Book Review: The Reason I Jump

One of the most misunderstood Things That Exist in mainstream discourse right now is autism. There is so much oversimplified, misleading, or just plain wrong information floating around, that it is nearly impossible for any neurotypical person to have a clear understanding of what autism even is, let alone what autistic people need from society and caregivers. As an example, for the longest time I thought the definition of autism was the inability to empathise with others, which is just embarrassingly incorrect.

If you're anything like me, then your "understanding" of autism came from popular novels like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and The London Eye Mystery, which a) are all written by neurotypical people, b) almost exclusively feature children with Asperger's syndrome, the latter being a very narrow and high-functioning section of the autistic spectrum, and c) often give very garbled and incomplete explanations of what autism, or even Asperger's, actually is. Also not helping are TV shows like Sherlock, in which a character is featured who displays some symptoms which resemble autism, only to be described as a "high-functioning sociopath" (which is inaccurate and cringy for about thirty-six reasons, including the fact that sociopathy doesn't even feature different levels of functionality).

So one of the remedies to this widespread misinformation is The Reason I Jump. If you haven't heard of it, Jump is a semi-autobiographical book by then-thirteen-year-old Naoki Higashida, who is autistic. The bulk of the book is a kind of FAQ, which Naoki giving roughly two-page answers to questions he gets a lot or which he suspects you might have. Intersected here and there are Naoki's short stories, all of which are touching and clever and just very very good.

The English translation also features an introduction by David Mitchell (the author, not the guy from Peep Show), which itself is really helpful. He opens with a description of what it would be like if you suddenly developed autism, which is pretty much the best explanation of autism I've ever encountered. It goes pretty much like this:

1. One day, you lose the ability to communicate. You can no longer explain to anyone if you're bored or happy or in pain, or what you had for breakfast, or how sorry you are that their dog died.
2. Then, soon after, the filter in your head which organises your thoughts vanishes. "A dam-burst of ideas, memories, impulses and thoughts is cascading over you, unstoppably. Your mind is a room where twenty radios, all tuned to different stations, are blaring out voices and music."
3. Now the filter which organised your senses has also vanished. Every visible, audible and otherwise sensible thing is drawing your attention equally. "Colours and patterns swim and clamour for your attention. The fabric softener in your sweater smells as strong as air-freshener jammed up your nostrils."

And, voila. You are now experiencing what autistic people experience, every minute of every day, for the entirety of their lives.

Throughout the rest of the book, Naoki's incredibly engaging voice patiently filters through so many of the misconceptions we have about autism. Some answers might seem incomplete, but they are incomplete in more or less the same way that you can never give a complete answer to the question "why do you like video games?". The frank, open way he writes makes it impossible not to empathise with him, and with every chapter you develop a clearer idea of what being autistic is like. 

What both Mitchell's introduction and Naoki's explanations and stories force you to do is admire autistic people, the way you admire everyone else who prevails in the face of a kind of adversity you will never experience. Conventional autism narratives call upon you to shed a tear for the parents and the caregivers, the poor souls who have to try to get through to autistic people, and that's not entirely unjustified. But we often fail to recognise that living with autism is much, much harder than caring for someone who does. The difficulties faced by autistic people should be met with sympathy and patience, and the achievements of autistic people demand raucous celebration.

So should you read this book? Yes. Why? Because the way autistic people are treated in society matters, and is an issue which demands your attention. But more generally, paying attention to narratives different from your own is a fundamental part of being a person, and, I would argue, the only way to live a life which does more good than harm.

Also, it's just a darn good read. (I finished it in about an hour on the train.)

BLODA #5: If you're transgender, we hate you.

BLODA stands for Blog Lots of Days in April, because I've reached the conclusion that trying to blog every day in April is going to mean I post a lot of unreadable crap. So let's try and avoid that.

So let's get some define some things first: "trans*" is an umbrella term for everyone who's gender identity differs from the gender they were assigned at birth. This includes women who were born in a male body, men who were born in a female body, and people who identify as both genders or a third gender or no gender at all. It also encompasses people who identify with their assigned gender but engage in cross-gender activity, such as crossdressing. The asterix refers to the multitude of suffixes people can attach to the trans- prefix to describe how they identify.
Also, the word for people who identify with their assigned gender at birth is "cisgender". So when you come across this word, it just means everyone born with a female body who identifies as a woman, and everyone born with a male body who identifies as a man; the majority of the population.
Let's also state at the outset that "tranny" and "shemale" are slurs, in the same vein as "faggot", and using them in polite conversation makes you an assbutt. Similarly, "transsexual" is an adjective, not a noun, and calling someone "a transsexual" is dehumanising.

