify with, and I just wondered if you could tell us what the term auti-gender means and why it’s important to you?

CHRISTA - Yeah, so auti-gender is understood with the context of when you’re autistic and that greatly impacting how you experience gender. And so I want to be really clear with this that it’s not autism as a gender, but it’s rather the fact that you can’t separate being autistic from who you are and how you experience the world, and gender is another part of that and some of us feel like we can’t really unlink that, that being autistic heavily influences our experience of gender. And, you know, not every autistic person may experience this, but a lot of autistic people I’ve found do and…

JAMIE - If there is auti-gender does that imply NT gender and ADHD gender? Or could it be described as a combination of neurotype and your experience with gender, but actually the actual neurotype isn’t important, it’s recognising that the two are interlinked that’s the important bit?

CHRISTA - There’s the term neurogender which is a whole other term, and neuroqueer, where it’s saying being neurodivergent influences your experience of gender. And I think that’s a wider umbrella and auti-gender’s kind of just a more specific piece of that.

JAMIE - That makes a lot of sense.

CHRISTA - Because I think being neurodivergent is definitely going to impact our experience of gender, because a lot of us, with autistic people we’re literally defined by the way we kind of don’t fit as neatly into society’s little checkboxes. And so, like, we know gender is a social construct, so it’s just another one of those areas in which many autistic people don’t necessarily fit.

JAMIE - It makes sense. I don’t think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, awooga, awooga, I generally don’t like gendered clothing. I don’t understand why boys shouldn’t wear skirts, and I own skirts. I don’t necessarily wear them outside, because socially complicated, but as a kid I was like, well why couldn’t I wear a skirt to school? It looks really comfy, really breezy.

CHRISTA - We’ve had people, like you said, who don’t even think of these issues, sexuality and gender and all these things, because we’re infantilised all the time and so there isn’t a lot of conversation happening about this because of that.

JAMIE - When I first came out as gay and started having a boyfriend, I was at college at the time, and college in the UK is post 16 education, so that’s 16 or 17, and essentially all of the grownups to me went, “Oh, that’s brilliant, Jamie, who’s the lucky person?” kind of pat on the back, pat on the back. And then, like, “We’ve just got to pop out for a moment,” and they went and found my boyfriend, Jimmy and were like, “Are you serious with Jamie? What is this? Is this a con?” you know, and he basically got it from every single adult in his life going, “Are you really dating an autistic person? You know, there must be an ulterior motive to this.” And he was like, “No, I just like hanging out with him.” They were like, “Hmm, suspicious.” So that infantilising can be… It’s well meant but can be quite corrosive.

CHRISTA - Hmm-hmm.

ROBYN - So, Christa, can you tell me about how you got interested in gender and also maybe a bit about how the way you thought about your own gender evolved?

CHRISTA - Yeah. Well, I think growing up I didn’t really know there were other options, but I felt like a lot of, quote, gender, was annoying to me. I was like, why is it girls can’t do this? Why is it boys can’t do this? You know, all of it just really frustrated me. I just never felt like I was a little girl, and I never felt like I was a boy either. And finally being able to fully embrace that as an adult has let me have freedom, because I’ve never liked living in closets and I don’t think it’s healthy to do so. And I’m someone who values the truth and I prefer honesty, and being untrue to myself really is something that I find personally soul crushing. And I came out of the closet the first time in middle school when I took my first girlfriend to a school dance and years later when I was diagnosed autistic I started coming out of another closet, the autism closet, and surprisingly that was actually quite similar to coming out.

JAMIE - Can I make a joke that I made on stage once that got me both complaints and a lot of laughter, but it makes me giggle?

CHRISTA - Please.

JAMIE - Which is, I made a joke that, you know, coming out of the autism closet was quite difficult, partly because the rest of the world was really messy and the inside of the autism closet is incredibly tidy.

ROBYN - I wanted to make a joke about closets. I wanted to say that well, I think Jamie might quite like being in a physical closet.

JAMIE - I used to have an office inside a cupboard.

ROBYN - Yeah. Which is like the UK’s name for a closet.

JAMIE - As I said, RV living, very appealing, very appealing. The company I rented my cupboard from, my office cupboard went bust, so I no longer have an office cupboard. So we’ve mentioned before the various types of closets in our life, and you mentioned that coming out of the autism closet was another experience. Could you tell us about that please?

CHRISTA - Yeah. So, you know, why I say it was really similar to coming out of other closets would be that the experience when you’re telling people one you have to do it over and over and over again, you never stop coming out of the closet. And some people are going to get it, some people won’t, you’re going to learn pretty quickly who you can talk to safely and who you’re going to have to hide around. And there is also the painfully familiar experience of people who are just leaving your life who won’t be able to accept the new information and kind of become, unfortunately, a hinderance on your continued personal growth. And that’s something I’ve experienced with every closet I’ve come out of and, you know, it’s sometimes painful but it’s also at the same time, you know, you have this freedom to really be your most authentic and true self.

