Coming to Terms

A kid in Southern Baptist Texas in the 1970s and 80s has no vocabulary for what he is, only a steady refusal of rules that strike him as senseless. The one bit of colour he risks — a pink tint on a new pair of glasses — his father has removed. Decades later, two words fit: autigender and neuroqueer. This sheet mounts the essay he published in 2022, his words unchanged and under a heading taken from his own sentence, and then takes up what it stops short of: what a word that fits is for, and what it charges.

Against My Grind Link to this section

I didn’t have the vocabulary for what I felt back in Southern Baptist Texas in the 1970s and 80s, but I was uncomfortable with and resistant to gender norms as a kid. They felt: silly, arbitrary, oppressive, confining, unnecessary, counter-productive, irrational. They did not make sense. They did not fit.

A small, shareable anecdote of the ways norms went against my grind, from a lifetime collection:

I didn’t openly express myself in dress much—I was deathly afraid of being noticed and totally unsure about what I felt—but I would splash some color in. I opted for a pink tinted coating on a new pair of eyeglasses once. Kids at school gave me grief, but I liked them and came to wear them as a defiant badge and also a sort of shield. My father had the coating removed.

Several burnouts and a retirement later, I have zero capacity for masking, for attenuating myself to the sensibilities of surrounding bigots and bullies. I enjoy my pink and my flower print Thai fisherman pants and wistfully wishing I could dial my gender to my pansexual, polyamorous, genderpunk, genderqueer mood.

Autigender and neuroqueer are the best fits I’ve found after a lifetime of seeking. Perhaps a term that fits even better will emerge. Perhaps it’s already out there for me to discover. I’ll keep reading other queer Autistics as we help each other figure ourselves out.

A copia, not a category Link to this section

The case against labels nearly always assumes a label is a box — a container, sized in advance by somebody else, that a person is put inside and does not get out of. Against that picture, of course labels look like cages, and of course the humane-sounding move is to ask for fewer of them.

But look again at what the words in that last paragraph are doing. Pansexual, polyamorous, genderpunk, genderqueer, and then autigender and neuroqueer: six words in two sentences, not one of them a box, not one of them cancelling any of the others. That is not a classification. It is a copia.

Copia is a rhetorician’s word for abundance. Erasmus wrote two books on it — De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, on the twofold abundance of words and of matter — on the principle that you cannot choose the expression that lands until you have generated the whole range to choose from. The abundance is not ornament. It is the method, and its proper name is invention.

Jordynn Jack pointed that word at gender. Reading autobiographies, blogs, and forum posts by Autistic writers, she found something that would not sit on either of the models on offer:

A strategy of invention — that is the phrase to hold on to. Copia is not a rack of labels waiting to be issued. Invention, in rhetoric, is the generating stage, the part before the choosing, and Erasmus’s book is two books for that reason: one on abundance of words, one on abundance of matter. Abundance is the method, not the mess.

And a copia is something you can see the extent of. Jack lists what her writers were reaching into — genderqueer, transgendered, femme, butch, boi, neutrois, androgyne, bi- or tri-gender, third gender, and even geek, and then, because gender does not arrive by itself, terms related to sexuality, such as straight, gay, lesbian, pansexual, bisexual, and so on. Set that beside the two sentences above it and the overlap is not a coincidence: pansexual and genderqueer are on both lists, and the whole point of the second one is that it does not stop where the first one does.

Her conclusion is the sentence this sheet is built on. What the diversity of her sources supports, she writes, is an expanded concept of autistic gender identity that pushes past a gender continuum toward a copia, in which terms can be tried on and appropriated, discarded, and invented while still being understood as embodied and constructed. Tried on, appropriated, discarded, invented — four verbs, all of them things a person does, none of them things done to a person.

Sonny Jane Wise arrived at the same shape from the other end of the room, and set a better table for it. Their Neurodiversity Smorgasbord borrows from the relationship smorgasbord — the idea that you describe what a relationship actually is instead of filing it under platonic or romantic — and does the same thing to neurodivergence:

So: a plate. You go down the line, you take what is yours, you leave what is not, and what you carry back is not a verdict on you. It is a description, assembled by you, of one particular evening. Somebody else’s plate has three of the same things on it and four you have never eaten, and neither plate is wrong, and neither is the buffet.