So now lets talk about how everyone apparently hates trans* people and society is basically just okay with it. 

Let's start with the Daily Mail, the third most widely-read newspaper in the UK, which retains it's readership by demonising as many people and minority groups as possible to get self-righteous middle-class white Brits furiously screaming about how hard their lives are.

According to the Daily Mail, it's worthy of the national news when a primary school teacher is openly transgender and undergoing a transition from male to female. In fact, it's worth a main-space article and piece from a regular columnist just to emphasise how immoral it is to let trans* people near kids.
But when that transgender teacher commits fucking suicide because she can no longer face the endless press harassment the Mail has a hand in causing, it's apparently far less newsworthy than the fact she existed in the first place. The BBC considers it a matter for local Lancashire news, despite having implications for the nationwide LGBT community. The Mail mentions that she died an "unsuspicious" death, but of course says nothing about press harassment or even the fact it was a suicide. Worst of all, Richard Littlejohn, the columnist who called for her resignation, has not in any way been held accountable. There is a petition to remove him which has spread mostly through LGBT-specific social media, but has little support from mainstream organisations or news sources; neither Littlejohn or any or his employers have talked about the death, nor has anyone with any mainstream influence demanded so much as an apology.
So the moral of the story is that it's basically okay to spread fear and hate against trans* people, even when it results in those people's death. Brilliant.

But surely this is an isolated incident? I mean, we are talking about the infamously right-wing Mail here. Surely most of the media is more enlightened? Not really.

Let's look at the mentions of trans* people in Britain's most popular newspaper: The Sun. At the time of writing, all the search results for "transsexual" in the Sun website are, in order:
-The use of the presence of a transsexual porn star to emphasise just how filthy the porn someone inside the Vatican was downloading; because sex being had by trans* people is just inherently more "dirty" than sex being had by cisgender people
-A priest incorrectly identified as transssexual selling crystal meth
-A transgender woman (called a "pre-op transsexual", a label which itself is problematic) accused of violently raping a woman; a story which reinforces the idea that transgender women are just men trying to pretend to be women, and who could take advantage of the "real" woman around them at any time
-"The world's first ever transsexual caught on tape", an article which is so othering and dehumanising ("look, a transsexual! Get a good picture!) that I can't even.
-A transsexual prostitute being murdered after blackmailing celebrities
-A transgender woman undergoing surgery pegged as world's tallest transsexual!!! -see "did you get a good picture" comment above. Also, the woman in question is depicted in a leather corset with a whip, not that they're making her very existence inherently sexual or anything.
-An article trying to poke a cisgender female actor into feeling offended about being cast as a trans woman

Can you see the link, kids?!
In the vast majority of Sun depictions, trans* people are associated with crime and scandal and extreme abnormality, codified as a type of  "other" which exists in shadows and brothels waiting to lure us all into depravity. Even when trans* subjects exist outside of this world, they are still dehumanised as a glorified funfair attraction. So for the tabloid press, the rule is apparently to only mention trans* people when you can pass them off as a sub-human other.
It goes without saying, I think, that if even one Sun article today conveyed the same attitude towards black people, gay people, Muslims, or virtually any other minority group,  there would quite rightly be a massive scandal. But when it comes to transphobia, no-one objects. Article comments, where they exist, are just as if not more prejudiced than the article. When it comes to transphobic attitudes in the media, readers accept it as the norm. 

And so we come to the crux of the matter. The general public accept that trans* people are to be treated as not-quite-human.

It's perfectly fine to dismiss transgender men as "not real men", and transgender women as "not real women". In fact this has been the result of probably two in three face-to-face mentions of trans* people that I've personally experienced. Even perfectly nice and clever people don't see anything wrong with painting transgender and transsexual people as "fakes", and assuming that they themselves know more about what sort of person the trans* individual is than the trans individual does.

It's perfectly fine to characterise trans* people as weird or disgusting, and express the desire that they either not exist or stay far away from you. Because obviously, the discomfort you get from being in the physical presence of a trans* person once in a blue moon is a far more important issue than a trans* person's experience of being ostracised, isolated and dehumanised their entire fucking lives.

It's perfectly fine to go to great lengths to hide the fact that trans* people exist from children, assume that such knowledge is inherently corrupting to young innocence, and liken the fact that trans* people exist to descriptions of sex acts.

It's perfectly fine to use the idea of resembling a trans* person as an insult or use the fact of a trans* person's existence as the punchline to a joke.

It's perfectly fine to discuss a person's trans* status in public with people they barely know, and openly speculate about personal information regarding their body.

Except, it's not.

Transgender women, transgender men, people who crossdress, people who don't fit with the "man" or "woman2 label they were given at birth in any number of ways, are all real, living, breathing, hoping, hurting, human beings.
Oh, I'm stating the obvious? So start acting like you've internalised that fact.
You wouldn't ask a cisgender woman for descriptions of her vagina, so don't act like which genitals a trans* person has is any of your business.
You realise it's dickish to tell someone "you're not really a Christian", "you're not really British", so don't tell anyone "you're not really a man/woman".

The reason trans* people suffer so much from violation of privacy, violence, homelessness, social ostracisation, endless attempts to regulate their identity, etc, etc, is that the media and general public refuse to acknowledge them as fully human. If you have regard a trans* men as less of a man than a cisgender man, if you have ever asked a trans person "so do you still have a penis?", if you use the word "tranny" in public, if you make jokes where the punchline is "she was a he!!", then you are part of that problem.

So start giving trans* people the respect they deserve.

BEDA #4: Compromise is Good

So as you are inevitably aware, Margaret Thatcher died yesterday. Which triggered an ever-expanding discussion of her complicated legacy, covering all the things she was loved and loathed for.

I am not going to join that discussion. But one the most common things people said they admired about the Iron Lady was her 'strength of will', her insatiable drive to pass the policies she wanted passed, and her unwavering commitment to her ideology. Which I found... interesting.

When you are leading a country, but also when you are trying to achieve anything at all, you will inevitably come against people who have different ideas about what needs to be done. According to Thatcher's admirers, the best way to respond to these people is to stick to what you previously thought the best plan of action was, regardless of what they are saying. But to me, that makes very little sense. 

All people are fallible, right? Including you. And the people you are arguing with hold the opinion they hold for a reason. They might have different life experience which you are ignorant of, or have considered the problem from an angle you didn't; or, it's possible, they might just be cleverer than you.

So why on earth would you not listen to them? 

One of the Thatcher quotes which came up during the BBC News feature, in regard to a Commonwealth debate on whether or not to sanction apartheid South Africa, was: "if I am the minority of one in a group of fifty-four, then I feel very sorry for the fifty-three". That kind of attitude is just mind-boggling to me.

The kind of commitment to our own ideas at the expense of everyone else's which Thatcherites seem to be prescribing is just arrogance. Assuming that your way is the right way in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary is not admirable, it is deeply destructive.

Empathy and compromise are the only real path to understanding. I think that a head of government who recognises that will be much better for a country than an unswayable dogmatist. 

BEDA #3: Gender in Music, or, The Ballad of Sam and Vince

About a year ago I broke my religious commitment to never watching reality TV into pieces, by getting sucked into a little show called The Voice.

If anyone is unaware of how The Voice works: four famous musicians pick twelve singing hopefuls each to coach, things occur until each coach has one singer remaining, and the last four compete in the final. At the centre of the pitch for the show is the fact the initial auditions are "blind", with the coaches having their backs to the singers, supposedly so that they will judge on vocal talent alone.

I started watching the first audition of the last series because my mum and sister had it on. Upon discovering that I liked loads of the people auditioning, and that the coaches were unrestrainedly human nutjobs rather than the robotic typecasts you get judging most reality TV shows, I decided to commit to watching the rest of the series.

Then during the second audition, a decidedly sexy piece of man wearing tight leather trousers and a dark sleeveless hoody appeared on stage, with bleached blond hair and a considerable amount of eyeliner. And he started covering Like A Virgin. And it was objectively fantastic.
His voice was technically excellent while being a basically unique sound. He payed all due homage to the original while making it his own. He blew the audience away, and all four coaches expressed interest in working with him.

This guy was called Vince Kidd. And I basically fell in love with him.

As Vince progressed through the competition, dazzling the onlookers every time, and easily surviving each round, I got more and more excited. Not just because he was someone I would have happily made out with given half a chance, but because he was Someone Like Me doing well in a TV talent show.

I have no idea if Vince is gay or bisexual. It doesn't matter. What matters is how he works his gender, refusing to conform to the accepted standards of what a man is. All his outfits and performances on The Voice were a little bit guyish, a little bit 'gay scene', a little bit feminine, and a little bit of something else entirely.

This mattered to me because everyone has ever won a TV talent show in Britain has fit the mold of either "man" or "woman" like jelly. As do well over 95% of popular mainstream artists today. They are all openly heterosexual, they all wear outfits you could find in the appropriate gendered section of a high street store, all  the ones with penises perform in a way which is unnambigously Male, all the ones with vaginas perform in a way which is unambigously Female.

Of course it's absolutely fine for each individual artist to act that way, and I get that the majority of people watching probably fit the same gender roles just as comfortably. But when you are a person who doesn't fit their assigned gender very well, looking at a music industry where nearly all the successful performers are either unambiguously male men or unambiguously female women says: "unusual gender expression is unmarketable. You will always be seen as weird, and are destined for unpopularity. We don't have a place for you."

So Vince Kidd was basically my first great hope that the music industry's relationship with gender was changing or would change, that more than a statistically laughable number of successful performers would be openly gay or, God forbid trans*, and that the world would be more comfortable with even straight-cisgender people being flexible in gender expression.

And how did that pan out, you must be wondering?

So Vince gets to the semi-finals. I'm pretty sure I watched it live, and was probably chewing my fingers the whole time. After a stellar performance, he gets though to the final, and the girl he's competing with (whom I loved but was no Vince) basically admits that the best man won.

I'm out-of-my-mind ecstatic. A week passes.

I don't get to see the final live because I-can't-remember-why (I was probably in Milton Keynes), but I watch it on iPlayer the moment I can.
The way the final works is: each contestant sings twice, people vote, one singer is knocked out, the remaining three sing again, people vote again, winner is announced.
Vince continued, in my opinion, to be the better singer and performer of the four, although we've established how biased I am at this point. But he is the first to be knocked out.

And yeah, it affected me more than it probably should have, and yeah, the fact I fancied him definitely played a part. But I got rather pissed off, and didn't watch the rest of the final.

The way I figured it at the time, the world was telling me that people like Vince weren't marketable after all. That they would only ever get so far. That people would only put up with guys acting feminine or "gay" or vaguely-non-guyish for so long. That even when it seemed most that Someone Like Me was going to succeed, that success would never really be granted.

Looking back now, I'm not so sure. Vince's story was probably the first of his kind, a non-typically-gendered person getting to the final of a reality TV show. So that's probably something People Like Me should be grateful for. But it just didn't feel like enough at the time.

Of course, Vince could still break into the music industry, and has an album coming out this year. You should check it out, not because of smashing the gender binary or anything, but just because he's amazing.



So this has all come up because season two of The Voice UK has begun, and while no-one remotely like Vince has auditioned yet, there are several adorable probably-gay-types who I will inevitably end up rooting for. We shall see how it goes.  

BEDA #2: Escape

My favourite books and TV shows will always be those which allow me to escape to another world.

When I open a new story I start by reading the words, translating letters into thoughts in my head, mapping out physical locations, fleshing out characters and deciding if I like them or not.

Then I start to empathise, to grasp the joys and struggles and needs of the characters, to understand what's being fought over and what's at stake. Before I realise it, I'm rooting for something. In a good book I want the best for the people I'm reading about almost as much as I want the best for my friends and family.

Just like you never realise you fell asleep until you wake up, I never know I've fallen into the world of the story until I close the book and find I'm still there. I paint myself into the world behind the pages, create a parallel existence for myself where I'm a warlock or Clayr or Time Lord's companion or an air-merchant from Batmunkh Gompa.  I escape to a fantastical new world not because it's better or happier than my homeworld, but just because I can.

Eventually the story-worlds I love the most become a sanctuary, somewhere to run to when things in this world are going to crap. It's as good a defence mechanism as any. Because when you can cross infinite realities in your mind, there's nothing that can really take away your freedom.

Some people indulge in sports fandom to supplement their real lives. Others fill their heads with music, or celebrity gossip, when they don't want to think about what's around them. And some of us get the strength to face the real world by stepping, from time to time, into a world of stories.

BEDA(WSO) #1: Half-Baked

So I'm going to try and breathe life back into this blog by doing Blog Every Day in April (Well Sort Of), which is when you decide to start Blog Every Day in April on the 5th of April, because you are both impunctual and fond of sticking it to the man.

I promised to blog about a Certain Thing to a couple of people a few weeks ago, and that one might surface during this month. I have half a draft of it, but I sort of hate that half a draft, so I might have to start from scratch.

So what am I going to talk about? At time of writing I have literally no idea. My instinct is to go towards political stuff, but I've started to suspect that teenagers posting their half-baked thoughts about political issues on the internet is perhaps not the best way to bring about positive social change. 

Though to be fair, I don't think I have thoughts which aren't half-baked anymore. You can see it in the essays I futilely pound out for uni; I start off with a certified Good Idea then don't know where to take it.

That seems to become my attitude towards deciding What To Do With My Life, as well. Uni, for a lot of people seems to be this great watershed regarding goals. You go along basically doing what people tell you, the endgame being Get Into Uni, then once you're here your life is dumped into your hands, much to your chagrin. "A human life?!" you cry. "I don't know what to do with this!" To make it worse, you have already Gotten Into Uni. Which means you need new goals, goals you have to pick for yourself. Get a degree, yes, but more importantly figure out a life to lead once uni is over. And, yeah, it's terrifying.

Uni feels like a three-or-four-year limbo before being dropped into the Real World. Your degree is essentially a focal point around which you are supposed to design a Future, a plan of action to squeeze the most possible value out of this Life thing you've suddenly been given control of. 

Which is where the half-baked ideas come in, because really I'm just grabbing at what are essentially abstract concepts, like "social work", "speech therapy", "emigrating", "getting a boyfriend", and trying to structure them into some kind of solid plan. For all my planning and dreaming, I can't grasp the reality of fifty-odd years in a job maybe raising a family.

I'm panicking, and the panic comes mostly from having no idea what I want, but still wanting it, and from recognising that whatever I choose will close doors, and maybe what I want will be stuck behind one of those doors. You get so caught up in staring down the gaping abyss of Adult Life and trying to figure out how to navigate it that you forget that you're also living a life now, and that that life needs attention, and oh shit you have three assignments to finish in a week. 

I live half-baked life because so much of my energy is put into wishing and dreaming and being terrified, and I don't have enough left to make what I'm doing now the best it can be. Social interaction, or god forbid flirting, becomes a monumentous task you can't begin to comprehend. That thing you supposedly love, and are paying eight grand a year to study, looks bland and pointless and irrelevant to everything that matters, so why would you put your best efforts into it?

But in spite of all this, I'm not completely hopeless just yet. I live for the moments when you're doing something that really engages you and makes you forget to be nervous and terrified. Performing on stage. Laughing with friends. That one essay that really grabs you and makes you go several hundred words over the word limit. 

I have hope that these moments will increase in frequency until my life doesn't look so half-baked after all.

Until then, I'll be procrastinating on tumblr. 

The Poppy

Today in Britain we honour soldiers who have fought on our behalf. Emphasis is given to the fallen, those whose hopes and fears came to an abrupt end in trenches or on battlefields. But the actual funds from the Poppy Appeal go to support those soldiers who did return from war, injured and shellshocked, finding it nearly impossible to re-adjust to civilian life.

Every soldier makes a sacrifice when they sign up to fight. They know that they are severely increasing their chances of dying in the near future, but they also know that their lives will be drastically different if they do return. Yet still they fight; and all our lives would be worse if they did not.

I don't think buying and wearing a poppy constitutes a celebration of war, because I honestly don't believe anyone has seen war as glorious since 1914. Remember that the poppy symbol comes from the end of war, from the first signs of life which returned to Flanders fields after the eleventh of the eleventh. By wearing a poppy you are not saying war is awesome. You are saying, "I like being relatively safe and free, I like being able to speak my mind and live under a democracy, and I recognise that many people had to die and suffer for this to be so".

We take so much for granted in the West, because imagining a life different from yours is always difficult, and  because our immense wealth is so mind-blowing when you stop to think about it that it convinces you that stopping to think about things is overrated. But this is one day when we can pause to pay attention to what has been sacrificed for our improbably free and luxurious today, and honour those who suffered so that people they never met could vote and bitch about politicians and write blog posts and make friends with black and gay people.

Above all, what the poppy says is "thank you". And if every human being wore a poppy all year round for the duration of their lives, that might be half of the thanks those who went to war deserve.