the brain | anatomy OfA xenowolf

Welcome to my brain, or at least select portions of it externalized and fossilized, in writing. To quote the description of the accompanying Spotify playlist I put together for this project, Anatomy of a Xenowolf is “an interactive memoir-manifesto webpage: a Wiki of my life rolled in heavy allegory and hyperfixation crumbs, then deep fried in autism.” That was the goal, and still is to some extent, but the stories I had to tell took centerstage in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s still technically interactive, though that affordance is minimal and optional. (You might note the numbered sections are all scrambled, it’s up to you if you want to hop around to read them in chronological order.) It’s still a memoir, fragmented and refracted through the use of second person pronouns, stilted painful memories, and embodied examples of living as an undiagnosed autistic person. It’s still a manifesto, there is a call to action embedded within this piece; it’s one that begs for compassion and generosity of spirit, it implores you to experience my precise flavor of hyperconnectivity in the face of alleged-asociality. Could an autistic person make this? Well:

What follows simply cannot be a coherent, linear story– by nature of being autistic, I am apparently incapable of rhetoric. But, you could’ve fooled me; my propensity for never shutting the fuck up around people I feel safe with prevented me from ever considering that I have autism in the first place. Now, my sister? Much, much quieter when she was younger, I did the talking for her. My mom tells me that when I was a toddler, meaning Ava was an even smaller toddler, she would ask us how our days went. Ava wouldn’t-couldn’t say a word before I answered for her (e.g. “Her day was good, we did blah, blah, blah”).

You know one of the biggest injustices of the public’s autism (un-)awareness? The fact that hyperverbality is also a sign of ASD, not just mutism or being nonverbal. It’s a spectrum disorder, so it makes sense that seemingly antithetical symptom presentations can coexist within the same diagnostic criteria. But it’s not like there’s a mass-cultural interest or investment in understanding difference, so why would it be general knowledge that sometimes autistic people naturally gravitate towards loving communication and others so much? We’re just not naturals at showing it.

My dad recalls how I spoke in full sentences by the time I was two, while a photo I reprinted on my high school graduation announcement portrays a snapshot of my hyperlexia. Put most simply: words were-are my forever home. Words, written or spoken and sometimes sung, provide divine insulation and nesting materials. Words, for me, represent abundance and enrichment. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that it wasn’t “normal” to memorize thousands of song lyrics with ease, or to have subtitles flitting across my brain’s visual interface as I hear words or prepare to speak. It’s not “normal” to literally write sentences in your head ahead of speaking them? Or, that your short term memory kicks out so often it’s difficult to remember how far you are into the sentence you’ve pre-written and speak-read aloud? Y’all didn’t have a word count of a million in your Google Drive by the time you finished undergrad? (Which by the way equals, on the conservative end, eight novels and on the generous end, twenty.)

Despite all of this and receiving substantial recognition for my community building skills, you might be surprised to hear I’m not supposed to be able to articulate myself as an autistic person. Upon learning about my autism, I also learned that mainstream psychiatric institutions and standardized diagnostic criteria disbelieves in an autistic person’s understanding of themselves as an individual in relation to others. Which is to say, the hegemonic field of psychology’s current understanding of autism is oriented around the concept of a “theory of mind.” This says that autistic folks, by nature of being autistic, cannot comprehend that they are entities with rich inner worlds engaging and communicating with other beings with their own personal interiority. As rhetorician and disability scholar Remi Yergeau writes, “Autism’s essence, if you will, has been clinically identified as a disorder that prevents individuals from exercising free will and precludes them from accessing self-knowledge and knowledge of human others. Its subjects are not subjects in the agentive sense of the word, but are rather passively subject to the motions of brains and dermis gone awry.” (8).

