5-4-3-2-1!

I recently noticed an odd bit of common ground between the lives of Eddie Izzard and Grayson Perry, whose biographies I’ve just read. Being roughly the same age, it may not be surprising, but they both turned out to be big ‘Thunderbirds’ fans when they were little. The question is, is this about gender identity stuff or is it just coincidence? I have a feeling it isn’t coincidence, which might sound odd.

Yesterday I talked about my former kompounophobia, from which I most fortuitously recovered, and it’s fair to bear in mind here that many people have a puppet phobia. I can in fact relate to that, though it doesn’t really apply any more and my feelings about puppets were never strong enough to amount to a phobia. I just find them slightly creepy. I won’t make a big thing of this personally because to be honest I would be kind of appropriating the identity of puppet-phobes (is there a technical term?) to do that, so let’s just say I can relate to it and to a very limited extent this put me off Sylvia and Gerry Anderson’s stuff. It didn’t put me off ‘Tinker And Tucker’ or ‘Bill And Ben’ though, so it isn’t that simple. Oh, apparently it’s called “automatonophobia”, which brings to mind the idea of people being afraid of robots, which I’m sure does and will happen and which Isaac Asimov wrote about a bit. But I’ll stick to the subject.

‘Thunderbirds’ was a bit of a guilty pleasure for me as a child. I have distinct memories of my mother letting me bunk off church so I could watch it, which would’ve been in the early ’70s. It has the distinction, along with much other Gerry Anderson paraphenalia, of being a hangover from the ’60s for me which I was able to appreciate as fresh and still quite new. Its typography is particularly reminiscent of that era, when capital letters were still very popular in credits and title cards, although later in the decade entirely lower case style became de rigeur, as can be seen, for example, in ‘2001’ and ‘Zardoz’ (yes, 1974, I know). It is of course fairly typical of me to focus on such a small detail, but the use of capital letters in ’60s media intrigues me.

Gerry Anderson’s stuff is of course a whole universe. Although I had considerable enthusiasm for it at the time, this has not persisted particularly well and for me it’s very much relegated to a particular period of my life. It probably peters out in about 1975 with ‘Into Infinity’, also rather confusingly known as ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ because it was a failed pilot. I watched very little ‘Space 1999’ and even the puppet-based stuff was for me confined to ‘Stingray’, ‘Thunderbirds’ and ‘Joe 90’ as far as actually watching it on TV was concerned. However, I was familiar with some of the merchandise, notably the ‘Fireball XL5’ annuals and the Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle toy:

The above specimen apparently now costs £350, and in view of that fact I also recall accidentally breaking my cousin’s Thunderbird 2 toy, mint condition examples of such things are now so valuable.

I’m not sure whether Supermarionation productions were aimed at boys or not. At first glance it does seem like they were because they focussed very much on machines and vehicles, and the characters tended to be male, but there was also Lady Penelope, and I presume she was partly in it as a rôle model for girls. If Izzard and Perry are at all representative of its audience, I can imagine lots of XY children not expected to wear dresses sitting around on Sunday mornings quietly wanting to be her, although I can’t say I was one of them.

I’m not going to do this in any particular order, so I’m going to start with ‘Joe 90’, probably the least popular of the lot although I don’t see much mention of ‘Supercar’ or ‘Fireball XL5’ nowadays. The premise is rather disturbing. A nine-year old adopted child is experimented on to have expert adult learning induced into his brain and sent on secret missions. He has to wear special glasses to retain the knowledge. Apparently this is surmised to be happening in 2012, although when I was watching it I assumed it was in the 1990s because of the title and name of the central character, and there’s a little less focus on machinery as far as the shots are concerned, possibly because the puppets have more human proportions and can bear to be on screen a little longer. It satisfies the boyish fantasy of wanting to be a spy, but does so in a post-Cold War world in which there seems to be global unity. There also seem to be no female characters whatsoever. My nickname when this was on the telly was, unsurprisingly, Joe 90, because of being perceived to be very knowledgeable and the fact that I wore glasses. There is something positive in having a nerdy male hero who isn’t physically strong at least, but there are rather a lot of worrying implications in the setup. It’s like you take the line about today’s children being wrapped in cotton wool, extend it back to the 1970s with the ‘Apache’ style public information film which implies children spent a lot of their time playing independently outside and putting themselves in moral danger, then extend it further into the ’60s and have them hijacking fighter planes and engaging in aerial cat fights while having missiles fired at them! On the other hand, 2001’s ‘Spy Kids’ also had that kind of premise and was I presume influenced by this. I personally think there’s a potentially even more concerning subtext in the all-male environment and the man telling his adopted son to relax while he activates a machine to manipulate his mind, but these were different times and perhaps more innocent. It’s all a bit “hmm”.

