Rediscovery

It’s been a while since I did a ‘Tikaani’ post. So why the hell not.

I have been doing some re-examining on Tikaani’s sexuality and gender identity and it’s been pretty interesting and over frustrating. I am one of those kooky folks that see my muses having some sort of free will and usually have habit of telling me things that they want to tell me rather than me wanting to know. So I usually get a lot of interesting tibits useless info…like Tikaani not liking the color orange. 

He and Mai should hang out.

But his sexuality was a giant unknown and mostly I just throw darts at it until something sticks. For a while I thought he was rather ‘meh’ sexual. Like sex was ok to him but it wasn’t important or something he sought. But Tikaani has always been a sensory seeker. I mean when he was younger he wasn’t fond of touch until he was bit older. So now he enjoys cuddling, touching, and kissing. Those things, but actual intercourse didn’t matter. Until I started exploring a long-term relationship he has within the current canon of him being a shaman of the Northern Watertribe and him being in relationship with a deaf shaman and him learning a form of pidgin sign. It occurred he was pretty fucking kinky and totally ok with sex as a general note and that ‘sex’ to him wasn’t the same as it is to others. 

Themoreyouknow.

The more I prodded and pushed on him growing up and falling in love and dealing with people and relationships it became pretty clear that Tikaani was bisexual and homo-romantic. It seems he prefers courting men only because feels rather awkward around women. Tikaani is terrified at the thought of fathering anything. So eventually he sticks with courting men, only to avoid knocking someone up. He is pretty anxious around children. However he adored his second-cousin Uluu, despite being rather reactive around him as an infant and generally he gives most babies a wide berth. His partner on the other hand at one point desired children but relented to simply raising Uluu and staying at Tikaani’s side. 

Tikaani’s gender was also something of a mystery. Granted, he doesn’t care what pronouns you use, and he will probably use ‘boy’ in most circumstances but something jumped out of me as I continued to re-explore him. He was probably nongendered. Or rather apathetic to his gender, it was something that didn’t occur to me after working on him from sometime that his gender wasn’t important to him and that he will take on any role in the lodge. It’s something that I am still working on, but it’s pretty clear that he is not cis at all. 

Exploring a developed character can be enlightening and rewarding it’s also parallels real life, not everything you know about a person stays the same, everything can be dynamic and changing and it’s important to recognize that. It something to consider when you found our your friend is gay and your read him a straight (or hetronormative) when your friend is trans* and you read him as cis, or autistic and you read him as allistic. As someone that spent years writing Tikaani and discovering this strange muse of mind, I find it enjoyable to learn new things that I once thought it was obvious and right in front of me. Learning new things about old friends should have the same kind of joy.

On the context of 'Broken'

On the context of ‘Brokenness”

I never liked the word ‘broken’ to describe anyone. Not because ‘no one is broken’ but because it’s so flat and incomplete of a word. It has no form, or context. The word tells me nothing, because what exactly is broken and why are people so offended by it? In regards to disability, people think that ‘broken’ limits, dehumanizes and restructures a person around their disability ignoring the good and the positive skills they have. Yet when you do look at the good and positive you also need to balance it. It’s one the many reasons I feel like bringing this up and using some of the character I write with in my fiction. One that many already have known, for this essay, instead of Tikaani as my avatar pseudo-person its, Chiko my airbender original character which I think fits a bit better.

One of the most frustrating about disability narratives in fiction, is the idea that for the story’s arch to be completed the person with a disability must A) Accept his disability or B) learn to defeat it and be comparatively normal and like everyone else. Both are rather half-ass and shoddy endings, but most of these are written by able bodied people who never had a disability or that experience so they are just contextualizing as someone that woke up disabled than someone born with one. It’s one of the reasons I like Toph from Avatar. She is born blind so her narrative is not about her blindness but people’s perception and her ability to surpass that. In some way, Toph is broken, but her brokenness is not her disability but whole experience of being patronized and coddled by her parents, of her constantly having to match up to her sighted peers and putting walls among people because she is afraid of being seen as weak. With that all in context, she is a broken character. Brokenness is not about disability, it’s about social perception of worth, of value and reclaiming that word not as a flaw but as a paradigm. Brokenness should be part of the character’s narrative; it shouldn’t be a hurdle for the person to get over, because frankly, it never actually happens in real life. 

