CWs: Transphobia; brief references to various maladaptive behaviors; brief, mostly clinical depiction of sex.
Preface: Occasionally people ask me if I’m serious about this. There’s nothing I say here that I don’t believe per se. At the same time, part of the purpose of this post is to lampoon an incredibly stupid idea one cis guy had about trans people, and to subvert his own strange binarist, clinicalized way of looking at us. Make of that what you will.
Blanchard is so obviously wrong, and yet there’s something alluring about his typology. Yes, it ignores the existence of trans men. Yes, it ignores the existence of nonbinary people. Yes, it says that all trans lesbians are autogynephiles. But there’s something lurking beneath it that, for many trans people, on some level clicks.
What clicks? The notion that there are, broadly, two different kinds of transgender. And that they occupy spaces very roughly corresponding to Blanchard’s “homosexual [sic] transsexual” and “autogynephile”. Blanchard’s theory about the nature of those two types makes no sense, but the types nonetheless exist. Let’s drop the inaccurate labeling. Let’s call “homosexual [sic] transsexuals” Type N and “autogynephiles” Type S,1 and let’s forget about what Blanchard says defines them. We, as trans people, know people who clearly fall into Type N or Type S, and we’re aware of the difference, even if we can’t articulate what divides the two types.
Type N transfolk are the “knew it since I was a baby” type. They’re the “Being trans is just a fact about my past” or “I don’t even see myself as trans” type, the type much more likely to want bottom surgery and to be stealth even in trans-friendly environments. They’re almost always binary.
Type S transfolk are the “I feel better this way” type. They’re the “Trans pride flag in every social media profile” type, the type much more likely to feel any bottom dysphoria resolved by calling it the right word and to out themselves as trans because they think it’s something people ought to know about them. Many are nonbinary, and many more are “binary with caveats”.2
To explain what separates these two types of trans person, we have to start with something that all trans people have in common: All trans people are autistic.
Now, okay, asserting any attribute to be universal among trans people will never be 100% correct, simply because any person can start identifying as trans, and there will always be some nonzero number who do so for reasons unrelated to the ones we normally think of as being involved in trans-ness.3 But setting aside these edge cases, yes, (almost) all trans people are autistic.
I’m not about to present a bunch of numbers about comorbidity between trans-ness and autism. The point is not that all trans people have Autism Spectrum Disorder as clinically defined. In fact, we’re not talking about Autism Spectrum Disorder at all, but the broader concept, what we can call “little-‘a’ autism”. Little-‘a’ autism isn’t defined in the DSM. It’s the definition that’s evolved parallel to the DSM. “Autism” once meant, per Wiktionary, “a pathological tendency to engage in self-centered fantasy thinking”. The colloquial definition of autism today, often used insultingly, is, again per Wiktionary, “Abnormal and unhealthy focus or persistence, stereotypically coupled with low self-awareness and unhealthy hatred of opposition or criticism”.4 Imagine versions of those definitions that weren’t skewed by the input of ableist neurotypicals, draw a line between these two points, and you have the shape of little-‘a’ autism.
Little-‘a’ autism is when the world needs to make sense, and some things make it make more sense, and some things make it make less sense, and some things make so much wondrous sense that you need to spend 20 hours reading about every single detail. Little-‘a’ autism is when there’s always a huge amount of information to process, and you do a damn good job at it if you do say so yourself, but everyone always seems to think you do a bad job just because you forgot to say “Sorry” when your coworker’s dog died. Little-‘a’ autism is when the ambiguity between “Sorry” as an apology and “Sorry” as a commiseration isn’t just something you joke about, but something that triggers that very specific burning feeling in that spot four inches behind the center of your brow, the kind where if you think too long you might have to go break something or hurt yourself or get very drunk—but not in the cool way neurotypical people do, a cold, clinical drunk, scientifically testing how long it takes to stop feeling.
Little-‘a’ autism is when the world needs to make sense.
Maybe this definition feels too hand-wave-y to you, but it’s the only meaningful definition there is. Go look at the DSM definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder. It doesn’t define a syndrome. It defines a jumble of symptoms with no real attempt to explain what unifies them, to explain why wanting to stack soupcans would correlate with crying when there’s thunder and always wanting to wear the same hoodie, even though that’s obvious to us. It reads like if the definition of COVID-19 were written by someone who’d never heard of lungs. The only good definition of autism you’ll get is this kind, the people’s kind. Autism is when the world needs to make sense. Not just should; needs to.
(Almost) all people with ASD are little-‘a’ autistic. Many people without ASD are little-‘a’ autistic. And (almost) all trans people are little-‘a’ autistic, because as a rule the very things that make us trans also make us little-‘a’ autistic. It’s not a comorbidity; it’s inherent in the definitions.