‘Thunderbirds’ is of course the flagship series, and does have a strong female protagonist. I don’t know how unusual this was for the time, but as I recall she was, well I was going to say “in the driving seat” but of course Parker had that job, though she was kind of head of operations for International Rescue in Britain. There’s a lot of what I perceive nowadays as padding involving vehicles and gadgets, but that probably depends on the viewer and I presume this was part of the appeal. I think of Grayson Perry’s focus on the idea that machinery offers an escape into a world of soluble and finite problems, and imagine him watching the programme as a distraction from the fraught relationships with and between the adults in his life. Generalising this, the question arises of how many small children were enthralled partly because of similar difficulties in their home lives. Hence some kind of vague path can be made out between a childhood characterised by domestic violence with a choice either to identify with the male (and no, they weren’t all male but they so often were) perpetrator or to reject that identification, and at the same time to escape into a world of technological, emotionally safe but still thrilling situations where the answers are readily available without over-complicated emotional realism, since emotions were already all too real for the children in question. This would mean that the rejection of masculinity involved for Grayson Perry is not innate but has a kind of psychodynamic history to it. However, it might not be feasible to use this as a grand unified theory of M2F transgender nerdiness because Eddie Izzard views herself as genetically determined to be trans, and she was also into ‘Thunderbirds’. Getting back to Lady Penelope, the unequal physical strength of a woman versus a man in this programme is compensated by her use of physical weapons and other pieces of high technology which level things out. There’s an implication that technology emancipates women, but they can also “have it all”, epitomised by the pink car with concealed missile launchers. Lady Penelope’s femininity is equipped with concealed barbs. There are a few oddities about the production. It seems to have been done on 35 mm film, allowing it to be reproduced today in high definition and it looks absolutely gorgeous, revealing enormous attention to detail on the models and props, and as is often so in films and TV programmes of the time there’s a lot of contrasting colours in terms of brightness, including the large quantities of pink used for Lady Penelope’s accoutrements. This must have been done with an eye to the international market, particularly the US, because I know I for one was watching it on a 405-line VHF black and white set, on which all of this would’ve been wasted. Although the remastering is awesome, it does leave me wondering what the point of it was. It suggests a kind of loving attention to detail done without regard to whether anyone would ever see it. The fact that in the UK most of us would’ve been watching it in black and white right up until 1976, and certainly Izzard and Perry would’ve meant that the gender-coding of the pinkness of Penelope’s costume, nick-nacks and car would have been lost unless the child in question had some of the toys or other merchandise. Nonetheless I was aware that it was pink and I don’t really know why. ‘Thunderbirds’ also suggests games to play with dolls which are not really very “dolly”, which brings to mind Izzard’s description of herself as an “action transvestite”.

The merchandise could actually play a bigger part in the imaginative play of the viewers than the programmes and films. I knew about ‘XL-5’ because of the annuals and didn’t make the connection with television. I was slightly puzzled about what it was but didn’t let it bother me that much. In fact it’s a bit like radio in that the pictures are better. I am still very impressed by the lavish beauty of ‘Thunderbirds’, but this wasn’t how it was experienced by the children watching it at the time. Imagination would’ve been more important, and that would’ve involved playing with the toys and reading the strips. In a way it’s almost a shame that the quality of illustration and special effects is so much better today than it was back then, for this reason, and for me at least it feels important that all of this stuff was happening to real models rather than something computer-generated, even if they were “just” models. Referring again to Perry, he had a larger world to escape into because more was left to the imagination, and he also got to develop his imagination in this respect. I’m sure younger artists do this too though, and I don’t know if it’s my age and nostalgia or something more objective which has led me to think this way.

‘Fireball XL-5’ is up until today something I’ve only known from the annuals. Since it was made in 1962, in black and white, there’s a bigger gap between my imagination and the show itself than with the others. It still has some really good models and its universe is bigger than the others, being interstellar space, which is also true as far as imagination is concerned as what you see on the screen has to be worked much harder with due to the relatively low quality. The character Venus is portrayed somewhat anti-sexistly but not very much. For instance, in spite of being a scientist she’s told to get the coffee, but it turns out all she needs to do is press a button, which you might think the men were able to do considering all the buttons they have to press to operate the spaceship, but this is apparently a special lady’s button which would give the men some kind of lurgy. I did also notice that the font is a lot more informal and rather cursive-looking compared to the others, which have quite imposing, blocky characters. I can’t say I have the to watch any more, but unlike the others it lacks nostalgia value for me.

