Pride and autism

With Pride month starting, I want to talk about something that is really important in understanding and supporting queer autistics- the concept of autisexuality.

Reflecting on my lived experience as a bi/pansexual, and how as I've accepted my autism diagnosis and learned about autistic culture, the concept of autigender/autisexuality has made things make a lot more sense to me on so many fronts.

For those that don't know, autigender is akin to being genderqueer, but comes from a place of neurodivergence and fundamental separation from neurotypical concepts of gender and sexuality. So, being traditionally masculine is rooted in neurotypicality, and that's not something I've ever felt comfortable with. Same with femininity, so no luck there. Just felt like, on the gender spectrum, I just... didn't fit in, or really care either way. I ended up masking as male in a lot of cases to be a good male role model for a lot of the kids I worked with, but honestly if I had to choose a gender, I'd choose whatever gender PCs or trees are. (He/him pronouns are still fine, btw.)

Same with sexuality. What draws me to a person is often autistic traits. I love people who have the same hyperfocused passionate interests as I do, or at least, similar. I'm not particularly interested in physical appearance, and I've learned there's a lot of fun ways to have fun with bodies of all types, but what unlocks that is that same autistic frequency.

So I think when you're talking with autistic queers, I think it's really important to understand that there may be a standard layer of neurotypical queerness, but there's also autistic queerness on top of that. People are complicated. That's what makes them fun.

Happy Pride month.