Chiko’s narrative is being used because I use Tikaani a lot his narrative isn’t about accepting and deal with a sudden disability but social stigma and moving against it. Chiko on the other hand has to deal with much in short time. For those that don’t follow the show or know the canon, this might be confusing and there is a special interest blurb about the show somewhere so you can do your own research. Yet, for those that are aware, the show brings up the fact that a race of people (Air Nomads) have been wiped out, Chiko is one of them and he and his family survives. Barely. His missing left arm is reminder of that massacre at his temple and it does haunt him. He does have phantom pains, he does deal with nightmares and flash backs and all that crap. His missing arm is a point of grief of him. The thing I want to bring up with Chiko, is that his narrative isn’t about his missing arm though it does feel like that, but honestly about his frustration of constantly being jarred around and dealing with a massive war. It’s about growing up on the battlefield and about being considered an outsider but not because of his limb but because of his social context. Chiko does seem himself as ‘broken’ but not in the idea that it’s because of his missing arm, but because he is considered unworthy to live, that he isn’t meant to be here and to him, surviving while others died, isn’t fair. He doesn’t get closure or sort of respite. His brokenness, his hurt, doesn’t go away if he gets a prosthesis or finds a stable home, the war will still be there and people will still die. Giving a disabled person an accommodation or a tool, doesn’t make their brokenness go away. Chiko’s value isn’t undermined by his brokenness, his love for his brothers and his willingness to never submit isn’t challenged by it. Over all, he isn’t less of a person for being ‘broken’. 

Which is I suppose the crux of the argument really. Tikaani isn’t less of a person, neither is Chiko neither am I. Brokenness doesn’t minimalize a person. Which is why next to ‘broken’ I hate the word ‘different’. People think that broken is a word that strips a person’s self and negates them but different doesn’t do that. I don’t believe that. Calling someone different, doesn’t negate that they are broken but accentuates it. It’s still isolating, negative and othering. Calling Tikaani ‘different’ doesn’t remove the fact he lives in a universe where his humanity is always in question, where is feared a shadow of a person and one that gambles with spirits. Saying that Chiko is different, doesn’t negate his missing arm. His nightmares or the fact his people are dying and being systematically killed (So much for Avatar being a ‘children’s’ show) and watching his whole world being set on literal fire. So I cringe when able bodied people saying that I am “differently abled’ thinking that my humanity isn’t questions or the alienation I feel evaporated by well-meaning sympathy. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t make me feel any less included. I don’t want to downplay either of my characters stories because I wouldn’t want mine negated for the sake of the comfort of abled people. I don’t believe calling me ‘broken’ strips me. No more than calling me different or special. I am either. I am just a wild satyr, an organic android, a bard with no song. 

I want people to see the brokenness and love it. Because it is a part of me it’s not separate thing. It is me.

The Monster That I Am

art work by Lucy Dreir aka Thug of my 'satyr-sona' Kalypso.

After spending about 5 years in disability right and identity politics, I have learned that I stopped caring about language and personal labels. What people call themselves is none of my business what they reclaim isn’t my problem until it comes one. But I guess this is a commentary on a word that I took offense to that now I want to actually redirect and reclaim. 

For those that have seen my art, I draw a lot of satyrs and fauns. I have bit of an attachment to them and other fae like creatures. I have made pair of satyr dolls (Santos and his mate Krysanthe which found loving homes when I raffled them off at Beltane) and I working on a third one and I have project in mine for a centaur doll. I don’t know when this attachment started or if this is a special interest but I’ve always filled my pages up with fauns and satyrs, dragon people, snake people and various kinds of nonhumans. I write about them and their lives in my stories as well. To me their lives are more interesting than any of the humans I write or draw. In some way I have appropriated my character’s nonhuman identities in regards to myself. I know that this is probably a response to the years of abuse and marginalization in which my humanness has been taken from me. As an autistic, I’ve been pretty much been swamped by the “changeling’ label and I’ve discussed ‘changeling culture ‘(the idea that our children has been taken by anthromorphed disabilities and we need to ‘free’ them from it) at length and frankly this isn’t a re-hashing of old news. In some way I took that label of ‘monster’ of ‘nonhuman’ and I embraced that metaphor. If I am not human to you, then a monster I’ll be. 

