[Music]
I am autistic and what this means in
practice is that there are some things
that are easier for me than they are for
most people and a great many things that
are somewhat harder and these affect my
life in more or less overt ways as it
goes I’m pretty lucky I’ve been able to
build a career around special interests
and granular obsession my main gig at
the moment is explaining superhero
comics continuity and publishing history
for which work I am somehow paid an
actual legal currency which is both a
triumph of the frivolous in an era of
the frantically pragmatic and a job
that’s really singularly suited to my
strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies
I like comics I like stories in general
because they make sense to me in ways
that the rest of the world and my own
mind often don’t self-knowledge is not
an intuitive thing for me what sense of
self I have I’ve built gradually and
laborious ly and mostly through long
term pattern recognition for decades I
didn’t even really have a self-image if
you’d asked me to draw myself I would
eventually have given you a pair of
glasses and maybe a very messy scribble
of hair and that would have been about
it but what I do know backwards forwards
and in pretty much every way that
matters our stories I know how they work
I understand their language their
complex inner clockwork and
I can use those things to extrapolate a
sort of external compass that picks up
where my internal one falls short
stories their forms their structure the
sense of order inherent to them
give me the means to navigate what
otherwise at least for me would be an
impassable storm of unpossible data or
stories are a periscope angled to access
the parts of myself I can’t intuitively
see or stories are a series of mirrors
by which I can assemble a composite
sketch of an identity I rarely
recognized hull which is how I worked
out that I was transgender
in my early 30s by way of a television
show this is my story and it’s about
narrative cartography and representation
and why those things matter
it’s about autism and it’s about gender
and it’s about how they intersect and
it’s about the kinds of people we know
how to see and the kinds of people we
don’t it’s not the kind of story that
gets told a lot that you might hear a
lot because the narrative around gender
transition in dysphoria in our culture
is really really prescriptive it’s
basically the story of you know the kid
who has known for their whole life that
they’re this and not that and that story
demands the kind of intuitive
self-knowledge that I can’t really do
and a kind of relationship to gender
that I don’t really have which is part
of why it took me so long to figure my
own stuff out so to what extent this
story my story has a beginning it begins
early in 2014 when I published an essay
titled I see your value now
Asperger’s and the art of allegory and
it explored among other things the ways
that I use narrative and narrative
structures to navigate real life and it
got picked up in a number of fairly
prominent places that got linked and I
casually followed the ensuing discussion
and I was surprised to discover that
readers were fairly assist fairly
consistently assuming I was a man now
that in itself wasn’t a new experience
for me
even though at the time I was writing
under a very unambiguously female byline
it had happened in the letter columns of
comics I’d edited it had happened when a
parody Twitter account I’d created went
viral when I was on staff at Wired I
budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a
dollar in a box every time a reader
responded in a way that made it clear
they were assuming I was a man in in
response to an article where my name was
clearly visible and then I had to stop
doing that because it happened so often
I couldn’t afford to keep it up but in
all of those cases the context you know
the reasons were pretty obvious the
fields I’d worked in the beets I covered
they were places where women had had to
fight disproportionately hard for
visibility and recognition we live in a
culture that assumes a male default so
given a neutral voice and a character
limit most readers will assume a male
author but this was different
because this wasn’t just a book I’d
edited it wasn’t a story I’d reported it
was me it was my story and it made me
uncomfortable it got under my skin in
ways that the other stuff really hadn’t
and so I did what I do when that happens
and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer
it to look at the conclusions and peel
them back to see the narratives behind
them and the stories that made them tick
and I started this I started this by
going back to the text of the essay and
you know examining it every way I could
think of looking at craft looking at
content and in doing so I was surprised
to realize that while I that I had
written about a number of characters
with whom I identified closely that
every single one of those characters I’d
written about was male and that
surprised me even more than the
responses to the essay had because I
spent my career writing and talking and
thinking about gender and representation
in popular media in 2014 I’d been the
feminist gadfly of an editorial
department and multiple mastheads
I’d been a founding board member of an
organization that existed to advocate
for more and better representation of