‘Stingray’ is probably the other one I knew from back in the day. This has potential for being the most claustrophobic since it’s set on board submarines, but it didn’t come across like that. Watching it on a black and white television also levelled it with the other series, and in fact black and white TV used to do that generally as there was a less stark division between the “old days”, when everything was in black and white, and “nowadays”, when everything’s in colour. In 1978, for example, I watched ‘Whistle Down The Wind’ from 1961 and it didn’t seem remotely dated. Anyway, ‘Stingray’, which apparently was in colour. There was a short period shortly after the Second World War when all things marine were trendy. This has been attributed to the outbreak of peace in the oceans and a desire to reclaim them as safe places to be, even though historically they really haven’t been seen that way. There’s also a sign of ocean and space being seen as opposite poles – unexplored regions through which intrepid craft can travel – which was more clearly marked out in the ’60s than today. As far as women are concerned, the really big thing about the series is the presence of Marina, a member of an aquatic race of humanoids who never speaks, possibly because her folk are telepathic, and who has long, flowing hair drifting in the water. However, she is knowledgeable about the underwater world and an asset to the crew. There’s also a terrestrial woman called Atlanta Shore who is a rival for Marina’s affection for Troy Tempest, the captain, so that’s not entirely ideal but that doesn’t seem to be all she is. ‘Stingray’ comes between ‘Fireball’ and ‘Thunderbirds’, and I think this shows in the latter’s multimedia approach, since the flagship series has vehicles in space, the air, on land and underwater. You can see a progression of technique and experience there.

‘Captain Scarlet’ I know from the re-runs and the fact that I had a godchild who was into it. It scores over the others in being multi-ethnic, but in fact the Andersons wanted to introduce that to the earlier shows but were put off by the fact that it would’ve meant the networks in the southern US states would’ve refused to put them on if they had. This is reflected in the ’90s and twenty-first century by the rather blobby, gender- and ethnicity-indeterminate characters such as the Teletubbies, who are acceptable cross-culturally for that reason, although that does mean not confronting racism and sexism. There is an obvious problem with an indestructable character, because that would seem to take away all the tension, but I could be talking out of my hat because I can’t really remember them and only saw them as an adult, so they aren’t amenable to having a childhood influence on me.

The opposite is true of ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, also known as ‘Into Infinity’. I found this very appealing indeed and recently read the novelisation. At the time I was impressed by the hardness of the science fiction, and notably I remember feeling envy for and identifying with the girl character Jane Masters and wanting to be her, but not David, the boy. This was in Christmas 1976. The characters form a family travelling in a spaceship near the speed of light and end up in a new universe after falling through a black hole. The main orientation of the programme, which was supposed to become a series but didn’t, is education rather than entertainment, which is probably why it appealed to me as a neurodiverse person, so once again it seems quite likely that I wasn’t alone in that interest in Jane rather than David, and once again an Anderson production has elements relevant to gender identity issues, at least for me.

There are quite a few series I haven’t mentioned. ‘UFO’ I did watch but didn’t make much of. ‘Terrahawks’ is too recent for me and I wasn’t really watching TV at the time anyway. I did see bits of ‘Space Precinct’ but was unimpressed, and ‘Space 1999’ was on the Other Side, which is also true of several others which I did see, but that’s the reason I didn’t watch it so it’s all a bit odd that really. Other things that are odd include 1969’s ‘The Secret Service’ and ‘Terrahawks’ itself. The former has of all people Stanley Unwin in it playing an undercover vicar who can shrink himself and is a mix of live action and puppetry. It wasn’t shown in all the regions and was cancelled in its first series, to be followed by ‘UFO’. ‘Terrahawks’ is a different matter again. From the few clips I’ve seen, it started off as a rather camp series and then turned into something else which seems to have been some kind of comedy. It strongly reminded me of ‘Spitting Image’, which is interesting because the original concept of ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ is even closer to that, and the three are linked by the intention to use latex marionettes, perhaps building on muppet technology. It just seemed that that was the Zeitgeist for innovative telly at the time.

To conclude then, the popularity of Century 21 productions with trans people assigned male at birth would not be surprising, even given that I’ve only come across two examples, because they chime with their general nerdishness, but there are other factors which may make them in particular appealing. First of all, it is I admit a bit of a leap on my part to draw the conclusion that just because Eddie Izzard and Grayson Perrry are both fans of ‘Thunderbirds’ this means everything the Andersons ever made appeals to every initially male-assigned gender incongruent person, because this is obviously never going to be true and would in any case only appeal to people of a certain age at first transmission. However, the Supermarionation shows do generally include the following:

• They are shows featuring doll-like figures performing action adventure stories, which provides an excuse to play with dolls in a less gender stereotypical manner and also puts it up on the screen in an acceptable way.
• They have a limited tendency to show women in active and commanding rôles without having to lose their femininity.
• They provide a detailed world in which the main problems are limited and technical rather than emotional.
• They also provided a world which had to leave out various details because of the limitations of the media at the time, which stimulated the imagination of the viewers to construct a rich fantasy life away from the realities of enforced gender conformity, often by violence or fear.

