Gender Identity

So, recently some people have linked to me in blog posts while under the impression that i was female-identified... which has led me to try to work out why...

I tend to assume that it's obvious to people that i'm (physically) male, because, well, if you can see and/or hear me "in the flesh" then it is obvious; i'm about 5'11", with a body consisting almost entirely of straight lines and right angles, no breasts, big feet, a bass voice (albeit one that goes up or down a couple of octaves somewhat randomly, but still a clearly male-sounding voice), and prominent facial hair. (I can't find a decent picture of myself to put here, but you can see me in the photos on this post; i'm the one with long dark hair and a beard, in the general style of Aragorn or Faramir in the Lord of the Rings films, or a typical 16th/17th century English Catholic style, such as Guy Fawkes or King Charles I.)

I think my username is part of the reason for the confusion; for those not familiar with the Hindu deity Shiva (who i identify with partly because ze is both "male" and "androgynous" depending on context), a name whose first syllable sounds like the pronoun "she" and which ends in the traditionally-feminine (in European languages) -a probably defaults to female. Also, there are the ecofeminist writer Vandana Shiva (who was also a partial inspiration for the name choice) and the DC Comics character Lady Shiva, who are female (as well as various other people and things with the name Shiva). While i've been mistaken for a woman on a couple of forums where i have used variants of the name Shiva, in most of the places where i've used other usernames (including, oddly, variants of Nataraja, which is one of the epithets of Shiva, and has the same "feminine" ending) i've been assumed to be male long before posting any personal information.

Another possible reason is because the vast majority of outspoken autistic bloggers out there seem to be female (eg. Ballastexistenz, Andrea, Ettina, Bev, ABFH, chaoticidealism, lastcrazyhorn, and plenty of others - Joel and Larry are about the only exceptions i can think of) - which is kind of strange, because the usually-quoted statistics say that autism is much more likely to occur in males than in females. I'm not quite sure what sociological explanation there could be for the predominance of autistic women over autistic men in the blogosphere...

Also i kind of suspect that, because i blog about feminism, i must be female, in some people's minds, because no man could possibly want to talk or write about feminism [/sarcasm]...

The ironic thing is that being thought of as "male" is just as odd to me as being thought of as "female". I don't consider myself to have any sort of "internal" gender identity whatsoever - it always feels like "gender" is simply not a valid category in which to place myself. When i see "gender" as a tick-box category on a form, i feel similarly to if, on a form asking for details of a vehicle, it asked for "miles per gallon" when my vehicle was powered by something completely different (and that can't be measured in gallons), like say solar electricity - i just don't really consider myself to belong to the category of beings that have gender.

I spent quite a few years thinking (on the rare occasions that i thought about gender at all) that "gender identity" was wholly socialised, that the whole concept of identifying as a "man" or a "woman" was something "put into" people by their upbringing and the society around them. Of course, that position led me to be confused about why (the vast majority of) other people seemed to "swallow" it so easily, and i was able to "see through" it, but i filed that in my mind with all the other social conventions that i was confused about being the only person to "see through" (which, of course, my discovry of autism helped explain massively). It fit, however, with the general socialist and feminist worldview which i was developing at that time, and i met a lot of people in those movements at uni who believed roughly the same thing.

Of course, there was one big thing that that belief system completely failed to explain or understand, and that was the existence of trans people. It was a friend's coming out as a trans woman, and the resulting conversations about gender and identity between me and her (which, along with a few other things that happened around the same time, led to it becoming a far, far deeper and more important friendship, and to date my longest-running truly close friendship), which led to me realising that my position was not in fact logical, and that other people - at the very least the subset of trans people who know they are trans from early childhood, and potentially up to and including the vast majority of the population - did have an "internal" gender identity, even if i didn't.

Of course, as well as my former position (no one has "real" gender identity, it's all socially constructed), it's also common to encounter the opposite extreme position (everyone has an internal, binary gender identity, and anyone who thinks ze doesn't is deluded or hasn't self-examined enough). While the former position denies the reality of trans people, the latter position denies the reality of people like me. The minimum real reality seems to me to be that at least some people do have an "innate" or "internal" gender identity, and at least some people don't. What's uncertain to me is the proportion of those categories to each other: some would accept the existence of people like me who don't believe they have an innate gender identity, but claim that we are a small minority, while others would argue that only a small number have "truly" innate gender identity, while perhaps the majority only think they do because of socialisation. I personally suspect that a lot of the socialist-feminists who don't believe that anyone has innate gender identity are actually themselves "neutrals" like me, but haven't encountered (or are blinded by ideology to) the contradictions in believing that everyone is like them/us...