women and girls in comics characters and
creators and most of my favorite
characters the ones I’d actively seek
out and follow were women just not
apparently the characters I saw myself
in now I still didn’t realize it was me
at this point
remember self-knowledge not very
intuitive for me and while I had spent a
lot of time thinking about gender I’d
never really bothered to think much
about my own I knew
academically that the way as other
people read and interpreted my gender
affected yet had influenced a lifetime
of Social and professional interactions
and that those in turn had informed the
person I’d grown up into during that
time but I really believed like I really
just sort of had in the back of my head
that if you peeled away all of that
social conditioning you’d basically end
up with what I got when I tried to draw
a self-portrait so a pair of glasses
messy scribble of hair and in this case
maybe also some very strong opinions
about the x-men I mean I knew something
was off I’d always known something was
off that my relationship to gender was
messy and uncomfortable but gender
itself struck me as messy and
uncomfortable and it had never been a
large enough part of how I defined
myself to really feel like something
that merited further study and I had
deadlines and so it was always on the
backburner so I looked I looked at what
I had at this this improbable group of
exclusively male characters and is
looked and I figured that if they this
wasn’t me then it had to be a result of
the stories I had access to to choose
from and the entertainment landscape I
was looking at and the funny thing is I
wasn’t wrong exactly I just wasn’t right
either see the characters I’d written
about had one other significant trait in
common aside from their gender which is
that they were all more or less
explicitly more or less heavily coded as
autistic and I thought ah yes this
explains it this is under representation
in fiction echoing under representation
in life and vice versa because the
carrick the characteristics that I’d
honed in on that I particularly
identified with in these guys were
things like emotional unavailability and
social awkwardness and granular
obsession and all of those are
characteristics that are seen as
unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable
in female characters which is also why
readers weren’t
we’re assuming that I was a man because
you see here’s the thing I’m not the
only one who uses stories to navigate
the world I’m just a little more
deliberate about it for humans stories
formed the bridge between data and
understanding they’re where we look when
we need to contextualise something new
or to recognize something we’re pretty
sure we’ve seen before they’re how we
identify ourselves they’re how we locate
ourselves and each other
in the larger world there were no
fictional women like me there weren’t
representations of women like me in
media and so readers were primed not to
recognize women like me in real life
either now by this point I had started
writing a follow-up essay and this one
was also about autism and narratives but
specifically focused on on how they
intersected with gender and
representation in media and in context
of this essay I was I I went about
looking to see if I could find even one
female character who had that cluster of
traits I’d been looking for and I was
asking around in autistic communities
and I got a few more or less useful
one-off suggestions and some really
really splendid arguments about
semantics and standards and I then I got
one one answer over and over and over in
community after community after
community leverage people told me you
have to watch leverage so I watched
leverage leverage is five seasons of
ensemble heist drama it’s about a team
of very skilled con artists who take
down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and
the like and it’s a lot of fun and it’s
very clever and it’s clever enough that
it doesn’t really matter that it’s
pretty formulaic and I enjoyed it a lot
but what’s most important what leverage
has is Parker Parker is a master thief
and she is the best of the best of the
best in ways that all of leverages
characters are the best of the best and
superficially she looks like the kind of
woman you see on TV so she’s young and
she’s slender and she’s blonde and she’s
attractive but in a sort of approachable
way and all of that familiarity is
brilliant misdirection because the thing
is there are no other women like Parker
on TV because Parker even if it’s never
explicitly stated in the show Parker is
coded incredibly clearly as autistic
Parker is socially awkward her speech
tends to have limited inflection what
inflection it does have is repetitive
and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time
she’s not emotionally literate she
struggles with it and the social skills
she develops over the series she learns
by rote like they’re just another grift
when she’s not scaling skyscrapers or
cartwheeling through laser grids she
wears her body like an ill-fitting suit
Parker moves like me and Parker Parker
was a revelation she was its revolution
unto herself in a media landscape where
unequivocally exist to either be
punished or a loved hole Parker got to
play the crabby savant and she wasn’t
emotionally intuitive but it was never
ever played as the product of abuse or
