This Is Us

The first time I sought out therapy, I was met with a smiling gender-conforming white lady who furrowed her brows when I described the pain I was in and said softly to me that it “must be so hard.” It made me immediately want to bolt from the room. Instead, I just sat there and cried.

I was in graduate school, depressed and unmoored, and the therapist was overseeing a social anxiety group I was desperate to join. She sat me down on a couch across from her and asked a few gentle, quiet questions about what it felt like for me when I tried to make friends. I didn’t know how to answer. I never really tried to make friends at all. Friendships were driven by an invisible machinery I didn’t know how to take apart or reassemble. There was a deep longing inside me for connection, but if you put another human being in front of me, I’d freeze up. …

When the pandemic began, many people took to the internet to share all the things they hoped they’d accomplish in isolation.

“I’m going to write a memoir!” one friend of mine announced.

“I’ll finally have time to work out every day!” another declared.

“Look at all this bread I baked!” said several others.

Across the internet, some people even turned their goal-setting into a cudgel with which to beat others: “I read four books this week and practiced my Spanish every day,” they tweeted. “What’s your excuse?”

When in a state of shock, it’s pretty common to retreat into work. Lonesome and powerless, many of us frantically grasped for a sense of purpose and agency. And in our moralistic culture where suffering is equated with virtue, it’s no wonder a lot of folks wanted to cast a horrifying situation as somehow “worth it.” …

This year, for the first time ever, I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving. I didn’t brave the overnight Amtrak and subject myself to the germs of hundreds of travelers; didn’t wake up in the Cleveland suburbs to watch the parade and drink vanilla-flavored coffee from my mom’s Keurig. I didn’t get to spend two hours with her and my sister, squealing over the cute pups in the National Dog Show. …

Welcome to Autistic Advice, a semi-regular column where I respond to questions about neurodiversity, Autism acceptance, and disability rights from Autistic people and their allies. You can anonymously send me questions via my Curious Cat askbox.

My question today comes from an anonymous user on Curious Cat. They ask:

I am a transgender Autistic who is pro-Capitalist. Is that a bad thing or contradictory?

Anonymous

Thanks for asking this question, Anon. I would imagine you’re asking this because you have been told by some trans & Autistic peers that your economic views are inconsistent with the marginalized place you occupy in society. I bet you’ve also seen a lot of rhetoric online equating a pro-capitalist stance with being amoral, unconcerned with the struggles of oppressed people, and maybe even downright evil. …

It’s December, and my former colleague Courtney has adopted Elf on the Shelf as a pandemic holiday project. Based on the 2005 book of the same name, Elf on the Shelf is a newish “tradition” in which parents position a plastic elf in new locations around the home every day in the countdown to Christmas. Each morning, children are tasked with locating the Elf, whom they’re told is watching over them and reporting on their activities to Santa. In some families, the Elf leaves behind presents for the kids, or hand-written notes, or candy. …

I’ve been slowly working my way through the Netflix series Queen’s Gambit, and have become smitten with the show’s protagonist, Beth Harmon. She’s such a richly rendered, desperately needed portrait of Autism, particularly of how Autism can look among women, people who “mask” their symptoms, and people who were never diagnosed. She’s also a rare media depiction of an Autistic with a drinking problem. And a prescription pill addiction. And a penchant for shoplifting. And trouble managing her money. And maybe some compulsions around sex.

Like so many media portrayal of Autistics, Beth Harmon is shown to be singularly focused on her special interest, competitive chess. She pursues her craft relentlessly, doing anything and sacrificing everything to identify new competitors, amass books on chess moves, shore up her skills, and enter highly-billed competitions. Beth faces down her opponents with a cold-blooded stare, and delivers verbal postmortems on her games in a rapid-fire monotone. She’s blunt and emotionally withdrawn, unable to understand other people’s feelings, or so lost in her obsession as to not care. …

Earlier this week, I asked essential workers who follow me on Instagram to share anything they wished us work-from-homers would understand or recognize about the situation they’re in. I have just under 5,000 Instagram followers, and this question inspired dozens of responses, representing a diverse spread of professions. I heard from baristas and nannies, cooks and dishwashers, EMTs and primary school teachers. Each response offered a bracing account of worker exploitation, exhaustion, and trauma set against a backdrop of customer entitlement. …

There’s a new, hot transphobe out on the prowl for some delicious outrage clout. She’s written a book so transparently cruel and poorly researched that a major retailer swiftly banned it and many independent bookstores refuse to stock it. The book’s been panned by every interviewer who possesses even a shred of scientific knowledge or respect for trans people’s humanity. In many ways, the evil has already been defeated; the bad idea has lost in the court of public opinion, and the trash has been swiftly and unceremoniously taken out.

But on another level, this book has been a raging success. It’s generating exactly the kind of shallow, frantic attention its author always intended. Before the book came out, this author was a relative nobody with some decent bylines. Now that she can crow about being “cancelled” for being a bigot, she is a conservative darling. …