JAMIE - One of the threads that we pick up quite often is the intersection of autonomy identity, and as I get older I have more autonomy and control over my life, therefore I’m in a better position to be less affected if people choose to leave my life because of being autistic or gay or whatever. Does that make sense, that kind of as you get older the impact of losing a single person gets lessened?

CHRISTA - Oh yeah. Just think if you’re a child and you’re in the custody of your parents and your parents aren’t accepting of you you’re trapped with them, pretty much.

JAMIE - Yeah. You mentioned the considering of the agenda became more apparent after your autism diagnosis, and I’m curious about how that came about, but I’m also curious about where you ended up in that process and kind of what the outcomes were.

CHRISTA - Yeah, and so I guess I’d say it became too hard to deny after my diagnosis, so for me I was assigned female at birth and that’s what it’s felt like, it’s like an assignment that was given to me that I really had no say in. And I went along with this for a lot of years, performing how I thought I was expected to behave, and I would even present myself in this really hyper, feminine, over the top way because, you know, that’s what I thought I needed to do to be a girl; I had to wear the makeup, the skirts, the heels, all the things. And it’s not even really a healthy representation of what it means to be a woman, because looks aren’t what makes the woman either. But it was just easier for me to present outwardly in a very stereotypical female presentation, even if on some days it felt like an elaborate costume.

And with autistic people, some of us, we may mask and hide our true selves, and I put on that feminine costume as part of my mask as an autistic person. I was playing a role and trying to blend in, just so I could be treated better by people in the world. And, you know, this elaborate mask was part of me behaving in a way that was, quote, socially acceptable, and that was, you know, behaving in an appropriate, quote, appropriate gender roles. And since unmasking as an autistic person over the past four years that piece of my mask has also begun to fall away as I get to know myself all over again and evaluate how I really feel and how I see myself, versus how I think I should act for society’s benefit instead of my own benefit.

And, you know, I am much happier in life when I don’t mask and I go along with how I feel instead of just conforming to society’s norms and doing what I think society expects me to do. And for a lot of years I didn’t put a name to my feelings about my gender, I was just like, I’m a me. And then I started to kind of, like, during Corona things are different and so I had more time on my hands and I found myself scrolling through TikTok which is an addicting time suck, and I found other LGBTQIA people on TikTok and started following those, and was like, oh my gosh, there are names for exactly what I experience. And so then I came out and said, okay, “Well I’m nonbinary, if we want to be specific, I identify as gender fluid and there it is, that’s it.” And I put it out there because I finally had words for it.

[Jingle: 1800 Seconds on Autism. With Robyn Steward and Jamie Knight]

ROBYN - Let’s also talk to Madge Woollard who’s with us. Hi, Madge.

MADGE - Hello, lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

ROBYN - Thank you very much for coming. Madge identifies as nonbinary but uses she/her pronouns, and she’s a piano teacher and she’s been married to her wife, Jo, for 20 years, and she got her autism diagnosis when she was 44. The reason I wanted to bring Madge into the conversation was because I know that Madge identifies as nonbinary but uses she/her pronouns, and Christa identifies as nonbinary but uses they/them pronouns. And I think that that’s really interesting and also sort of demonstrates when you’ve met one autistic person you’ve met one autistic person. And so too maybe when you’ve met one nonbinary person you’ve met one nonbinary person. And Madge has been listening to what Christa’s been saying and I wanted to ask Madge if any of those things sort of resonate with you? If they’re similar to you or if they’re different, and how they’re different?

MADGE - Oh yeah, definitely. I love the concept of auti-gender, I think that’s brilliant, ‘cos I do feel kind of in between the genders. But yeah, as Robyn said, I use she/her pronouns, just for convenience really and because I am happy in my female body, I don’t want to change anything about my body or have any male aspects, any physical aspects that is. So does that answer your question, Robyn?

ROBYN - Yeah.

CHRISTA - I probably would be comfortable using all of the pronouns, depending on the day. Honestly, that’s why I say I’m gender fluid because my feelings about my gender kind of fluctuate. But, you know, if I’m having a day where I’m feeling a little bit more towards the more feminine quadrant I might not mind someone using she/her pronouns with me. But the fact that you don’t know how I’m feeling that day, if people ask I just say them, it’s just easier because then you’re not making those assumptions about me.

I don’t know why, it’s just always made me a little bit uncomfortable, people making assumptions about my gender. And I don’t know, that’s not something all nonbinary people feel, but it’s something I do. I’ve heard a couple of other nonbinary people say they feel that too.

MADGE - Well, I think that as long as you’re talking respectfully to a person and I would hope that people wouldn’t mind too much if they stumble over the pronouns, but because I use she/her pronouns and I appear quite feminine it’s not been a problem for me. But I definitely think we should all respect each other’s pronouns, even if it does make some quite clumsy sentences, ‘cos they/them is quite a new thing and so everybody’s getting used to it. So it is going to take some time.

