Desire not deficit

Being Autistic, Being Transgender, and Being Queer in terms of desire, not disorder

Autism and gender dysphoria (or incongruence) are diagnoses offered by associations of psychiatrists utilising a deficit model. The divergence of the individual’s body and its experience from the norm is measured and categorised, filtered through an implicit understanding that this divergence is an undesirable malady or affliction.

At the very least it is assumed that the divergence must cause distress, because it is obvious to all that the dominant culture is hostile to observable divergence from constructed norms - from Whiteness, specifically. Mitigations offered tend to address this hostility by intervening on an individual scale, seeking adjustment of the divergence to meet the expected norm, rather than building collective systems of care and working to adjust the ways in which we relate to each other such that the hostile environment dissolves around us.

The treatment of the individual body may be appropriate for some forms of neurodivergence that are also degenerative disorders associated with individual suffering, such as dementia and alzheimers¹.

In a descriptive sense though, I have begun to think about my autisticity, transgenderness and queerness [the experiences of Being Autistic and Being Transgender and Being Queer] in terms of desire, not deficit.

Being autistic, transgender and queer are socially constructed subcategories of my General Experience of Being. My General Experience of Being is much more derived from my own felt desires, than it is from divergences that exist only in relation to some ‘normal’ general experience of being human [and hence, way of desiring] which I have never experienced —
and will never experience —
and do not hold any desire to experience.

---

There is a double-negation of desire in the conceptualisation of the divergent body.

1. The desiring body is shunned in favour of the invalid and broken body. We focus on deficit and disorder, storying our own identities as incorrect, insufficient or inhuman;

2. The desire to explore one’s own desires is opposed by the introjected desire (which becomes a compulsive drive) to conform to normative standards [derived from normative desires]. Our desires are ruled invalid and heretical, like our bodies; to seek their fulfilment is to perpetuate the suffering that is caused by our position as abnormal. Only by sublimating our desires can we mitigate our suffering.

This double-negation of desire within the individual body has a feedback effect at the collective scale which makes further negation a more likely fate. When our desires are negated the possibilities that our desires point to inch further away into the foggy depths of an unimaginable future; capitalist realism sets in, and our power to create the world diminishes. The power of the erotic is extinguished, in favour of the meekness of normality.

To exemplify this bluntly: we are killed by social stigma, marginalisation, and the classification of our identities as ‘mental disorders’. Transgender and autistic people commit suicide at disproportionate rates — research shows that for trans people at least, being classified as disordered is a significant contributing factor². When our desires die, so too do our futures. When we desire, magic happens.

---

I desire transly. I desire autistically. I desire queerly.
My desires are trans, autistic, and queer.
The objects that I desire are trans, autistic, and queer.
The relations that I desire are trans, autistic, and queer.
The experiences that I desire are trans, autistic, and queer.
The desires that I desire are trans, autistic, and queer —
And so, I am trans, autistic, and queer.

---

Trans, autistic, and queer are not fixed, immutable, biological identity-categories of human. They are neuroqueer; fluid, and responsive, reflexive and reactive, not to a staid and static normal, but to connections, encounters, and experiences. My desires flow like a river, and they are cocreated with other people who share similar models and experiences of being; and importantly, ways of creating reality.

Together, we are a dreaming body of desire.

1. https://twitter.com/DrRJChapman/status/1671429578433200129

2. Transgender Psychoanalysis, Patricia Gherovici 2017