I personally think this is sufficient explanation for such a phenomenon, if it exists, and I suspect that it does exist. There is another factor, somewhat external to these and more widely applicable. I think of gender incongruence as a form of neurodiversity, and it correlates with other types of neurodiversity, notably being in the autistic landscape but possibly also with dyslexia, as seen with Izzard and possibly other forms such as ADHD. Anderson shows have a clear appeal to certain neurodivergent people in particular, and it may simply be that such people are also strongly gender incongruent.

Or it may all just be Perry and Izzard, and nobody else, but in that case my list might still apply to them.

My Button Phobia

Trigger warning: various phobias – I can’t mention them because those would be triggers for readers with them. Sorry.

For most of my life, up to about 2014 when I was forty-seven, I had a button phobia. I had it for as long as I can remember, and I mentioned it yesterday. I didn’t mention it often, even to people I trusted, for two reasons. One was that I didn’t want it to be exploited for the sake of a joke or something, and the other was that it was difficult for me even to say the word. I’ve decided to talk about it and its effects on my life here.

I describe my abhorrence of them as a phobia, but it’s more like disgust. This is also how other people tend to describe it, although there seems to be a separate pure phobia too, sometimes originating from a negative experience such as almost choking on one as a small child. The usual explanation given for phobias is conditioning, and I’m sure that’s often true. For instance, when I was a child I was also afraid of dogs, and that was because of one jumping up into my pram when I was a baby. This has now long faded, probably by the time I was about ten. The phobia I’m describing here, though, has unexpectedly gone, and I’ll go into that later.

You may have noticed that I’m avoiding naming them. I used to do this when it was active, but now I’m doing it out of consideration for anyone reading this who might have it. I have only knowingly come across one other person with this issue, and he was a gay man. When I found out, I carefully asked him questions because by that time, when I was twenty, I already suspected there was a link between my gender incongruence and this, and that later turned out to be true for me in a very peculiar way, but he didn’t report anything along those lines, hence my free use of that pronoun to refer to him.

The Greek, i.e. technical, term for this is koumpounophobia. I’m not sure how useful it is to have a name for it. There was a phase a few years ago when the internet was slightly younger, when it was being flooded with practically identical websites purporting to address various different phobias, and this was one of them. To my mind, not only was this annoying, since it obscured anyone who might be reaching out to others on the matter, but it was also futile even if the quality of the therapy offered was good, because koumpounophobia is usually an entirely different kind of beast from the likes of my former phobia of dogs, which proceed from a fairly simple learned response to a traumatic association with the object of the phobia. There seems to be a second class of phobias which are more like this, and are often rare, although there are common examples. For instance, arachnophobia (fear of spiders) doesn’t seem to be due to trauma, at least in this life, but is more connected to instinctive fear of that small venomous animal. It doesn’t seem to be based on anything here in Britain, but over much of the rest of the planet even quite small spiders could be a major risk to life, and presumably at some time in our distant evolutionary past, spiders have ended up killing a lot of our potential ancestors to the extent that the actual ones who survived because they were afraid of them passed that trait on to many of us. I get the impression that most people seem to have at least a mild fear of spiders. I have never had any, and I wonder if that’s because the facility in my brain which would manifest that phobia is dedicated to koumpounophobia instead, although I’m not sure because it’s more nauseating disgust than fear, which I presume arachnophobia isn’t.

Koumpounophobia is by no means the rarest phobia. One of the strangest, to my mind, is described as “fear of being drowned by peacocks”, which remarkably is not unique but is extremely rare. I can’t quite remember the details of it but it seems to involve the prospect of being surrounded and overwhelmed by displaying peacocks which would kind of erase your existence through their visual exuberance. Apologies if this disturbs anyone. I mention this one because I think it might offer a clue as to what’s going on. Peacock displays clearly evolved because they make a major visual impression, which in the occasional human triggers a fear response. Up to a certain point, they seem to be doing the same kind of thing in a human brain to that of a peahen, but instead of leading to sexual arousal, they lead to fear in these people.

It’s said that one person in 75 000 has koumpounophobia. That’s about thirteen people in a million. It can make it very difficult to function in the world because one tends to avoid clothes with them and environments with them as far as possible, which of course isn’t very far. It doesn’t fade with exposure either, unlike some other phenomena which become habituated. It has a major impacts on people’s careers in a major way and makes it harder to enjoy special occasions like weddings or achieve possible catharsis in funerals. From a personal perspective, all sorts of things probably impaired my educational achievements, and some of that was down to me, but one thing which definitely did was that the compulsory period of secondary education included a particular kind of school uniform. And imagine the difficulty with job interviews. The problem is that a ubiquitous bit of clothing technology is inextricably woven into the fabric of society to the extent that makes it much harder for someone with this issue to cope. It isn’t even anyone’s fault, and I’ll come back to that because it’s important.

