funereal-disease:
funereal-disease:
starting to feel more and more like my gender is “autism”
to expound on this (it’s okay to reblog the expanded version):
I like living in a female body. I like my sexed characteristics. I like presenting femininely. I like being referred to as “she”. I have always been uncomplicatedly cis by pretty much every measure, and I don’t think that has changed. What’s changed, I think, is what all those things *mean* to the world around me.
“It doesn’t feel good when people say ‘everyone’ and they don’t mean you.” I heard that the other day, and I haven’t been able to let it go. It crystallizes what I’ve been feeling over the past year: that autistic women, or at least high-systemizing-low-empathizing women, are being increasingly defined out of womanhood itself. I’m seeing a return to frankly disturbing essentialism among women of my generation. It’s of a piece with that “feminist astrology” post I wrote a while back, but it’s more than that. It’s a creeping woo-ishness in the gender discourse that’s beginning to make me nauseous.
It seems, to my admittedly untrained eye, that despite constant pretenses at breaking down the gender binary, millennial and Gen Z women are not just enforcing it – they’re widening the gulf. The general mood is that there are things women know that men just can’t understand or even truly empathize with. On the more overly woo-ish end of things, there’s astrology and “feminine energy” and literal goddess worship. But the essentialized dichotomy shows up in more mainstream media, too. It underlies every thinkpiece on “how women feel” about X, Y, or Z. It’s there when women of my cohort make fun of STEMlords and “well actually"s and hyperlogical white dudes and expect me to laugh along with it. It’s not even subtle in posts like “women’s atheism is fundamentally different from men’s” and “women don’t say what they mean and that’s okay”. It’s present in every piece of emotional manipulation disguised as activism that women, being The Nurturing Ones, are supposed to fall for.
Obviously the stereotype itself is nothing new – what’s new is the enthusiasm with which my generation has seemingly decided to lean into it. I fear that by the time we’re fully in control of the media and the public narrative, women like me might be defined out of womanhood altogether. And I fear that responses to this concern will run along the lines of “it’s okay, just admit you’re non-binary”. I’m *not* non-binary! You fucks just moved the goalposts! Narrowing what counts as “woman” isn’t okay just because claiming non-binary genders is becoming more of an option. It’s still defining people out against their will.
tl;dr my gender is “too femme to count as male but too high-systemizing for The Sisterhood”
This may be recency bias on my end, but goddamn, today’s gender essentialism makes everything surrounding the concept of gender so very confusing. The worst part is that it’s gender essentialism dressed up as ‘breaking down the gender binary’. It’s basically just a repackaging of traditional gender norms with the labels on what’s good and what’s bad switched around.
But not quite. A lot of the vitriol directed at what they think is typically male is just slagging on autistic people. When you tell them this, they’ll look at you funny and say that of course they don’t hate autistic people, they’re not ableist!
But that’s because they don’t know what autism is, they don’t know what it actually looks like in the nitty-gritty, beyond the idealised image they have in their heads.
There’s a lot said about how autism is severely underdiagnosed in women because the behaviours that indicate autism are generally expected of women in society, yet I see a lot of these people stereotyping all men as having these autistic traits, while not realising they are autistic traits, and then unilaterally (or at least, without any concern for the scrupulous, which is to say, many autistic people) declaring all these traits to be bad and in need of changing.
And there’s just so much collateral damage in that approach! They’re hurting so many people that they don’t even mean to hurt and I just want to scream at them to stop doing that.
But then I’d just be aggressive, I guess.
A part of the gender thing on here, in particular, seems to be the repackaging of any action or feeling or concept related to gender not stereotypically on one side of the male/female dichotomy as non-binary. I am aware that there are non-binary people, but no every woman who presents as/likes sterotypically masculine things is non-binary and the same with men and femininity. It seems like, out of an effort to broaden the gender spectum, some people have been reinforcing gender essentialism, instead.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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