Let’s talk more about tradition and gatekeeping because the two go hand-in-hand much of the time. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned how much I hate gatekeeping. In music, video games, and just about anything else. That morphed into me musing about traditions and how I was mostly against them, too. Or rather, I did not mindlessly support traditions that continued just because.
Here’s something I’ve been musing about for several months. There is evidence that autistic people are significantly more likely to be trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming. I’ve talked about it with a friend of mine who’s trans, and we both have our hypotheses as to why there is a correlation (which, need I remind you, is not causation). I think it’s because when you’re autistic, you’re already a weirdo in the eyes of others. You’re on the outside/the fringe, and already look at things differently.
I’ll speak for myself. I was a weirdo from the time I was young. I was talking to K tonight, and we agreed that one of the good things about people being more aware of mental health issues these days is that labels can help you deal with things. I’ve said that if I had known thirty years ago that I was neurodivergent, I think things would have been much different for me.
I also think that having that different point of view is what led me to question so many traditions that others took for granted. Like gender. We accepted at some point that race was as social construct, so why not gender?
One issue I have because of my neurodivergence is that I don’t see things the way normies do. And I don’t accept things that others considerable unremarkable. Like I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it started with me realizing I was bi when I was in my early twenties, followed by the revelation that I did not have to have children. Actually, it might have been the former after the latter, but they were very close together.
These were followed by me always questioning my gender in that I felt I wasn’t a woman because I didn’t do woman-centered things, and I was roundly (and soundly) chastized for it. At that time, there wasn’t any talk of gender nonconforming or nonbinary. I was just a bad woman in most people’s eyes. I felt like I was failing over and over again at something so basic.
Once I started questioning, I could not stop. I like to tell the story I walked away from Christianity when I had sex for the first time. I had been told all my life that i would go to hell if I had sex before marriage. It was an awful, terrible, sinful thing, and only bad girls did such a thing (and, yes, it was more directed at girls/women than boys/men).