Cats are said to be afraid of cucumbers. This is anecdotal as far as I know and it would be cruel to test it, but the reason seems to be similar to this problem. Cucumbers resemble snakes visually and in terms of odour. Some snakes smell of cucumber and clearly to a cat, whose colour vision is less acute than most humans’, a cucumber looks like a snake. This happens whether or not they’ve ever seen snakes, and it strikes me as similar to koumpounophobia. It’s a side-effect which in the feline case is usually quite innocuous and not something which would be a problem in the wild because they presumably rarely encounter anything similar which is just a vegetable. I would imagine they’re afraid of non-venomous snakes, eels and legless lizards too, but the fact that snakes are often dangerous to them rather than just potential prey means they have this instinctive response.

I used not to be able to say the word in any language I knew it in. It influenced a kind of basic design ethos in my childhood which other people have taken further, notably Steve Jobs. In my case I associated them mildly with wheels and knobs, rotary motion in general and of course controls with the same name, and therefore was keener on hovercraft and linear induction motors than wheeled vehicles, although of course a standard hovercraft has hidden rotary movement in the form of its fan. I imagined a world where there were only slide controls and rectangular touch sensitive panels. Because I ended up going into philosophy and eventually herbalism rather than becoming any kind of designer, this had little influence on the world, but a person like Steve Jobs, who wished to eliminate them entirely from Apple products because of his own phobia, did end up having enormous sway in certain areas and consequently we now have touch screens rather than keyboards. He didn’t invent those of course, but did play a major part in popularising them, and apparently he was also able to cope with an initially fairly conventional career path.

I would imagine that it’s also been a spur for some fashion designers, although I’m not aware of it. It was a major factor, needless to say, in my own clothing choices as an adult, and in fact despite my gender incongruence the more important factor in my preferences was whether they had those fastenings or not. It also applied to press studs and piercings, in that a sleeper or stud was too much like one of them to cope with, on myself or someone else. Consequently, with the exception of jeans I only wore them on work-related occasions, which for me was taking herbal consultations, teaching adult ed and giving talks and lectures. I’ve seen it claimed that the metal ones are less triggering for most people with this issue, but that didn’t apply to me. For some people it extends further to other small round objects, and I suppose for me there was a mild extension to wheels and a stronger one to ear studs, and that last is a jump-off to what I think is going on.

I believe that the source of the phobia in instinctive terms is abhorrence of certain skin lesions, such as boils and those of smallpox, and to some extent skin conditions related to poor constitutional or nutritional health. In evolutionary terms, we’re genetically programmed to avoid these and move away from them, and also not to reproduce with people whose skin health we perceive as poor, as that suggests they may not be good candidates for healthy gametes, low-risk pregnancy or sustained parenting. Incidentally, it’s interesting that sexual attraction to all gender presentation has a universal preference for such features as clear skin and “good” hair, and this spills over into non-sexual contexts too. It’s also deeply unfair, but I’ve already blogged on the faults in the wisdom of disgust. For koumpounophobes, this association works the other way. The experience of nausea and disgust is transferred.

Neurologically, although this doesn’t seem to be backed up by current hypotheses on the origin of phobias, it seems evident to me that phobias share features with sexual paraphilias and epileptic foci. They’re not fundamentally explicable in terms of associations as mental events or amenable to a life experience based narrative in these cases, although as with my dog phobia they are in many others. The response is also not exactly fear, and I was definitely afraid of dogs and not disgusted by them, so it may be that calling them phobias at all is a misapplication of the term. If you ask someone with a sexual fetish why they are turned on by particular objects, clothing or practices (and that’s not strictly speaking a fetish but the word tends to be applied loosely), they can give all sorts of reasons based on appearance, texture, odour and associations, but although these can be understood intellectually they’re never going to lead to the person hearing the explanation acquiring that paraphilia. On the other hand, if you actually have that kink, you won’t even need an explanation because you will immediately understand. There are of course many cases of kinks arising as a result of experience, which for example probably explains why foot and footwear fetishism is so common – they’re in a toddler’s line of sight a lot – but others, such as leather, rubber and PVC, are, I’m guessing, more to do with their comparison to skin and possibly also their physical restrictiveness, and that association doesn’t result from a specific experience but a kind of archetypal similarity. Psychoanalysis, while mainly useless and baroquely distanced from lived reality, does include the useful concept of cathexis here, which is the allocation of emotional and/or intellectual energy to an idea, object or person – “item” is probably the word I’m looking for here. In the case of paraphilia this is positive cathexis, and with phobias it’s negative cathexis.