trauma even though she had survived both
of those it was just part of her as much
as work her hands or her eyes and she
had a genuine character arc my god she
had a genuine romantic arc even
and none of that required her to turn
into anything other than what she was
and in Parker I recognized a thousand
tics and details of my life and my
personality but I didn’t recognize
myself why what what difference was was
there in Parker you know between Parker
and the other characters I’d written
about those characters they’d spent
ethnicities and backgrounds and
different media and appearances and the
only other characteristic they all had
in common was their gender so that was
where I started to look next and I
thought well okay maybe maybe it’s
masculinity maybe if Parker were less
feminine she’d click with me the way
those other characters had so Jan I
tried to imagine a Parker with short
hair who’s explicitly butch and nothing
so okay I extended it and what seems
like the only logical direction to
extended I said well if it’s not
masculinity what if it’s actual maleness
what if Parker were a man yeah
in the end everything changed and
nothing changed which is often the way
that it goes for me adilyn mark no
matter how slight and the math is a
rebek ibly altered at a landmark and
paths that were invisible before open
wide add a landmark and you may not have
moved but suddenly you know where you
are and where you can go I wasn’t going
to tell this story when I started
planning this talk I was gonna tell a
similar story it was about it was about
stories like this is about narratives
and the ways that they influenced our
culture and vice versa and it’s centered
around a group of women at NASA who had
basically rewritten the narrative around
space exploration and it was a lot more
fun and I still think it was more
interesting but it’s also a story you
can probably work out for yourselves
in fact it’s story some of you probably
have if you follow that kind of thing
which you probably do given that you’re
here and this is a story this my story
is not a story that I like to tell it’s
not a fun story to talk about because
it’s very personal and I am a very
private person and it’s not universal
and it’s not always relatable and it’s
definitely not aspirational and it’s not
the kind of story that you tend to
encounter unless you’re already part of
it which is why I’m telling it now
because the thing is I’m not the only
person who uses stories to parse the
world and navigate it I’m just a little
more deliberate because I’m tired of
having to rely on composite sketches
open your maps add a landmark
reroute accordingly
[Applause]
[Music]
you
[Music]
I am autistic and what this means in
practice is that there are some things
that are easier for me than they are for
most people and a great many things that
are somewhat harder and these affect my
life in more or less overt ways as it
goes I’m pretty lucky I’ve been able to
build a career around special interests
and granular obsession my main gig at
the moment is explaining superhero
comics continuity and publishing history
for which work I am somehow paid an
actual legal currency which is both a
triumph of the frivolous in an era of
the frantically pragmatic and a job
that’s really singularly suited to my
strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies
I like comics I like stories in general
because they make sense to me in ways
that the rest of the world and my own
mind often don’t self-knowledge is not
an intuitive thing for me what sense of
self I have I’ve built gradually and
laborious ly and mostly through long
term pattern recognition for decades I
didn’t even really have a self-image if
you’d asked me to draw myself I would
eventually have given you a pair of
glasses and maybe a very messy scribble
of hair and that would have been about
it but what I do know backwards forwards
and in pretty much every way that
matters our stories I know how they work
I understand their language their
complex inner clockwork and
I can use those things to extrapolate a
sort of external compass that picks up
where my internal one falls short
stories their forms their structure the
sense of order inherent to them
give me the means to navigate what
otherwise at least for me would be an
impassable storm of unpossible data or
stories are a periscope angled to access
the parts of myself I can’t intuitively
see or stories are a series of mirrors
by which I can assemble a composite
sketch of an identity I rarely
recognized hull which is how I worked
out that I was transgender
in my early 30s by way of a television
show this is my story and it’s about
narrative cartography and representation
and why those things matter
it’s about autism and it’s about gender
and it’s about how they intersect and
it’s about the kinds of people we know
how to see and the kinds of people we
don’t it’s not the kind of story that
gets told a lot that you might hear a
lot because the narrative around gender
transition in dysphoria in our culture
is really really prescriptive it’s
basically the story of you know the kid
who has known for their whole life that
they’re this and not that and that story
demands the kind of intuitive
self-knowledge that I can’t really do
and a kind of relationship to gender
that I don’t really have which is part
of why it took me so long to figure my
