CLH Words

While  I talk about my transness and my AuDHD here, everything I say below also applies to my other later diagnosed/realized disabilities. I specifically did not talk about my POTS or EDS here because while they are important, they are not an identity I relate to as much as my transness and AuDHD.

AuDHD—the brain type of being both autistic and ADHD. Autism and ADHD are highly comorbid and cannot always be separated

Masking—a term used by autistic folks to talk about the, often unconscious, practice of trying to behave (and eventually think and feel) like an allistic person. If you are unfamiliar with masking, I highly encourage you to look up other autistic people talking about their experiences, as it is an important topic.

There is a common line when telling trans stories (or at least when cis people tell our stories). It goes that even if we come out later in life, we “always knew” that we were trans. As someone who came out when I was about twenty (which by no means is late; the internet has def skewed our definition here), I can assure you that I did not always know. My realization that I was trans was slow. I first started to suspect around sixteen, when I realized that cis men probably didn’t have a deep ache around their manhood and feel a sense of longing to be feminine. It took me years of examining this sense of wrongness, this pain deep at my core, to realize that it was my response to failing at being what everyone thought I was—a man—and denying myself the ability to truly feel myself. I did not always know what I was.  I only know I was me, and that I felt a deep pain inside me.

               Being in neurodivergent spaces, primarily AuDHD ones. It is almost the opposite of the “always known” idea. Late diagnosed/realized people (again, anyone who figured it out after the age of like eighteen, reducing all of adulthood into “late” and shifting the narrative of self-discovery, but this is a rant for another time) have the narrative of not knowing until finally, after a long process of research and self-reflection, it clicks. My journey to figuring out that I am AuDHD is similar to that of my trans identity. I didn’t suspect until eighteen or so. I knew that I was different, I felt it like a deep aching, but I wasn’t able to understand that ach was not of wrongness, but of differentness and longing to fit in. Finally, a few years ago, when I was about twenty-three, I settled on my identity of AuDHD, getting officially diagnosed a year later.

               I cannot separate my AuDHD from my transness, nor can I separate them from myself. I quickly learned that I was different from everyone else. I remember in preschool being made fun of for liking the color purple, because it was a girl color. Just as I learned to mask my autism, learning not to stim, to make eye contact, talk in a way that allistics can follow, I learned to mask my gender. Pink and purple were no longer my favorite colors. I suppressed my urge to wear dresses and feminine clothing, eventually leading to not allowing myself to care what I wore, shunning fashion. While I was never able to be allistic or a cis man, I created a mask that was as close to that ideal as I could get.

Like with many autistic people, that mask eventually grew around me, eating away at the real me until I was barely there. All that was left of the real me beneath the cis-allistic mask was the aching I felt. The longing to be normal, to fit in, twisted and combined with the struggle to be a man, to be comfortable in my skin. I did not know my identities, just that I was failing at being what the world told me I was. I made rules not only about what I was allowed to do (no wearing dresses, no painting nails, etc), but also about what I was allowed to feel and want (no wanting to be feminine, no wanting to be a girl, etc). This is why I never knew I was trans. I hid behind my cis-allistic mask, not letting myself feel who I truly was. The only thing that I could feel was the sense of wrongness, the pain at failing to be the mask I thought I had to be. The mask that the world told me I was.

               When I became my mask, it was impossible to see that there was an alternative. I did not know, did not feel that I was cis and allistic. The mask I made was cis and allistic, and I was expected to be, had to be, my mask. Therefore I must be cis and allistic. It was not a conscious thought, but an unspoken rule. To be trans or autistic was something that other people did, and since I was my mask, my best attempt to be normal, I could not be those things that are other. The first step of realizing that I was trans and AuDHD was realizing that me being cis and allistic are not a given. That the deep sense of wrongness, the ache to be normal and knowledge that I come up lacking in my struggles, were not in fact a part of me but instead my reaction between the friction of my mask and myself. Once I began to realize that the me I was and the me I pretended to be could be different, that I was in fact wearing a mask, I was able to begin to explore the possibilities of being other.               

I have always been trans and AuDHD. But since I live in a world that not only shuns transness and AuDHD, but expects everyone to fulfill the roles of cisgender and neurotypical, I was unable to understand myself as I truly am. It was only in allowing myself to explore who I am outside of my struggle to fulfill the expectations of the world that I was able to come into myself and set aside my mask. We need to build a world that not only allows for and loves diverse ways of being a person, but that actively expects and encourages people to diverge. For as long as allistic and cis are the norm, masking will be required to not be seen as the other, no matter how accepted being other is.