The danger of talking about autism in this way, as souls relegated to an eternal carceral state of mental powerlessness– is that it implicitly assigns respect only to those reaching a certain threshold of ability. Considering that a person’s brain creates their being, their behavior, etc. and how our wrld typically refuses to meet them where they’re at, using the language of “oh, they can’t help how they are” acts as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s kinda true– autistic people do not consciously decide to be autistic and to have these struggles. On the other, neurotypical people conditioned to dehumanize the disabled from living in an ableist culture often hear this and their bias warps it to mean “those who aren’t like that then must pick up the slack” within their interactions with neurodivergent folks. It implies who we should really be sympathizing with are the non-disabled, who bear the burden of smoothing over the consequences arising from autistic people acting as they do.

My issue with this? They actually don’t often carry that perceived responsibility with honor or sincerity– they have next to zero empathy for autistic people and their struggles because they don’t take the time to truly see the person beyond the condition. In my experience, my autistic traits have been met with LOTS of hostility and degradation. Neurotypicals, many of y’all are just fucking bullies and don’t want to acknowledge that you haven’t grown up yet. You’d rather go into “helper” fields to prove to yourself that you are good sooner than you’d decidedly be good. Your being ugly on the inside contributes to widespread suffering, I hope you know– but, you probably don’t and probably haven’t ever stopped to consider whether you’re a part of the problem. (Bigotry and bias can be subtle, that’s its insidious power. When you as an individual have limited access to wield institutional power, your discrimination won’t be as easy to clock. Sure, you’re not a cop killing or beating or pepper spraying peaceful protesters while wearing symbols dog-whistling to white supremacists, but have you ever paused and checked yourself on saying out of pocket shit to people whose lives you don’t recognize let alone understand? Why (not)?)

Are you trying to help or cure? In order to answer comprehensively (and without making an ass of yourself, please be for fucking real before you open your ignorant mouth), it might be worthwhile for you to reflect on how, historically, the word “cure” has been synonymous with abusive tactics and eradication.

My final issue with the rhetorical disempowerment around autism? Y’all don’t choose your neurotype either!1!!1!1!!! Put best by Remi:

Of course, framing autism as neurological involuntarity is a false construct. After all, does anyone really choose their neurology? And yet, even though neurotypicality is as much an involuntarity as is mental disability or neurodivergence,

the construct of involuntarity is culturally inscribed into autism as a condition. Autistics wrench and scream and rock

their bodies, and they have no choice; they have no agency; they project little to no rhetorical or narrativistic purpose.

Within this passivity-centric framework, involuntarity…likewise encompasses any act of communication, or what white-coat types might otherwise reduce to inappropriate behaviors; it encompasses embodiment; it encompasses how one dwells in the world. It signifies a lack of purpose, a lack of audience awareness, a lack of control over one’s own person– and under the banner of person, I’m including how we conceptualize mind, body, being, and self-

determination. My flapping fingers and facial tics signify an anti-discourse of sorts: Where is my control? Where is my

communicability? Would anyone choose a life of ticcing? How can an involuntary movement, an involuntary

neurology, a state of being predicated on asociality– how can these things be rhetorical? (Yergeau, 8)

They’re rhetorical in the same way that a neurotypical being overwhelmed by their emotions can lead to collateral damage in the form of them expressing themselves. Is getting overstimulated and angry and punching a hole in the drywall not another form of involuntary rhetoric, [Redacted]? Are you not making a (loud) sensory-based statement through the sounds of screams and cracked gypsum board? Is shutting down and refusing to communicate your expectations not just an involuntary internal (non)communicative mechanism? (Is that not just a premeditated resentment, if neurotypicals are truly intentional, infallible communicators?)

The falsehood that autistic people, in particular, are helpless being who they are seems like a silly justification for ableism. It smells to me like a cheap ploy to assert your superiority over others. No one chooses the brain they’re born with, you can’t help being the way you are either– unless you commit to working within your own neuroplasticity to cultivate growth (it’s a mindset). It’s about being willing to self-reflect and try for better, for others and yourself, regardless of where you started. Simply: get gud. [Read: be [a] good [person], sincerely be better to those you’ve tasked yourself to care about.]