This is not to say that I am not human at all or that I don’t deserve to be treated like one. If there is an ongoing theme with my nonhuman characters, is that they don’t asked to be treated like a human, to subvert what makes them a merman, satyr, dragon folk or whatever. But rather for people to accept that difference, as valid as their humanness and that their satyrness isn’t something that needs to be tamed in order to live among human society but instead, for it be recognized that it’s ok. That it is alright to be something other than human. Granted, authors have been waxing identity politics with using fantasy races, aliens and robots or whatever, as a metaphor for race, gender, sexuality or…whatever. But in regards to that, I’ve noticed it’s always the human being the protagonist. He or she is face with the racism and oppression as someone that benefits from an unfair system and it’s about her or him realizing it and undoing it. It’s rarely about the nonhuman dealing with the unfair system and the expectations forced on him through it and when it is, there is the human acting as the audience avatar or translator. I never found that necessary really. I don’t need a normal person translating my autistic or transgender experiences to a cis or allistic person. This satyr doesn’t need to explain himself or why he does the things does, to you or anyone else. 

When I was working  on “Drinking the Styx, “ I wanted to make sure there were no humans in my story as part of the main cast that cast was going to satyrs and their experience didn’t need to be translated or explained away by humans or human sidekicks. I wanted to be clear that Hermes isn’t a human it’s one of the reasons I spent so long drawing him and his design. I wanted his eyes to be alien and strange, to be hard to relate to at first but eventually you see him with all of his satyrness, daddy issues and problems with mental illness. I shouldn’t have to soften him, maybe him less goatish for my readers. I don’t compromise. 

It’s the same reason I refuse to make Tikaani completely verbal, it’s the same reason I don’t always submit to the idea that I need to wear my ‘mask’ in order to be valued. I should be valued even when I am flapping, shrieking or talking to you plainly. My worth shouldn’t be based on how functional I am or how well I pass. Yet, it is. My identity as a ‘monster’ is measure how well I can hide my fangs, my horns, my long floppy ears any everything about me. It’s how well I can make eye contact, how well I speak, how articulate I can be, how well I can follow verbal cues (when I can’t process them very well) how well I can sacrifice myself for someone with little respect for my own needs. Those are things that people want from me, from others. 

When I do pass, I am seen as ‘over coming’ that I am ‘rising above’ something .  My disability mainly, no one actually realizes how much work it is and many autistics have explained this. But I want to continue to make it clear on how aggravating it is to pass, even when in spaces it’s ok to flap. Because in the end someone is going to see your fox tails and or goat eyes and jump twenty feet in the air and go “Wait! You’re not human!?”  I don’t see my disability as something to be compromised to make you feel better; I don’t see people being friends with a goat man like me, like it’s an act of charity. You’re not a better person for not starting at my horns or hooves. You don’t get good karma cookies for not mentioning that I am walking on my toes or chirping.

It’s being a decent human being, to a decent satyr.

 

Looking at Monsters

The narrative I hear from trans* people the most is that they are often aware of their dysphoria at an early age. That they always knew that they were in the wrong body from the very start, sometimes I hear different narratives how they recognize their dysphoria later and then started transitioning. Or they always were aware but didn’t transition until much later. There are different reasons and different stories. Each unique as the person.

Mine doesn’t seem to follow the script though. I never been aware of my dysphoria, or saw it until a few years ago. It was muddled, mixed in with the feelings of alienation, isolation and othering I got as an autist. The feeling of being in the wrong body never was present, because my body was always a foreign thing to me. It was hard to understand the nature of it and recognize much of it. I guess this doesn’t make sense to some readers so let me try to clarify. 

I never noticed I had gait problems until someone actually pointed out, I never felt the dysphoria of my period because barely noticed it. I never notice that I was hungry or that I was suffering exhaustion until I was older and even now I still have trouble feeling hungry. Or thirsty, the only thing that I am pretty aware of was the need to pee and only that because it was drilled into me through toilet training. So I was made to recognize that feeling. The others come and go and sometimes I am aware of it, sometimes I am not. It’s hit and miss.

