Click here to read
By Jake Pyne, 2021This article proceeds from the observation that autistic and transgender experiences have significant and overlapping temporal schemes to which narrative is crucial. While both autism and transgender are highly medicalized states of being, there exists no biological marker that distinguishes autistic from allistic (nonautistic) minds, or transgender from cis ones. Indeed, both autism and transgender can be understood as “narrative conditions” (Duffy and Dorner 2011), in the sense that each comes into being as it is storied over time, by oneself and by others. As two so-called epidemics on the rise, a temporality of urgency now attaches to both autistic and transgender subjects, and in recent years those who straddle the categories — autistic and trans — have come to inspire maximum hand-wringing (see Bradley 2017). In this article, I draw on the life writing of autistic, trans, and autistic-trans authors to consider the temporal possibilities of their narratives.