As for my part in this mess: I chose to write this because of two horrible experiences I had in one of my writing classes here at UMich Ann Arbor. The title of the course was Advanced Rhetoric and Research and comprised an interdisciplinary group of undergrads. All were responsible for two projects by the end of the semester, the former being an introduction to an author we felt everyone should read at some point and the latter our own investigative research on whatever topic we felt called to explore. At that point, I had been out as trans for less than a year and had changed my name– which is one of the most freeing things I've done for myself, by the way. So it felt appropriate to bring awareness to the practice of deciding a new name as a gender non-conforming person. I wanted to show that there is intention and there are legitimate ideas that go into the process of renaming yourself; I interviewed trans friends of mine, found evidence of culturally, family, and history-informed selections, then wrote, directed, and edited a sixteen minute documentary about it titled There’s Something Kinda Funky Going on With My Gender (credit to Grey Weinstein, founder of The Michigan Gayly, for that line).

But this is neither here nor there, the (first) unfortunate incident I experienced in that class happened way before the time for working on that project arrived. In fact, it happened on the first fucking day of class. Our professor, a nice but I perceive somewhat emotionally unaware woman, asked us all to do an exercise in which we were trying to understand ourselves in relation to others. As writers, especially writers engaging in socially resonant research topics, we have a responsibility to position ourselves, to explicitly name our conflicts of interest in what we are writing about. To practice this, we were asked to share out in a circle our answer to the question “When was the first time you noticed your social positioning or were made aware of other people’s identities?”

Cut to a (white) person immediately describing when she discovered that (anti-Asian) racism existed in middle or high school when a Vietnamese family was experiencing social ostracization in their rural Southern town. While not bragging, per se, her storying of this moment of realization reeked of white saviorism and really highlighted how her family was the only to extend a welcome to the (racialized, Othered) newcomers. (Did they stay friends with the family? Fuck no, it sounded like she hung out with their similarly aged child a few times and called it a rescue.)

Other people described their beginning to understand ableism when one of their parents became disabled and lost everything (their career, support system of “friends,” etc). There was some talk of poverty, there was more minimal talk of race, most of it was gender-based. All of these realizations were-are valid, of course, but to me, they were horrifying in that they were all wayyyyy too recent. You’re telling me adults studying at one of the best universities around are actually pretty fresh to the idea of discrimination? (This is a problem I kept running into in tons of humanities classes here; despite what people might think about UMich being a very progressive, liberal campus, you’d be surprised how many people here are just unfathomably wealthy and isolated from seeing oppression with unclouded eyes.)

By the time the circle got to me, I was shaking and didn’t say anything because I couldn’t land quickly enough on the “first” time I noticed this wrld’s inequality. My brain had turned into a bright overstimulated slot machine with horror stories from my childhood spitting out garish images of systemic injustice. I considered one of these:

When I was a sophomore in high school, we played this game with our orchestra conductor where at the beginning of class we’d propose goofy questions to him. The format never changed: “would you do x, y, z, thing for a million dollars?” He almost always said no, and on this particular day, we were all shocked he wouldn’t do this really small insignificant thing for a million. His justification? “One million dollars is not enough to change your life. It’s not enough to live off of for the rest of your life, so it’s not going to actually change anything, you’ll still have to go to work again eventually.” I was genuinely disgusted by it, me and a “friend” both-- the same person described in #44 actually. The crucial context is: we both had just lost relatives to poverty and not being able to afford healthcare. My mom had just died and we couldn’t afford funeral services for her; she was cremated for a total of $3,000 and that alone bankrupted her husband. Now our teacher? His wife was an administrator for our local hospital and he regularly mentioned how he didn’t have to work as our teacher, this was basically his hobby. Now imagine how sick I felt once I got to UMich and one of my first roommates bragged about how she had blown through a grand in a month on just clothes, a few separate times. Could those times when she indulged in “retail therapy” or my teacher’s hobby have saved my mom’s life? Could that money have made a difference, or “changed a life?” Could it have spared one?

