Sanism in anti-trans propaganda: it’s all about conversion therapy, stupid!

Off the back of Meta's new policy, which bans allegations of mental illness unless the person is LGBTQIA+, let's talk about the sanism inherent in transphobic rhetoric.

With Meta, who run both Facebook and Instagram, recently announcing that treating people as intellectually inferior for being “mentally ill” is going to be allowed on their platforms if that person is trans or homosexual, it feels like a good time to talk about how sanism is inherent to transphobic rhetoric in general.

For some time now, transphobes have been weaponising the high statistical correlation between trans people and autism, as well as other mental illnesses to assert that trans people are just delusional about our need for affirming heathcare.

This is an old propaganda method, taking advantage of the social ableism that encourages us to treat people with disabilities like children, (often for the purpose of abuse, but sometimes out of a misguided sense of care,) as well as the long history of psychology invalidating trans people by pathologising our dysphoria as a variant of psychosis instead.

As an autistic, non-binary trans woman with several diagnosed and stabilized mental illnesses that more or less continually affect my life, this is one of the more frustrating and baffling lies that transphobes spread. They argue that my neurodivergency makes me less qualified to discuss my own experience or less likely to be trans in an authentic way than a neurotypical person. The transphobic propaganda site Transgender Trend makes this argument extremely clear:

“When you are autistic you often don’t realise that your thought processes aren’t the same as everyone else. Autistic people don’t cross-reference every thought against a neurotypical one to analyse if we are correct. We simply think, make decisions – and sometimes it goes horribly wrong because our thought processes have clashed with the way the rest of the world processes information.”

There two assumptions working here that strike me as immediately and fairly obvious false. First of all, I don’t know a single person diagnosed with autism (especially from childhood,) who is unaware their thought processes are different to people without autism. Notice I don’t use the phrase neurotypical to describe these people here. While the term “neurodivergent” originally referred exclusively to people with autism, its definition has been widened in the recent years to encompass any kind of neurological divergence from others, including, but not limited to ADHD, bi-polar disorder, learning disabilities, and psychotic spectrum illnesses.

It should really go without saying, but anybody with a disability of any kind, including autism, would find it really difficult, if not impossible, to fail to understand and very deeply internalise their difference to others from an early age. In a 2019 article on childhood disability for the ABC, disability activist Ellen Fraser-Barbour writes:

“When I was about eight years old, I was out in the school yard with my PE class. One minute I was in the middle of a game with my classmates, the next minute there was an adult running towards me, then in front of me, wailing and stroking my face. She sobbed. I stood frozen, unable to move. The PE teacher eventually came and ushered her away.”

These kinds of humiliating and dehumanizing violations of your bodily autonomy are common for disabled people from an early age. For autistic children, who may lack any physical differences to their non-autistic peers, we are singled out and diagnosed because of differences from other children in terms of both our social habits and our sensory reactions.

These differences are also noticed by our teachers, and our fellow kids. Studies also show they lead autistic children to have more traumatic experiences, on average, to neurotypical children their own age. The idea that it’s even possible for us to suffer like this and not notice that we think differently to other people is infantilising to the point of sheer delusion. But the second part of this argument, the idea that neurotypical thought processes lead to better outcomes for autistic people because they’re how most people think, is even more offensive than the first part!

It’s victim blaming, sure, but beyond that: the only way autistic people have to emulate neurotypical thought processes, aside from letting them do all our thinking for us, (opening us up to the very real risk of someone taking sexual or physical advantage of us, whereupon we’re unlikely to be compensated or believed,) is through masking, literally pretending to be neurotypical to avoid discrimination or abuse.

The trouble with this is, not only does it never fully work, but also, it leads to extra stress, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and exhaustion. Symptoms that are all eerily similar to the ones that trans or gay people experience from being closeted, which is the biggest reason why conversion therapy is always undesirable and never actually succeeds.

Transphobes like these kinds of arguments because they help them wash their hands of the fundamental fascist contradiction in their underlying ideology: if being trans (to them,) is a perversion or contagion, but it’s one that trans people hang onto even if our lives are actually endangered by it, the only way to deal with it “humanely” is through encouraging repression via conversion therapy and subsequently, masking for transgender people.

It makes more sense when you consider the close financial and rhetorical ties between the contempary anti-trans and evangelical Christian movements, both of which promote the repression of what they would call our deviant or immoral desires. These desires, in the case of right-wing Christians, are ones that go against the will of God, or, in the case of purely political transphobes, ones that go against their gender essentialist image of what men and women are supposed to be.

We live a profoundly, multi-laterally ableist society, where disability is seen as ultimately less of a social, more of an individual concern. We expect disabled people to only ask for “reasonable accommodations,” and we allow able-bodied neurotypical people to define what reasonable is. We take it as a given that they’re more equipped to do so because they don’t have an apparent disability or need for care.

The truth of the matter is though, as when it comes to transgender issues, only disabled people really understand the disability experience. If our ability to describe our experience is impaired by our subjective experience of our disability, that doesn’t mean that able-bodied, neurotypical people running off their external perceptions of it understand our own experience better than we do. It definitely doesn’t mean they should be trusted over us to decide, as a society, how we manage it.

I was kept from learning that I was a girl for years because I grew up when we didn’t have the language we have now to talk about the transgender experience. I was alienated from the stories I did hear, not just because I’m a lesbian-attracted, non-binary woman, (who were almost entirely excluded from the traditional narrative of what transition is and who trans women actually are,) but also, because of how my neurodivergency primed me to expect that I was different to everybody else, and should be punished for it.

It should be obvious by now that keeping trans children from transitioning and questioning the validity of the experience of trans adults who are traumatised or mentally ill is intended to stop more people from realising the problem with all this. Even if the sensory symptoms of my autism were largely unchanged by transitioning, many of the social symptoms were actually alleviated.

Even in the year before I went on hormones, choosing to start out with a purely social transition, that lifelong sense of otherness and difference went away because, I simply made more sense to other people on an intuitive level when I approached them while looking like a girl.

Neurodiverse people know our own experience with a level of intimacy and clarity that truly neurotypical people will only ever be able to listen to and learn from, never reach. We should be allowed the right and the responsibility to be the arbiters of that experience.

The reason why transphobic people are attracted to these kinds of arguments is ultimately the same reason that draws them into transphobia itself: they believe that their experience is a natural, desirable default, which trans people have moved away from out of choice or trauma.

The pity that they have for us as a result of this “decision” heavily depends on the type of fascist that they are. But ultimately, the outcome is the same. This is why we need to centre and prioritise the voices of neurodivergent trans people when it comes to the discussion of the issues that affect us.

The truth is that you can’t repress your disability or your dysphoria safely. We should aim to build a world where nobody is expected to either.

Mx Maddison Stoff (she/her) is a neurodivergent non-binary essayist, independent musician and author from Melbourne, Australia. She writes unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction set in a continuous universe which blurs the line between experimental literature & pulp sci-fi. Follow her on Twitter, Patreon, & Bluesky

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