The question of what to label myself in terms of gender identity is an odd one. I'm clearly not trans (although i am an ally), or intersex (as i am, as far as i know, a fully physically "normal" male in terms of genitalia etc). I sometimes use the label "genderqueer" (more so online than in meatspace), but i'm never quite sure exactly what it means to the people i use it in conversation with (as opposed to what it means to me), as it seems to be such an essentially contested term. Then again, arguably it's one of the key things in queer theory that terms to describe identity are necessarily essentially contested, because people have the right to define their own identities, and thus terms can be defined to mean whatever the definer wants them to mean (although, that's possibly straying a bit too far into postmodernism/relativism for me, as well as reminding me a bit of Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty - i think, perhaps speaking from my science-geek side here, that it's important for terms to have a generally understood meaning, and thus accurate uses and inaccurate uses that can be called as inaccurate). Wikipedia has a decent overview of definitions (albeit with a bit of elision between "genderqueer" and "transgender"), and some interesting links.

There's also some good discussion of the term "genderqueer" and gender identity here and here - i particularly like Dw3t-Hthr's concept of "geek" as a gender - something that i strongly suspect a whole lot of gender-variant autistic people would embrace wholeheartedly if it became well-known or popular...

I also strongly suspect that gender variance (including transgender/transsexuality, androgyny, and probably most other variants of genderqueer-ness) is a lot commoner among autistic (or otherwise neurodiverse) people than among the general population. The subject comes up fairly regularly on autism/neurodiversity discussion forums - a quick search of Wrong Planet revealed these notable examples (note that the second one is about atypical perception of autistic people's gender by others), a larger percentage of posters on autism forums openly identify as trans or intersex, by my estimation, than the general population percentage, and my aforementioned transwoman friend (who does read this blog... don't you? It would be nice to get a comment now and again ;) ) knows at least one other "transwoman" who she strongly suspects both of being on the spectrum and of being actually androgyne/"neutral" rather than female in gender identity.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all autistic people are non-normatively gendered, but i do believe that there is probably some sort of link between autism and atypical gender identity. My suspicion is that "group identities" in general (such as ethnicity, class identity, national identity, etc) are less logical and less necessary to autistic people than they are to neurotypical people, and (the social component of) gender identity would be included in that - so, if 2 people both lacked innate gender identity, and one was autistic but the other NT, the autistic person would probably be the more likely to identify as androgynous/agendered/genderqueer, whereas the NT might well still think ze had an innate gender identity due to hir gendered socialisation. (Autistic children are also much more likely to resist gendered socialisation... or, indeed, any kind of socialisation at all ;) )

I think that, possibly, the part of the brain in which gender identity is located (if a single such part exists) might be one of the parts of the brain which is significantly physically different in autistic people, and that it might be linked to issues to do with self-image and proprioception (the Oliver Sacks anecdote about halfway down the Wikipedia article is really interesting, as is the assertion that "Proprioception is permanently impaired in patients who suffer from joint hypermobility or Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome" - as the latter have correlative, if not yet proven genetic, links to both autism and gender variance (links between neurodiversity and hypermobility to be the subject of a forthcoming post)...

Trans people, especially those who are "primary" (aware of their transsexuality from early childhood) report proprioception problems where their "body map" is that of a person of their desired physical sex rather than the physical sex they were born with. Depending on the way that correlation goes, it seems kind of logical to me that someone with an overall impairment of proprioception might not have a gender identity in body-identification term, and/or might lack identification with their body altogether. (I have great trouble understanding why body image - things like body shape, weight, facial features, etc - seems to be of such great importance to the majority of people - another thing which i used to believe was entirely a social construct of Western capitalist "civilisation", but which i now (tentatively) understand to have at least some innate component to it.)

There might also be differences in the parts of the brain that are affected by sex hormones (oestrogen, testosterone, etc) in autistic people. A fairly large number of autistic people (certainly a greater percentage than of non-autistic people) are asexual (which is often accompanied by a lack of gender identity, although to what extent that's due to the conflation of gender and sexuality in a heteronormative society is uncertain), and others (including myself) develop conscious sexuality unusually late in life, and are thus asexual for a considerable period during which the majority of their age peers are some sort of sexual. The vast majority (or so it seems) of autistic women i know online (I don't really know any offline) are either lesbian or asexual. "Unusual" forms of sexuality (eg. dislike of normative sex acts and preference for non-normative sex acts, eg. those not involving penetration - see here) are also seemingly commoner among autistic people. Sex hormone levels might possibly even differ, if autism is (as i suspect it to at least sometimes be) part of a wider genetic syndrome affecting more than just neurology - a lot of autistic people seem to have weaker expression of secondary (ie, acquired at puberty or later) sexual dimorphic characteristics than non-autistic people (for example, i am much less hairy and much less muscular than my brother, who is 7 years younger than me, despite photos of us at equivalent pre-puberty ages being hard to tell apart). All these are things that i am not aware of ever having been investigated, except on an informal/anecdotal basis in autism forums...

So, yeah, i dunno. I'd love to see if there ever has been a formal study on gender identity in autistic (or otherwise neurodiverse) people. And i'm still not sure whether i count as "queer", either. A straw poll on how many readers of this blog thought i was female-IDed would also be... amusing... ;) But anyway, as this is almost certainly my last post of 2007, a happy and fruitful new year to all the awesome bloggers out there. The world needs people who keep on questioning all this stuff...