CHRISTA - Although maybe the word nonbinary is a new thing, having genders that fall outside of the gender binary is not a new concept. Indigenous peoples all over the world have represented and had more than just two genders. It’s kind of actually a new colonial concept that’s kind of been brought in more recently where we’ve had kind of the erasure of the genders that fall outside of the standard male female binary, and now more people are starting to talk about this. It’s a new conversation but it’s actually not even a new thing or a new concept, people have been nonbinary for a lot of years, we just now have a word to describe it. Like now it’s like, oh auti-gender, this is a new word, but it’s probably autistic people throughout the centuries have had this experience it’s just now there’s a word for it.

ROBYN - That is such a good point about indigenous people. So this is a question to Christa and Madge, if I could ask. Do you think there are more autistic people when compared to non autistic people that identify across the gender spectrum rather than identifying as a binary gender? And if you do, why do you think that is?

CHRISTA - I definitely think there’s more, at least people who are autistic, who identify as LGBTQIA+, and I say that because I did a Twitter poll and we had 3,670 autistic people vote, and my question was really simple: Do you consider yourself to be part of the LGBTQIA+? And the percentages were 75.3% yes and 24.7% no. And I’ll disclaimer this, because this is a Twitter poll, it’s not a scientific poll, but it’s enough to be interesting. And I would say I think a lot of this goes back to gender being one of those social constructs that, you know, we’re willing to question, we look at it under a magnifying glass and go, “Oh, some of that’s new things for me.” And we’re willing to do that, whereas I think some neurotypical people might be more likely to go along with what they’re supposed to do and we’re a little bit more rebellious by nature, some of us.

MADGE - And can I just add to that, that speaking for myself I grew up knowing intrinsically that I was different, I didn’t know that I was autistic at the time, but I think from there there wasn’t such a big jump to then coming out as LGBT, because I already knew I was different, if that makes sense?

JAMIE - While we have Madge and Christa on the line it feels like a wonderful opportunity to ask for their advice and their input. So, to both of you, what would you say to other autistic people who are figuring out who they are, or who they’re attracted to, or whether they even care about this at all?

MADGE - Well can I say, just connect to likeminded people online. There’s loads of stuff out there, and look on websites, but bona fide ones. For instance, Stonewall has a lot of links that you can follow. I’d say surround yourself with people who support you in finding yourself and don’t say things like, “Oh, you’re autistic, you can’t know your gender and your sexuality.” Or, “It’s just a phase,” or, “You’ve got it wrong,” you don’t want those sort of people in your life. So if possible surround yourself with positive people. Yeah, and just don’t limit yourself. So gender and sexuality can be fluid throughout your life, don’t feel you have to put yourself in any kind of box and it’s fine to change. So yeah, that’s my advice.

JAMIE - Thank you. One of the things that I have come across very often is actually to do with autistic people and dating. I know that a lot of autistic people really struggle with one off dating websites, and at least in my experience, of the autistic people I know the ones who have the strongest relationships, they grew very slowly over time. They may have started as colleagues or friends, and then over, sometimes literally years, it became a boyfriend and girlfriend situation, or similar. What do you both think?

MADGE - Well, I have to say, I actually met my wife through, it was called ‘The Pink Paper’, it was 20 years ago, before we really had dating apps and stuff like that, but I put an advert in ‘The Pink Paper’ and she replied and that’s how we met. So you can’t really say that autistic people don’t meet that way.

JAMIE - Well, that’s why I kind of prefixed it with the majority of people that I talk to. I think, I’m just doing some stats, of the nine people I’ve asked you’re the first person who’s found somebody that way. So it’s just fascinating to me.

MADGE - I just feel it was luck. I mean, I had tried dating things before and never been lucky, so I do feel there’s a lot of luck in it too.

ROBYN - Thanks so much to Christa and Madge, it’s been an absolute pleasure to speak to both of you, and thank you very much for listening to 1800 Seconds as well, and for writing to us. And also to the audience, to those of you listening, if any of you have any different thoughts or feelings please don’t feel like we’re trying to tell everybody how they should think and feel because everyone is different. But please do email us, stim, that’s S-T-I-M, [email protected].

JAMIE - Thank you, it’s been lovely to have you on.

CHRISTA - Thanks guys.

MADGE - Well thank you very much for having me, it’s been a pleasure.

ROBYN - Positive flapping over here.

MADGE - Yeah.

CHRISTA - Thanks guys, it’s been so much fun.

ROBYN - Another episode of 1800 Seconds on Autism is drifting towards its end, although I don’t know it could be drifting because it’s a podcast. I guess it’s drifting past your ears anyway. Before we go we’d like to encourage you to email us at [email protected]. Stim is spelt, S-T-I-M. We would like to know if you’ve got any thoughts about what’s been discussed in this podcast and, importantly, what topics would you like to be covered in future podcasts.

JAMIE - If this is the first time you’ve listened you might want to know that there are over 20 more episodes available on BBC Sounds and you can listen to them right now. You can subscribe to the podcast there too so that we appear on your device every time we publish a new show.

ROBYN - We’d love for more people to know about 1800 Seconds on Autism, so tell your friends, tell your family, and share us around on social media. It helps others who might like us find us. Thanks for listening, goodbye.

JAMIE - Goodbye.

EMMA - Bye.

[Jingle: That was 1800 Seconds on Autism]