When I was a sophomore in high school, our English teacher had us do book reports on whatever we were reading. I, being a weirdo nerd, was reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander because my dad recommended it to me. It was so difficult to work through because I was a sixteen year old trying to read the writing of a very accomplished civil rights litigator and legal scholar. But I tried, and came in early before class to draw a diagram of a hypothetical Black man moving through the legal system on the board. After I finished talking, a (Black) classmate raised her hand– the first time I’d ever seen her do so– and thanked me for talking about it. The week before, her and her brother were walking down their street and got stopped by the (over)police present. She said they grabbed her brother and hit him a few times while arresting him, and she didn’t know why or where they took him. She said she still didn’t know where he was and I was stunned silent. No one said anything, including our teacher, and so I told her I was so sorry that this happened to them, but I believed her and appreciated her saying something.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I had to take this awful elective course about Michigan history where the teacher taught us absolutely nothing. But, we each had to research something and I did a presentation about how Michigan’s chapter of the Klu Klux Klan had its headquarters in Howell and had organized a school bus bombing in the 70s in response to desegregation/integration efforts in Pontiac. There was a white student in the class who took an opportunity, not during mine in particular but during presentations, to talk at the Black students in the back of the class. They were clowning around and not paying attention and were usually on their phones, but this person didn’t take the time to understand why students who struggled in school maybe wouldn’t be interested in constantly hearing Black history in solely a violent context and maybe would check out instead. She went on an uninterrupted tirade about how “I’m scared of you people, because you’re the type who don’t learn anything and cause problems.”

When I was a sophomore in high school, in that same awful elective course, our teacher decided to spend the entire hour on September 11th talking about, of course, 9/11. We watched the same footage I’ve seen of the towers every single year since elementary school. At the end of the news reports and explaining it from all these different angles of terror, he asked us, “What changed in the US after 9/11?” I decided to chime in and pointed out that Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by a significant percentage immediately following the attacks. He sputtered, obviously caught off guard by this response, and went, “Yeah, Islamophobia? Yeah, that definitely changed.” One of the only Muslim students in our school sat behind me and poked my shoulder after our teacher moved on. She said, “Thank you for bringing up the hate crimes, I’ve never heard someone bring up Islamophobia when we talk about 9/11. It got really bad for my family after that.”

When my older sister was a sophomore in high school, meaning I was in elementary school, one of her best friends was in an abusive relationship. He pulled her by her hair and beat her ass on the main staircase of our high school, and I don’t believe anything was done about it.

When I was a senior in high school, it was somewhat common knowledge that there was a group of dudes buying and selling girls’ nudes (nonconsensually, if that wasn’t obvious). One of my friends got partially roped into it, as she had been friendly towards one of the guys who did that, who then was solicited by another dude in that group who thought he might have access to her body since they talked. Basically Dude 2 tried to buy her nudes off Dude 1 because they [Dude 1 and her] had had a handful of good interactions. When she and Dude 1 went to the principal with this information and receipts, our school’s administrator interrogated her, blamed her, and told her to get lost with this issue if she didn’t want to get in trouble. Did she care that there was a network of teenage boys trading nudes, which counts as child sexual abuse material technically since we were all minors? No, she went immediately into slut-shaming mode and told my friend to stop being a liar even though she hadn’t done anything wrong.

Which to pick? I could keep going (I will keep going). But then, in that moment in class, I chose to stay silent; I didn’t trust any of these people, these strangers, to react sensitively or with the emotional maturity that these topics demand. Had I chosen to be vulnerable, I knew I would snap if someone denied me my pain and the pain I've witnessed. And at that point in my life, I didn’t have the mental stability to bounce back from that that easily.