Because that, my dysphoria was incredibly hard to pin point. It was like an angry ghost that haunts me only when my back is turn. I never saw its face. As a child, I grew up being presented as female and I identified it as such growing up. It was a combination of lack of body awareness and being socially blindsided. I did stereotypical female things not because I wanted too, but because I was conditioned too. It was expected of me to wear dresses, to wear make-up and to be interested in boys. Most of those were genuine interests but they were also mixed into the idea that I had to follow through with them because of social obligations. One of the reasons I had a hard time understanding my feelings towards girls I had a crush on, is because I was conditioned to reject these feelings. My therapists didn’t help with that either and it took me years to see that I was in love with one of my best friends. It took me years to unlearn idea that I was obligated to act ‘female’ and present as one. It took me longer to re-understand gender and what gender meant. I think as a small child, I saw myself not as boy or a girl, but rather agender. I was adaptive to whatever social function was there. I played with trucks and dolls and blocks and tea cups. Everything was the same and I was not interested in people as so much the things. I didn’t care about looking ‘pretty’ or looking ‘tomboyish’ I wasn’t aware of looks at all until I was actually in my late teens. So even though I bonded with girls and identified with them, I did the same with the Sander boys and my friends in Kindergarten. I was a girl, I was a boy, I was both and I was neither. Gender, was a nothing word. Still though, despite being agender (sort of) I found myself more drawn to being a boy and that desire. I wanted to be a boy, I should have been a boy and so the first heartbeat of dysphoria emerged. It was squashed however through my parents and through the idea, that because of my sex I have to be of that gender. 

So as puberty emerged I found myself looking at gender. I went with what I was told to go with. I was a girl I was female. But for some reason at fifteen, that wasn’t fitting right. I ignored it as that feeling of ‘other’ was probably something else and at that age I found the Otherkin community and I latched on to it. It was there I probably reattached my frustration of something is wrong onto the idea that I was a therian or and animal trapped in a person’s body. It sounded delusional, but for some reason it made sense. I think it was first attempt to ignore my dysphoria or rationalize it. It got worse and worse as I got older and fell in love with women and men, to start loathing my breasts and hating my period every month. I was told this was typical, but in my heart this wasn’t normal. At that time, I was dealing with not just my body, but the fact I was neuroatypical and battled with that more than my body. My neurodivergence was a more present thing for me, I barely registered my body most of the time and I never saw the problems I had with it. The monster of gender dysphoria lurked behind my back, and glowered in the closet of my mind. I never opened the door.

 Not until I was 19.When I reached adulthood and gained enough research I actually started to realize that feelings of alienation weren’t just because I was autistic, but gender dysphoria. When I found the term ‘bigender’ I went with it. I started identifying as queer too, because I started to realize I liked girls and boys. But I was using bigender as mask, it wasn’t right label. But I hated the idea that I was trans*. It was a combo of internalize transphobia and the feeling of being alienated again. I was autistic and I suffered enough bullshit because of it. I didn’t want round too. So I ignored the monster in the closet, I paid no attention to the heavy breathing or the growling. At that time I tried to force myself to be more ‘female’. Because I didn’t want to admit that the bigender label wasn’t working. My marriage was failing I wanted to be loved and more and more, the monster roared and screamed. It wasn’t until I wasn’t until recently that the monster threw itself out and dragged me into the dark. In tears and anger at my ex-boyfriend I admitted I was transgender. It hurt like a son of a bitch. 

Now in transition, I recognize the dysphoria and I am starting to fix it. Looking back I noticed the symptoms much like my autism. I saw it in the shadows of my childhood. But years of not knowing my body, or recognizing it, had made my dysphoria a ghost and intangibility. It was hard to deal with it and hard to see it and now that I have, I now feel the anger and pain with my body that I’ve had but ignored. My periods are dysphoric, my breasts are dysphoric and lately vaginal sex is slowly being dysphoric.  Body awareness is a hard thing for an autist, but for me it was vital for me to see my gender problems and I feel it was the root of why it took me a long time to start transitioning and recognize I was trans* 

Maybe other transgender autists might have the same story.