Because things have to be right. Your body has to be right. The classic examples with autistic people are how we dress, how we stand, how we walk. Your foot needs to come down this exact way in your stride. And the need for one’s body to look different than one’s endocrine system has planned—so infamously elusive to explain to most people who lack such a need, because it does not equate to anything they experience—slots perfectly into this system of autistic body needs.
It just feels Right. Things need to feel Right. It’s Bad if things don’t feel Right. If things are Bad, then you need to do bad things, so the Bad things will stop feeling bad. Except they’ll still feel bad. You’ll still feel bad, as long as things aren’t Right.
As a rule the very things that make us trans also make us little-‘a’ autistic. It’s not a comorbidity; it’s inherent in the definitions.
(Almost) all trans people are autistic. But not all trans people are the same kind of autistic. There are two types, in fact: Type N and Type S.
For Type N, the binary gender opposite the one they were assigned at birth is a special iNterest, and transition is the way to best interact with that special interest. A car is the way to embrace your special interest in highways. A pair of binoculars is the way to embrace your special interest in birds. Transitioning is the way to embrace your special interest in the opposite binary gender. The transition will then take on a special role for you, much like the car for the roadfan or the binoculars for the birder, but it won’t be the special interest. It is a means to an end—a very important means to an all-encompassingly important end, but a means nonetheless. Some Type N people will embrace that means, will fly their trans pride flags high, will come out even once they pass. But many won’t understand that. Why highlight the one thing that makes the enjoyment of the special interest, well, imperfect? Why think about the little things that still make you different? Why think about how much more different things once were? You were the Wrong gender before, and it was Bad, but now you are the Right gender, and it is Good.
For Type S, transition is the Stim. Becoming a different gender isn’t the same all-consuming drive. In fact in some ways it’s incidental. Type S people reach for their stim when things are Bad, just like other autistic people (or they themselves at other moments) reach for a fidget toy or tap on objects in the right order or put together a puzzle. It’s soothing. You were stressed, but now you’re thinking about being a different gender, and that idea of changing your social role, or (for many) particularly of changing your body, has a calming effect. And then experimentation becomes the stim. You’re an adult now! You can just buy girl clothes, or guy clothes, or pointedly androgynous or genderfucky clothes, and no one can stop you. Holy shit this is great. Now, getting to interact 24/7 with the thing that calms you down so much—the thing that isn’t itself Right, but definitely isn’t Wrong, and definitely helps make Wrong things feel Right—how can you resist that? You might not even care if you “pass” eventually, or actively resist that as a goal, because that isn’t the point. You want people to know you’re trans, because every time you say it to someone, you’re stimming. It might even be bad to settle down into too stealthily binary a life, because at some point, mightn’t you forget you’re trans at all? Might you just start feeling like a cis person of that gender, and then you would have no stim, and when Bad things happened they would stay Bad.
Blanchard says the unifying attribute for Type N women is androsexuality. Maybe there is some truth to that, or was at a time with less lesbian visibility. If the Type N trans person wants to embrace the norms of the opposite binary gender, and androsexuality is the norm for women, then maybe there’s a pressure, or in particular was a pressure back when Ray Blanchard was young, for a Type N trans woman to be androsexual.
Blanchard says the unifying attribute for Type S women is fetishization. Maybe there, too, there is some amount of truth. Type S women are certainly stereotyped now, in the trans community, as more sexual than Type N.5 Stim and fetish can often blur together, in any autistic context. Just as many autistic people have the Right way to walk, many have the Right way to masturbate. And if being reminded of one’s trans-ness is a plus, not a minus, for many Type S people, what can remind you of it more than feeling one hand on your breasts and one on your penis, or feeling a gay man enter your very male vagina?
Except, anyone who’s discussed sex with enough trans people knows some Type N people for whom there’s a kink aspect. Special interest, just like stim, can become sexualized. But maybe Blanchard just wasn’t asking his “homosexual [sic] transsexuals” the right questions.
Wouldn’t exactly be the first thing he got wrong.
- More on those letters later.
- As one Type S friend of mine once put it: “binary F, but lowercase and kinda like, messy handwriting” or “some strange foreign character or something, it sounds like /f/ and kinda looks like it but we don’t really have a proper box to put it in so it might as well be an F”.
- For instance, someone might transition in search of a purely extrinsic benefit. Such cases are rare but do occur.
- “autism.” Wiktionary, The Free Dictionary. 5 Jul 2022, 22:20 UTC. 25 Jul 2022, 20:39 https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=autism&oldid=67653065.
- Wynn, Natalie. “Shame”. YouTube, uploaded by ContraPoints, 15 Feb. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7WvHTl_Q7I#t=2088. 34:48 to 35:30.