The second time I felt like I had to share these stories was later in the semester. We were discussing issues we’d run into while making our projects and I was trying to explain that I wasn’t sure how to explain transness to a general audience. I was grappling with how many “explanatory commas” to add to my own lived experience and that of my (genderqueer) friend’s. (A concept I got from a podcast episode we were required to listen to in my History of the American South class the previous year; in it, Black content creators and historians were discussing when it’s worth explaining Black cultural details to a non-Black audience– when it’s worth it to add “an explanatory comma” to provide context for listeners from an out-group not in-the-know.) The same person from that saving-a-Vietnamese-family story told me, “You don’t have to speak on behalf of all trans people” and I about lost my shit. Internally, of course. I decided to stop talking because we had been dissecting my work issues for like twenty minutes and I wanted it to stop.

My frustration resulted from the fact that I had been pointing out that I’m the first trans person plenty of people in my life have talked to, and that there’s an inherent responsibility to that game. It’s not just about elevating trans voices and curating a political platform on which we can speak of our own experiences– of course, it’s about that and it’s always been about that. But now it’s also about legibility. What’s the fucking point if non-queer folks see our experiences, decide they’re too difficult to comprehend, and turn a blind eye (again and again and again)? What’s the point of creating work centering queer joy for a general audience if it’s not both specific and generalized for the sake of inclusion? Our mistake in that interaction is thus: yes, of course, I shouldn’t be made to bear the burden of educating people about my existence, but that doesn’t detract from the reality that these are the social dynamics in which we operate. Yes, of course, I can’t and shouldn’t speak on behalf of all trans people (we are not a monolith) but that didn’t change that for many individual audience members, I was-am all the trans people they know. This framework, one of mass ignorance on the part of gender-normative folk, needs to change and I was attempting to do just that by being a sweet little tranny holding the hands of people unused to our presence.

A year after that, I found out I’m autistic– which just compounded the social-hits to my credibility as a person worth listening to if we’re being a traditionalist about it. (Meaning, I’ve noticed younger people with separation from the past are more willing to hear me out about traditionally social taboo topics.) So here I am, again, trying for that. Can I speak on behalf of all autistic or trans people? No; to want to do that at all, is a little suspect. So instead, I offer a general framework– of autism and of gender non-conformity– and try to defamiliarize these constructs while at once applying them retrospectively to my life. I’ve been an autistic trans person for all these twenty two years of gorgeously fraught being, and now I invite you in to witness it. I’ve gotten to an age where I refuse to stop talking when someone else doesn’t get it, because all of us are at different stages of getting it, and only further communication will let us meet on the same page. I’ve tried so hard to meet you at your level, please try to meet me at mine. You might learn something from it, I hope that’s what happens.

Once again, this piece is and will continue to be a call to action. It asks you to take up the work of mentalizing, the highest form of empathy, in which you try, genuinely try, to read these words from my perspective. It's an “effort of imagination,” to be both aware of emotions and intentions– to correctly read one’s interests and how their will is being directed (Gibson, 35). (Which, coincidentally, is another way of describing “theory of mind,” and why there’s a lot of persuasive myths about autistic people being unempathetic, heartless bastards.) Here in this piece, I ask you to exert effort to understand and to be empathetic to an Other. I employ second person language, “you,” in the most intentional of ways; this is a (rhetorical) strategy to force you into my deviant brain and my memories of living as an (undiagnosed) autistic, gendered body. This all happened and I could’ve just put these stories out there, but instead I ask you if you’re brave enough to set aside your culturally (re)inscribed aversions to autistic storytelling and (dis)believability. This story is for everyone who chooses to be curious rather than hostile. This story is for those who can’t accept that I’m autistic (and trans) and need to see the receipts. This story is for the “normal” among us and your neurotype, to nourish it with examples of a natural alternative.

This story is for you by way of me, and it’s nowhere near done. Click here to begin.