own stuff out so to what extent this
story my story has a beginning it begins
early in 2014 when I published an essay
titled I see your value now
Asperger’s and the art of allegory and
it explored among other things the ways
that I use narrative and narrative
structures to navigate real life and it
got picked up in a number of fairly
prominent places that got linked and I
casually followed the ensuing discussion
and I was surprised to discover that
readers were fairly assist fairly
consistently assuming I was a man now
that in itself wasn’t a new experience
for me
even though at the time I was writing
under a very unambiguously female byline
it had happened in the letter columns of
comics I’d edited it had happened when a
parody Twitter account I’d created went
viral when I was on staff at Wired I
budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a
dollar in a box every time a reader
responded in a way that made it clear
they were assuming I was a man in in
response to an article where my name was
clearly visible and then I had to stop
doing that because it happened so often
I couldn’t afford to keep it up but in
all of those cases the context you know
the reasons were pretty obvious the
fields I’d worked in the beets I covered
they were places where women had had to
fight disproportionately hard for
visibility and recognition we live in a
culture that assumes a male default so
given a neutral voice and a character
limit most readers will assume a male
author but this was different
because this wasn’t just a book I’d
edited it wasn’t a story I’d reported it
was me it was my story and it made me
uncomfortable it got under my skin in
ways that the other stuff really hadn’t
and so I did what I do when that happens
and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer
it to look at the conclusions and peel
them back to see the narratives behind
them and the stories that made them tick
and I started this I started this by
going back to the text of the essay and
you know examining it every way I could
think of looking at craft looking at
content and in doing so I was surprised
to realize that while I that I had
written about a number of characters
with whom I identified closely that
every single one of those characters I’d
written about was male and that
surprised me even more than the
responses to the essay had because I
spent my career writing and talking and
thinking about gender and representation
in popular media in 2014 I’d been the
feminist gadfly of an editorial
department and multiple mastheads
I’d been a founding board member of an
organization that existed to advocate
for more and better representation of
women and girls in comics characters and
creators and most of my favorite
characters the ones I’d actively seek
out and follow were women just not
apparently the characters I saw myself
in now I still didn’t realize it was me
at this point
remember self-knowledge not very
intuitive for me and while I had spent a
lot of time thinking about gender I’d
never really bothered to think much
about my own I knew
academically that the way as other
people read and interpreted my gender
affected yet had influenced a lifetime
of Social and professional interactions
and that those in turn had informed the
person I’d grown up into during that
time but I really believed like I really
just sort of had in the back of my head
that if you peeled away all of that
social conditioning you’d basically end
up with what I got when I tried to draw
a self-portrait so a pair of glasses
messy scribble of hair and in this case
maybe also some very strong opinions
about the x-men I mean I knew something
was off I’d always known something was
off that my relationship to gender was
messy and uncomfortable but gender
itself struck me as messy and
uncomfortable and it had never been a
large enough part of how I defined
myself to really feel like something
that merited further study and I had
deadlines and so it was always on the
backburner so I looked I looked at what
I had at this this improbable group of
exclusively male characters and is
looked and I figured that if they this
wasn’t me then it had to be a result of
the stories I had access to to choose
from and the entertainment landscape I
was looking at and the funny thing is I
wasn’t wrong exactly I just wasn’t right
either see the characters I’d written
about had one other significant trait in
common aside from their gender which is
that they were all more or less
explicitly more or less heavily coded as
autistic and I thought ah yes this
explains it this is under representation
in fiction echoing under representation
in life and vice versa because the
carrick the characteristics that I’d
honed in on that I particularly
identified with in these guys were
things like emotional unavailability and
social awkwardness and granular
obsession and all of those are
characteristics that are seen as
unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable
in female characters which is also why
readers weren’t
we’re assuming that I was a man because
you see here’s the thing I’m not the
only one who uses stories to navigate
the world I’m just a little more
deliberate about it for humans stories
formed the bridge between data and
understanding they’re where we look when
we need to contextualise something new
or to recognize something we’re pretty