On Being 'Human'

This is an essay on the character Aya from Green Lantern the Animated Series An essay on Aya and autistic narratives In discussing with Isaia last night I showed her and essay in which I discuss the race of aliens in Mass Effect, the Geth and allegorize them to autistics and autistic narratives. I am sort of going to repeat myself a little bit but I will try to discuss why I connected with Aya as an autist and why writing autistic narratives can be so bizarrely tricky. Aya is by far one of my favorite characters. I haven’t connected to her so strongly since Avatar: TLA with Sokka and Aang. She developed at a pace that wasn’t forced or contrite, nothing about her character seemed like a cliché and everything about her seem to sit with me in way I had trouble describing. I really liked her, a lot.

Being male identified, I had to pick out why I connected to Aya so strongly and why I wanted her to be happy the most. It was when I was running through the blog-gauntlet being ‘Autism Awareness’ month (aka, Month of Hell) and I was busy readying over blogs for my disability activism then it hit. I attached to Aya because she is an autist like me. Now bear with me, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds, nor am I projecting (I might a little), I spent years studying autistic narratives in fiction and analyzing them, I write fictional autistic characters, and I notice things. It was when I had that epiphany I knew I had to talk about it somehow. As I stated previously, Aya was paced well. Meaning her development came organically and unnoticed. You don’t noticed that she was falling in love with Razer because the writers didn’t expose it and learn to show not tell with it. Her evolution of gaining momentum over the course of the season and it was interesting watching her develop. When I realized what she symbolized for me everything seemed to be colored differently. The way she interacted with people, the way she talked, learned reminded me a lot of my own experiences and a few of my peers; to me despite being a robot, she resonated with me how an autistic person should act in fiction or narrative setting. She wasn’t helpless, she wasn’t a permanent child constantly needed the ‘neurotypicals’ to explain things to her, she wasn’t obnoxious, or made to be plot furniture. She was socially clumsy interacting with organics, communicating them had occasional snafus and there were more than one moment in which Hal yells, “Ayaaaaa” in frustration. Yet, she is brilliant, powerful, beautiful, and so wonderful to watch grow up. Watching her interact with Razer was so breathtakingly amazing to see how Aya evolved and became more human. Not by the will of her love interest but by her will and desire. It had nothing to do with Razer but everything about her own agency. And at the same time, I was frustrated. They have made a wonderful autistic narrative, but Aya wasn’t an autistic, but a robot.

Despite autistics being stand-ins for robots in many modern narratives these days. I know Aya wasn’t an inversion and most of my observations could merely be projections of my own want of a clear story of an autist that is not written just for neurotypicals. Not everyone shares my view point on Aya, and I respect that. Aya though is example on how I want autistic narratives to be written. With that same well-paced, organic feel that isn’t full of preconceived notions of what autistic should be or has to be in the eyes of neurotypical society. There was no need for a ‘Velveteen Rabbit’ story for her, meaning in which, a non-human or disabled character is turn normal or human by the loved of another. Usually a male non-human turned human by a female. Aya had her own agency and decision with her own identity. It wasn’t made as I mentioned earlier, for Razer’s benefit. But hers, Razer loved her for her. Not to make her normal or organic but truly accepted her for her. In some way, watching her in pain and anger while she was in Aya-monitor mode, made me both frustrated and in pain with her. I wanted her to be ‘saved’ but because she was hurting so much and I understood the moments of shear cathartic anger and rage at the discrimination that we both endured. I didn’t want her to burn away like I have so many times before. I think the most striking thing about Aya and her narrative, is that emotions and feelings were there and watching her build them to empathize with her human crew and still getting treated like she was soulless machine; was rather heartbreaking. I have experienced that, the idea that as an autist I can’t love, or that love is too complex for me and I lack ‘theory of mind’ to understand love; and its nuances. Watching Aya defy what was expected of her condition was amazing and so beautiful. She did feel and love, and seeing that being told was very rewarding and satisfying.

 It was proof that autistics and robots. Do have souls.