The other similar category seems to be epileptic seizures triggered by specific foci such as flashing lights or, in one famous case, an open safety pin. This last is particularly close to koumpounophobia. There may be the perceived danger of a point, which will probably be instinctive, or it may be the simple recognition of the concept which triggers the seizure. It’s clearly not appropriate to attempt to explain epilepsy in psychoanalytical or even psychological terms beyond a certain point: maybe the perception of danger from a pin is valid, but that wouldn’t trigger epilepsy even in most epileptics, and it may be nothing to do with it at all.

I should emphasise again that this explanation doesn’t apply to all phobias, or even to all koumpounophobia, because sometimes they arise from learned experience, but on the whole koumpounophobia doesn’t. People often seem very keen on coming up with pop psychological explanations for such things, but they also used to try to explain left-handedness in this way, even in academic circles.

For me, having koumpounophobia has influenced my attitudes towards other things. In Nineteenthly’s utopia, of course there wouldn’t’ve been any of these fasteners and other things would also be different such as all keyboards being membrane like the ZX81’s and hovercars and maglev vehicles replacing wheeled cars and trains, but it would obviously be silly to enact laws making them illegal just because they disgusted me. This has, I think, informed my attitude towards the whole notion of the wisdom of disgust and also homophobia. It seems to me that heterosexuals’ ideas of homosexual activity disgust many of them, but to me that’s irrelevant to ethical judgement, and that arises not only from my own queerness but also from my own koumpounophobia. That said, I did once write a short story about a character who was koumpounophobic and found himself in such a “utopia” in a parallel universe where they were considered old-fashioned and superceded.

A couple of other things. The phobia was so much part of my identity that I didn’t want to lose it. I felt it would lead to me doing disgusting and loathsome things like wearing clothes like that, and I didn’t want to become that person. The author Audrey Niffenegger’s novel ‘Her Fearful Symmetry’ includes a character, Martin, who is obsessive-compulsive and can’t leave the house, who says something like “part of the problem is not wanting to have a solution to the problem”. This could be seen, for example, in germ phobia: someone who is germ-phobic might consider it dangerous not to exercise the degree of care taken to avoid infection, as they see it, and if they were “cured”, it would lead to them acquiring that infection. Not wanting koumpounophobia to end is more abstract, as for most people, though not all, it isn’t perceived as exposing them to danger. It is in a few, for instance some people think they’re germ traps although that seems mainly to be a rationalisation for their phobia but also an extra connection to instinctive disgust, and others are worried they might choke on them. My concern was more like the fear of losing one’s good taste or fashion sense.

I’m still trying to confine gender-related issues to the blog dedicated to it, but it would be remiss of me to omit the remarkable experience of the phobia actually going away. Although I still have my moments, for instance if I’m stressed, since I started taking oestrogen, this phobia has disappeared! I don’t know what to make of this, but it means I am now that person I feared I would become in that sense. I do, however, find that validating because it clearly means that gender incongruence is an organic brain phenomenon rather than something resulting from upbringing or trauma, or anything like that, and that I became “fixed” in all sorts of ways when I started on HRT. I have a vague idea that it might just be something to do with physical penetration, but that doesn’t seem particularly feasible to me. In this new régime, though, I do wear them, and it’s absolutely fine from the viewpoint of not being distracted by disgust or fear. But, there are still two issues. One is that of loyalty to my former “community”. Although I’m aware that this town of around fifty thousand is too small for there to be more than one koumpounophobe in it, I also don’t want to be the source of someone else’s distaste. You may have noticed that I’ve avoided using any images in this post, and that’s why. The obvious images would be triggering. I know it’s unlikely, but I don’t want to be that person even though I’d be swamped by loads of people who are completely unaware and probably consider it peculiar that this even exists, and therefore persist in doing what they do. It’s also impossible to take all obscure difficulties people might have into consideration and they might even be contradictory. The other is that I’ve now got so used to zips and the absence of fasteners that putting on clothes with the Fastener That Dare Not Speak Its Name is actually a massive faff and quite time-consuming. On the other hand, taking time to do that sort of thing is a form of self-care a bit like doing your makeup properly. A third aspect is that if I do wear clothes with them, it can feel like a kind of affirmation that going on oestrogen was the right thing to do, because I now have that option. The last time I did it, I was actually less aware of my clothes than I usually am.