sure we’ve seen before they’re how we
identify ourselves they’re how we locate
ourselves and each other
in the larger world there were no
fictional women like me there weren’t
representations of women like me in
media and so readers were primed not to
recognize women like me in real life
either now by this point I had started
writing a follow-up essay and this one
was also about autism and narratives but
specifically focused on on how they
intersected with gender and
representation in media and in context
of this essay I was I I went about
looking to see if I could find even one
female character who had that cluster of
traits I’d been looking for and I was
asking around in autistic communities
and I got a few more or less useful
one-off suggestions and some really
really splendid arguments about
semantics and standards and I then I got
one one answer over and over and over in
community after community after
community leverage people told me you
have to watch leverage so I watched
leverage leverage is five seasons of
ensemble heist drama it’s about a team
of very skilled con artists who take
down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and
the like and it’s a lot of fun and it’s
very clever and it’s clever enough that
it doesn’t really matter that it’s
pretty formulaic and I enjoyed it a lot
but what’s most important what leverage
has is Parker Parker is a master thief
and she is the best of the best of the
best in ways that all of leverages
characters are the best of the best and
superficially she looks like the kind of
woman you see on TV so she’s young and
she’s slender and she’s blonde and she’s
attractive but in a sort of approachable
way and all of that familiarity is
brilliant misdirection because the thing
is there are no other women like Parker
on TV because Parker even if it’s never
explicitly stated in the show Parker is
coded incredibly clearly as autistic
Parker is socially awkward her speech
tends to have limited inflection what
inflection it does have is repetitive
and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time
she’s not emotionally literate she
struggles with it and the social skills
she develops over the series she learns
by rote like they’re just another grift
when she’s not scaling skyscrapers or
cartwheeling through laser grids she
wears her body like an ill-fitting suit
Parker moves like me and Parker Parker
was a revelation she was its revolution
unto herself in a media landscape where
unequivocally exist to either be
punished or a loved hole Parker got to
play the crabby savant and she wasn’t
emotionally intuitive but it was never
ever played as the product of abuse or
trauma even though she had survived both
of those it was just part of her as much
as work her hands or her eyes and she
had a genuine character arc my god she
had a genuine romantic arc even
and none of that required her to turn
into anything other than what she was
and in Parker I recognized a thousand
tics and details of my life and my
personality but I didn’t recognize
myself why what what difference was was
there in Parker you know between Parker
and the other characters I’d written
about those characters they’d spent
ethnicities and backgrounds and
different media and appearances and the
only other characteristic they all had
in common was their gender so that was
where I started to look next and I
thought well okay maybe maybe it’s
masculinity maybe if Parker were less
feminine she’d click with me the way
those other characters had so Jan I
tried to imagine a Parker with short
hair who’s explicitly butch and nothing
so okay I extended it and what seems
like the only logical direction to
extended I said well if it’s not
masculinity what if it’s actual maleness
what if Parker were a man yeah
in the end everything changed and
nothing changed which is often the way
that it goes for me adilyn mark no
matter how slight and the math is a
rebek ibly altered at a landmark and
paths that were invisible before open
wide add a landmark and you may not have
moved but suddenly you know where you
are and where you can go I wasn’t going
to tell this story when I started
planning this talk I was gonna tell a
similar story it was about it was about
stories like this is about narratives
and the ways that they influenced our
culture and vice versa and it’s centered
around a group of women at NASA who had
basically rewritten the narrative around
space exploration and it was a lot more
fun and I still think it was more
interesting but it’s also a story you
can probably work out for yourselves
in fact it’s story some of you probably
have if you follow that kind of thing
which you probably do given that you’re
here and this is a story this my story
is not a story that I like to tell it’s
not a fun story to talk about because
it’s very personal and I am a very
private person and it’s not universal
and it’s not always relatable and it’s
definitely not aspirational and it’s not
the kind of story that you tend to
encounter unless you’re already part of
it which is why I’m telling it now
because the thing is I’m not the only
person who uses stories to parse the
world and navigate it I’m just a little
more deliberate because I’m tired of
having to rely on composite sketches
open your maps add a landmark
reroute accordingly
[Applause]
[Music]
you
[Music]
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