11:05pm May 19, 2014

➸ Questions about Autism Women's Network?

youneedacat:

youneedacat:

I’ve been meaning to ask this, and since I was finally able to post about my relationship to the idea of ‘woman’ without the world imploding on my head, maybe I can finally ask it.

Does the Autism Women’s Network allow people like me? See above link for what I mean: In my case, genderless…

Okay so I’ve gotten one response, not from AWN, that says I don’t belong in ‘women’s spaces’ because it’d be the same as letting a cis man in and ‘centering people who are not women’.

I have to disagree, because ‘women’s spaces’ are not a uniform type of place. There are places that are only for trans women. There are places that are only for cis or trans women. There are places that are only for people raised as women (sometimes just cis, sometimes cis or otherwise). There are places that are pluralistic, and try to make a wide range of people welcome.

AWN seems to be one of the more pluralistic places where I am in fact welcome as I am.

And personally? I don’t see letting in people who were raised as women but don’t have a female gender identity as always wrong. Sometimes it’s wrong. It depends on what you’re trying to do. But some people find the experience of being raised as female, being subject to sexism and misogyny, etc. as an important shared experience. Some people find it so important that they try to shut out anyone who wasn’t raised as female, which I usually have a problem with. But other people acknowledge that there are many ways to be a woman, and being raised and treated as female can be an important experience of womanhood even among people who don’t have a female gender identity. Most trans and genderless people I’ve known who were raised female, have a visceral understanding of this shared experience, even if they’d never in a million years identify as women. And one reason that many of us gravitate towards women-centered communities is because it gives us a community where a larger than normal percentage of people are going to have that experience.

Unfortunately, some communities then turn around and say the experience of being raised female is so central that trans women shouldn’t be involved, they’ll even put it in the same way, that including trans women is ‘centering men’ (even though trans women are not men). And that’s horrible. And that’s the situation that usually causes a lot of people in trans communities to be quite leery of considering upbringing to have any relation to gender and what communities you should be a part of. Because they’re afraid that it will open the door to exclusion of trans women from communities that are very important to trans women, which then leads to a lot of other awful consequences.

But the way AWN does it, it’s possible to have both. Because people with a female-raised background and childhood (whether or not we identify as female) are welcome, and transfeminine people of all varieties are welcome, and in general it’s acknowledged that ‘women’ is being used in a broad sense with many definitions that are equally valid and important to the mission of the organization. This does not make AWN any less a “women’s space” than a place that is more stringent with its boundaries. There is no such thing as a universal “women’s space” with universal rules that apply to it, because different places are created by different people with different purposes in mind.

Anyway if I thought I was unwelcome, I would leave instantly. But obviously I am welcome, and I seriously doubt that the inclusion of a bio-female genderless person is going to somehow stop the organization from ‘centering’ female perspectives. No good organization would run on a super-strict set of ideological rules like that anyway, reality demands flexibility.

Especially since, as I was thinking more about this tonight…SO MANY autistic people have some kind of experience of gender variance, gender ambiguity, or gender non-conformity. As that one study that I posted earlier this week found…at rates that suggest it could be an overwhelming majority, in fact. It becomes barely even plausible that an organization for autistic women could even be viable with a gender identity policy that was all that strict or exclusionary.

Yeah among autistic people who were raised female, I’ve rarely met one who was completely at ease with womanhood, to put it mildly. And those who were, came at it from a long and rocky history in general. An autism women’s network that was only for people who were strictly women, gender-wise, (whether cis or trans) would be extremely small.

Notes: