I spent a lot of time being social over the holidays and goodness that was exhausting. I did have one en femme holiday party and that was lovely but the rest of the time it was BOY MODE.
I recently wrote about masking and how much energy I put into hiding or suppressing aspects of my identity, gender or otherwise. Social situations really force me to act in a way that other people expect, such as maintaining eye contact and having conversations and such. Of course, these things sound like I am doing the bare minimum around people but these things can be difficult for autistic people.
I have family members who can just float from person to person or group to group at holiday functions and are wonderfully engaging and chatty. I can sort of fake that but I can’t do that for very long. By the time the last holiday gathering of the year was underway I was just DONE.
Group functions really were difficult when I was making the transition to identifying as transgender from identifying as a crossdresser. There was a time when I accepted that all of THIS wasn’t just about panties but how femme presentation aligned with my gender identity. This caused me to really look at how we as humans have been conditioned to look at gender as a binary in society and social settings.
I realized just how “normal” it was for men to gather in the living room and women to gather in the kitchen at a party or whatever. From there, I paid attention to the typical conversations men had compared to women, as well as what each group typically did at the event. Men watched football and women cooked and cleaned. Men talked about football and women talked about everything.
You could dig a little deeper and suppose that there were plenty of women at the party who wanted to watch football and plenty of men who would have preferred to be cooking, but that’s kind of my point. Gender norms are something many people feel they have to adhere to and obey even when they don’t want to.
Over the years, I stopped feeling out of place at parties. I used to feel that I should be in the living room even though I didn’t want to, as well as feeling that I shouldn’t be in the kitchen, even though the conversations were more engaging. I used to feel that I didn’t belong anywhere but these days I just talk one on one with people I want to talk to. I tend to avoid groups as I struggle with focusing my attention on more than one person at a time.
As a masculine presenting person at these events, other masculine presenting/identifying people tend to gravitate towards me. My brother-in-law will drift over to me at a party and soon other masculine presenting/identifying will wander over and all of a sudden I am hanging with the guys. Conversations will soon evolve into more universal topics, such as sports, weather, and work.
I try to find my way out of these little groups because again, conversations with more than one person tend to overwhelm me. Surfacey conversations, although seemingly simple, can paralyze me. If someone asks me how work is going, do I respond with what they expect? I mean, I COULD say “oh work is a bitch but what else is new?” OR I could reply with what I feel is a more sincere and honest answer of “My new boss has cannibalized my team and has stripped away so much of the joy and satisfaction that my career used to have. I am worried about my new colleagues and how they are woefully unqualified in their roles. Our stupid president is dismantling the Department of Education and I am terrified about what will happen to the college I work for.”
I mean, no one wants to hear that in a casual conversation. Instead I say that work is a bitch.
Please know that I don’t dislike these guys (well, most of them). I feel most people are kind and are not intentionally trying to make me uncomfortable. I don’t expect everyone in my life to adjust their behavior because I am autistic, but I do hope that people understand if I step away into another room when I am feeling overstimulated.
I suppose my point is that the holidays are wonderful but they are exhausting from all the masking I do, not only from a gender identity perspective and from a neurodivergent perspective.
Love, Hannah
Hannah McKnight 