I want to close with the experience which led me to post this. I came across this video on YouTube, which I’m posting as a link rather than embedding because of the trigger issue on the thumbnail, and it turns out that this YouTuber, Georgie Carr, was also selectively mute, and that also affected a family member of mine. I don’t know what to make of this, as these are a single example of them occuring together (I don’t want to call them “comorbities” because that sounds like a term given by detached and perhaps not particularly caring outsiders to them), and I’ve never been selectively mute myself, but it’s noneteheless interesting that they should cluster even if I’m seeing a pattern which isn’t there. I feel like I’m beginning to piece together a more comprehensive understanding of what’s going on, but it still seems quite mysterious and I still don’t know. It’s so fascinating though.

Some Thoughts On Autism

It’s often been suggested that I am on the autistic spectrum, probably more Asperger’s than “classic” autism. I don’t agree with this assertion for a variety of reasons, but as well as getting into that I want to talk today about various issues surrounding this.

The only official diagnoses I have are ADHD, which I discuss here, and gender incongruence, which I’ve been into in great depth on another blog devoted to this issue. I see both of these as forms of neurodiversity, and in fact I believe that this entire household of four people is entirely neurodiverse. But there’s also the issue of self-diagnosis, which has a number of issues associated with it. On a somewhat different issue, I would be extremely surprised if I wasn’t diagnosable as depressive, but I’ve never pursued this. In fact I’d be so surprised if I couldn’t get that diagnosis that I’d probably end up doubting the competence of the people who hadn’t diagnosed me rather than the fact that that fits. The classic questionnaire for that, used for self-diagnosis but officially approved, whose name currently escapes me, shows me as having mixed generalised anxiety disorder and depression. I simply do not care about those labels: if the world was a less depressing and worrying place, I’d be fine, so that’s how to address that in my case. This isn’t supposed to be dismissive of anyone else’s conditions. I also have a strong family history of diagnosed depression which I won’t go into for confidentiality reasons. I should also point out that whereas I have self-diagnosed in this case, I am actually an experienced clinician although the objectivity goes out of the window when your patient is yourself.

But the case for me being Aspie is different. On going through the process of diagnosis for gender incongruence, then known as gender identity disorder, this did touch on being on the autistic spectrum and there is considerable “comorbidity” there in that sixteen percent of people who are gender dysphoric are also probably on the spectrum as opposed to 0.03% in the general population. However, it needs to be born in mind that ideally, most diagnoses should be to the advantage of the patient, and for me being diagnosed as this would drastically increase my gender dysphoria. I need to make something clear before I go on. When I look at the way people on the spectrum behave and think, it strikes me as “normal”, in the sense that I can often empathise with them. Neurotypical behaviour often comes across to me as if the people exhibiting it know some kind of secret the rest of us haven’t been party to and I often find it baffling. It’s like they’ve got a rule book which wasn’t given to me. Hence it could be said that my first impulse in behaviour is often to do things in such a way as to be labelled as autistic. In a way, autism is my “normal”.

Simon Baron-Cohen is well-known as the successful promoter of the “extreme male brain” theory of autism. That is, he sees being on the spectrum as resulting from a greater response of the central nervous system to the action of androgens. It’s often said that “I am my brain”, and I have some sympathy with that except that in fact I think identity is probably either larger or smaller than the brain rather than the exact size. I am, for example, not my basal ganglia because if I had Parkinson’s I imagine it would feel like an obstacle to me and not something I did naturally, and if someone is brain-dead it’s still the role of their next of kin to give permission to turn off their mother’s life support. In such cases, people obviously can’t be their brains because their brains are hardly functioning at all. And they usually aren’t functioning at their funerals either. Even so, there’s a lot of truth in the idea that I am my brain, and if Baron-Cohen’s theory is correct and I’m on the spectrum, that would make me extremely male. The only reason this thought wouldn’t make me suicidal is self-hatred – I would want to continue living as a punishment to myself. Someone who thinks more straightforwardly probably would consider killing themselves to be the appropriate response at this revelation. Therefore it really wouldn’t be good to get a diagnosis of Asperger’s for me. I find it, incidentally, very strange indeed that other trans women don’t find the idea of being on the spectrum absolutely devastating.

Of course it is also true that Asperger’s is underdiagnosed in women and tends to manifest itself differently because of their different social roles. Incidentally, I’m referring to Asperger’s here out of convenience and recognise the problematic nature of the name and the idea that it’s a useful concept as opposed to the rest of the spectrum. A major difference between the presentation of the “syndrome” in women is that they tend to mask more effectively, or at least are called on by social pressure to do so, than men. Masking is the inauthentic performance of neurotypical behaviour, and the patriarchy coerces women to do this far more strongly than it does men. It can become a habit, but it tends to be very tiring and lead to withdrawal and acting out in apparently safer circumstances. For most people it would be better if this pressure wasn’t exerted. Since it’s a vital survival strategy for women to have to do this, the learning curve is very steep and has to be traversed as an urgent necessity, and it’s claimed that this leads to them being underdiagnosed. This is not my experience as a trans woman because the social role carved out for me is masculine, and probably at least as baffling and hard to fit as not being “autistic” is. Therefore that long list of criteria which you may be familiar with about how women Aspies are not like men doesn’t apply to me, just as, presumably, it doesn’t apply to any other trans women unless they transitioned really young.

