Jackson Keys
I have been having a difficult time since I learned I am autistic. One would think that it wouldn’t make much of a difference. I’ve been autistic my whole life, so nothing has changed; I’m still autistic. And yet, it feels like everything has changed now that I have a word to explain many of difficulties I have had in my life. Suddenly, I see myself through a new lens, a clearer lens. I understand why people seem so foreign to me, why I have had difficulties making and keeping friends, and why so many people find me an annoying bore. Strangely though, knowing why things have happened doesn’t fix the trauma that not fitting in has and does engender.
When I was a child of 8 years-old in 1980, I realized there was a serious problem with me. No, not autism, but gender. During the1979-1980 school year, I played only with the boys in a competitive, long-term fight of marbles. At the beginning of that school year, I lost every marble I owned to the other boys. After much begging on my part, my mom finally bought me some more marbles, tiger-eyed ones. Thus began my domination of the marble pitch. Not only did I get good, I became the best. I went home every day with all kinds of new and fancy marbles in my jean’s pockets. Little did I know during this peak of triumph that an enormous fall was soon to occur. It seemed that winning all the time irritated the other boys, irritated them to such an extent that they remembered I was a girl. And because I was a girl, I could officially be ostracized from the boys. I was tossed out after years of playing with them because I was suddenly, and much to my horror, a girl.
I never really gave my gender much thought until then. Everyone called me a tomboy, and to me, that made me one of the boys. To find myself ostracized from my play group and my gender was traumatic. I had no one to play with except the girls. The problem with this was that I didn’t know how to be a girl. I couldn’t figure out how to make friends with girls, how to gossip with girls, how to play with girls. Luckily, I did find three girls who were willing to play with me. Although I couldn’t call them friends per se, they did let me hang out with them during recess to play Chinese jump rope. Chinese jump rope was nicely competitive and required little talking. It was an easy way to spend the next few years.
At the age of 11, my father moved my sister and me out of Sacramento to a small town in the coastal hills. And the marble story happened all over again. This time, though, it was a game called Nation Ball. I won’t explain the rules, but it was somewhat similar to Dodge Ball. I was very good at Nation Ball. Everyone wanted me for their team, until one day, they didn’t. Again, kids noticed I was a girl. I don’t know why they did or what I did to make them care, but I was no longer allowed to play with the boys. I was told that I was to play with the girls. This time, however, the teachers cared, too. They, too, said I was a girl, and I was to play with the girls. Again, I was lucky enough to find two girls who would play with me. So as the boys played sports during recess, and the girls gossiped about boys and hair and clothing, my two friends and I got into a lot of trouble playing school-approved ‘girl’ sports. We ended up banned from playing Tetherball (two broken pairs of glasses and a broken finger), banned from playing touch football (broken arm), and banned from playing 4-square (one pair of broken glasses and a re-brake of a collar bone). It was fun. Thus, I finished elementary school with high hopes for junior high.
I think everyone hates junior high or what is now called middle school. Puberty kicks in, social pressures increase exponentially, and school is more academically demanding. I hated junior high with a passion that was only dwarfed by my hatred of high school. I was bullied in elementary school, but it was tolerable. In elementary school, I only got into one fistfight and assaulted just a few times. Mostly, the other kids just teased me for wearing the wrong clothes, owning the wrong lunch box, or for being a girl/boy. It was rather harmless, because I didn’t care that much if I fit in or not, and kids still talked to me. I did care in junior high school. Why? Because the taunts and vicious catcalls became a daily thing, both from the girls and the boys. I was mocked every day for being gender non-conforming: everything I did, said, or wore was wrong. When I wasn’t being bullied, I was ignored.
Now I realize that autism played a huge part in this ongoing bullying. Not only did I not ‘girl’ correctly, but I didn’t ‘human’ correctly either. Kids and teachers, who ignored me in elementary school now felt emboldened to correct all the ways I was doing ‘it’ wrong. It was bad enough when the kids did it, but when the adults started in, too, I felt that no one was really on my side, that there was no safe place or person to be me. During my two years in junior high, kids called me vile names, shoved me into lockers, pushed me into the boy’s bathroom, and grabbed my boobs. And the teachers who witnessed it said I deserved it because I needed to understand that if I acted like a girl, the harassment would stop. I was constantly instructed by teachers to close my legs, stand correctly, be nice, grow out my hair, buy girly clothes, and wear makeup. I didn’t want to do any of that, but those kids and teachers did teach me that I had to ‘girl’ and ‘human’ correctly if I wanted to survive in society. Thus, the week before high school, I made myself a pledge to ‘girl’ and ‘human’ better. And during the next four years, I think I did a fairly good job. The daily taunts stopped; though, teachers were still quite insistent to explain how what I was doing was wrong: too forceful, too argumentative, not dressed correctly. However, the daily masking of my autism and gender dysphoria to look ‘normal’ proved too much for me. By my junior year in high school, I was depressed, hated myself, hated everything. I did very well in school and sports as was expected from my dad but didn’t care much beyond that. I was in pure survival mode.
That survival mode continued throughout college, graduate school, and jobs. I did love working in prisons, though. The pay was terrible, the stress caused PTSD, but I was back to being considered a bit like one of the boys. I would have probably stayed working in prisons, except I got mononucleosis at 32 years old, which led to ME/CFS. Thus, I was too tired to maintain the vigilance needed for prison work, so I ended up changing jobs. However, I continued to work full-time for the next 10 years. Each year, I got sicker and sicker, until one day I was so tired and ill that I couldn’t even figure out how to turn on my computer. I quit that week and went on permanent disability.
So now, I spend almost every day in a dark room, in bed, feeling like I’m dying, and bored to death. I still am getting sicker, but now much more slowly. However, disability gave me one good thing: the time to seek counseling. There, I worked through the trauma of my childhood (mostly), of working in prisons (mostly), and of being severely chronically ill (somewhat). Then, once I realized that being transgender was a thing someone could be, I worked though the idea of being gender-broken and began my transition to male. That one thing, transitioning to male, made an enormous difference in my mental health. Suddenly, so much of my childhood made sense. Instead of just thinking I was a boy, I learned I actually was a boy. These six years of my transition have made me happier with myself than I’ve ever been. I feel more confident and more at home in my body, even if it is severely ill.
But now I have this knowledge of my autism to work through. It, too, explains so much about my life and my difficulties. I can see the intertwining of my gender and autism throughout my life, one affecting the other, and how each led people to ‘other’ me. Autism is another thread I can use to understand why I have been so miserable most of my life and struggled so hard to try to just be ‘normal’. So now I’m on a new journey. I need to learn how to integrate autism into my self-knowledge and learn how to safely unmask my autism. Thus, on my good days, I read about autism, do self-reflections, and try to care for the feelings autism brings to the fore. This journey is interesting but scary. Like changing gender, one must have faith that the end result will be a better me than I am now, a more integrated me. That, I look forward to.
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