The same materials, arranged differently Link to this section

There is a version of this put precisely rather than culinarily. Florence Ashley’s account of gender identity begins from a problem that looks like an argument and turns out to be a floor plan:

Two people can hand you flatly contradictory accounts of what their gender consists of. One says it is her body. One says it is a set of preferences and a way of moving through a room. One says it is nothing she can locate at all. Ashley’s move is to stop treating that as a contradiction needing a winner. The materials overlap; the buildings do not. What differs is the arrangement, and an arrangement is not a lie.

This is what keeps a copia from being a free-for-all. The parts are real — the body, the messaging, how a pronoun lands when somebody uses it, what a boy did with a pair of pink-tinted glasses and what his father did about it. What is underdetermined is what you build out of them. More than one building stands up.

Self-applied, or it is a different object entirely Link to this section

All of that holds in one direction of travel only. Reverse it and every good thing about it inverts.

Socol is writing about people-first language, but that sentence is the hinge the whole question turns on. A label you reach for and a label you are handed are not the same object in different clothes. One is invention. The other is classification, and classification runs one way: the group that gets named is the group being sorted, and everyone else gets to be the unmarked case. The word can be letter-for-letter identical — Autistic on a plate you assembled, autistic on a form somebody else filled in about you — and the two do opposite work.

Nick Walker built the direction of travel into the grammar, which is the most durable place to put it:

The verb comes first and the label accrues to whoever does the thing. You are not eligible for it; you are doing it. Which is precisely why it cannot be issued to you from a desk: nobody can diagnose you with a practice.

What the label buys Link to this section

None of which makes the handed-down kind disposable, and this is where the argument usually goes wrong in the other direction. A word arrived at in a clinic still opens doors that no self-description opens: a support plan, a legal protection, a reasonable adjustment, an explanation that lands after thirty years of not having one. And it opens a door that has nothing to do with paperwork — other people who recognise the description. A 2023 thematic analysis of Autistic LGBTQIA+ identity and inclusion takes its title from one sentence: My whole life has been a process of finding labels that fit. That is the good of them, put as a life’s work rather than a slogan.

Helen Edgar, writing against a campaign to have autism and ADHD retired as invented labels, puts the aim where it belongs:

Take the word away and the gate is still there. All that has gone is the key — and the people who lose a key they were already struggling to get are not the people who were ever going to be fine either way.

What the label charges Link to this section

And still there is a bill, and it comes due in three ways. The copia hardens: a term invented to describe a relationship to gender turns into a type of person, and the thing that was a strategy of invention becomes another set of boxes with nicer paint. The list lengthens and does less: past a certain point each new word explains a smaller share of you and takes more work to carry. And the plate starts eating the evening — you find yourself defending the arrangement instead of living in it.

• Labels can become barriers when used inflexibly or in a pathologizing way.

  Labels can also be liberating when used to affirm identity, understanding, and belonging when adopting a neuro-affirming approach.

• A list of words and identities doesn’t really begin to scratch the surface of my experience and it’s making me more insular than I’d like.

• I’m reveling in the shedding of labels whilst appreciating the immense privilege I have to know who I am, to have words for my experiences, and the resources to find my own.

Read the order of that last sentence before you borrow it. The shedding comes first and the privilege comes second, and the privilege named is not wealth: it is knowing who I am and having words for my experiences. You can only put down what you have already picked up. Somebody who has never had a word that fits is not travelling light — they are lost, and telling them that labels are limiting is telling them to stay that way.

Six heads on one stem Link to this section

The drawing at the top of this sheet is one arching stem carrying six flower heads, and not one of them matches another. That is not a mistake in the botany. It is the argument: one life, one stem, and a marigold, a coral, a violet, a verdigris, a lichen, and a marigold again, all of them growing off the same plant at the same time and none of them the plant’s true colour.

Which is why the essay above ends where it ends, and why that ending is not modesty. Perhaps a term that fits even better will emerge. A copia does not close. The plate is for this evening. A label is a description you are making, not a verdict you received — and the test was never whether it will hold for good. It is whether, today, it fits.