But I can certainly get on board with the idea that Aspergers is literal testosterone poisoning and that it stops my brain doing what it’s supposed to do. I would like to know more about the research supporting Baron-Cohen’s theory but I avoid finding it out because I fear it will be triggering, so I’m going to move on in my ignorance to touch another issue.

I said before that I am not a textbook case of an Asperger’s person. If I do a questionnaire on the issue, it tends to show that in certain aspects I am indeed strongly typical of an Aspie, but there are always a large number of other answers which show me as the opposite of that. This online test shows me as having “many tendencies of an autism spectrum disorder”, and yes, I know it’s not a good idea to set too much store in such things, but I’m also perceived as being very polite and diplomatic, I choose not to speak in groups rather than avoid it because I think I talk too much and I don’t like the sexual politics of formerly male-assigned people talking more than cis women, I make a point of varying daily tasks out of habit, my ADHD probably contributes to poor planning and I find it hard to imagine fictional characters visually but that’s probably to do with prosopagnosia and I don’t know if that correlates with being on the spectrum or not. I recognise people from context, clothing style and hair rather than faces. This, I think, confirms what I said before: that although I have Aspie tendencies I am probably better described as “neurodiversity not otherwise specified”, if that exists as a diagnosis.

Religiously I also have a number of issues with the very concept of autism. The dominant theory of autism is that it involves the absence of a theory of mind, i.e. impaired ability to empathise. This is deeply problematic from a traditional Christian perspective because it seems to entail that autistic people are incapable of sin, which is essentially selfishness in my view, and if the idea that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” is correct, it has to mean either that autistic people do have a theory of mind and can empathise and therefore do commit sin, or are capable of doing so, or that sin is something other than selfishness. Now I accept evolution of course as well as a lot of other things which some Christians question or reject, but on this occasion I have allowed my religious beliefs to interfere with my perception of a scientific perspective. Another feature of autism is that there is no filter to input or output, as it were. That is, we (assuming I am Aspie) are unable to filter out distracting sensory stimuli as well as being unable to, for instance, “blurt things out” which are seen as inappropriate. The input side of things could be particularly relevant here as there is also a salience theory of autism, or rather, the “salience network” dysfunction hypothesis of autism. It amounts to this. There is a whole blizzard of sensory impressions presented to the brain, something Kant called the Manifold (actually he presumably didn’t call it that but I don’t know what German word he used). Now imagine trying to spot something like eye contact or a tone of voice out of all that stuff. I think the result of this is that one doesn’t get the opportunity to develop social skills, and it then becomes harder to do so as one matures and the brain becomes more hard-wired – one gets “stuck in one’s ways”. Although this opinion has been foisted upon me because of the fact that I’m Christian, I do think it has its merits.

Another view of the failure of empathy in autism is that it results from the very neurodiversity of our (is it our) brains. When a neurotypical person puts themselves in the position of another, they stand a better chance of anticipating their thoughts, feelings or behaviour because they’re effectively attempting to simulate the inputs and outputs of a brain similar to them. If the person attempting this is on the spectrum, they are imagining an atypical brain in that situation and unless the person concerned is themself on the spectrum, they’re less likely to be able to predict what’s happening for them. Hence it isn’t so much a simple failure of empathy as the inability to understand how someone else’s brain works. Note also that if you turn this round and imagine a neurotypical person putting themself in the position of someone with Aspie, and failing, for example, to recognise clothing sensitivity or aversion to persistent loud noises, this is a similar failure or empathy. It’s just that there are fewer of “us” than there are of “them”.

Lack of a filter has also been evoked to explain apparent failure of empathy in another way. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by sensory inputs as someone on the spectrum and this can lead to shutting down. Bearing in mind that like other diagnoses neurodiversity frequently doesn’t fit into a neat box, ADHD people can also be overwhelmed by stimuli. Therefore they have a coping mechanism, which may not actually be coping by the way so much as descending into a kind of breakdown, of shutting down and not perceptibly responding. If a particular feeling or situation is overwhelming to them, including the impression of emotion, the very fact that they can empathise might lead to this kind of shutdown, and it then looks to a bystander that they’re not responding. The fact is that they may be responding only too strongly.

I’m not an expert on the autistic spectrum by any means, and I’ve already warned about the inappropriateness of self-diagnosis. Nevertheless, I hope I’ve managed to express my perspectives on this issue. I’m also aware that what I’ve said may be controversial. If so, please feel free to put me right in the comments.