22 Keep Her Safe; Let Her Fly Free

Maxfield Sparrow

Teach your daughter to own her body.

WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, the bullying I had been subject to for the last six or seven years suddenly took on a sexual tone. The girls bullied me by spreading rumors that I was having sex, by calling me sexual names, including ones I didn’t even understand yet, by drawing obscene pictures of me or writing obscene notes about me and passing them around the room so that they would make their way to me, then giggling when I saw them. One girl even shoved me out the fire door, naked, when we were changing clothes for gym class.

The boys bullied me too, but in a different way. I got pulled into niches beneath the stairs or little alcoves behind the lockers where I would be groped or kissed against my will—disgusting, wet kisses with tongue.

I didn’t tell my parents what was happening. I didn’t tell anyone what was happening. I endured it all with shame and a sense of self-loathing because I thought I deserved it. Why would I think something so ridiculous as that? Because of what my parents had told me for years.

I am telling you about the humiliation I lived through so that you can understand what your role is in preventing your child from going through something similar. I know that sex can be a difficult topic, especially for a parent. It’s hard for many parents to think of their child growing up and becoming consensually sexual and almost impossible to think of their sexuality being infringed upon in unwanted ways. But it is a very important topic, and when I think about what I want parents of Autistic girls in particular to know, issues of sexuality top the list.

So, what was my parents’ role in my decision to keep my sexual shame a secret? It all goes back to how they responded to the bullying I had been facing for years before the sexual abuses at school began. When I would come home crying about how I was being treated, my parents told me that it was my fault. They said I was bringing the bullying on myself by insisting on being different from everyone else. They did not understand or accept that being different from others was beyond my control. They did not believe me when I said I wished I were like everyone else. They blamed me, not the bullies, for being a victim of bullying.

When the bullying turned sexual, I assumed it was more of the same: my fault. I was afraid to tell anyone because I already felt shame about the things people were saying and doing to me. I assumed that if I told anyone, they would just agree with the others and increase my shame and sorrow. So, I kept it secret and tried my best to avoid everyone—an impossible goal when you’re locked up together inside a school building. I begged to be homeschooled, but my mother refused. I had been a “behavior problem” for years, and she said, “Why should I reward your bad behavior by letting you stay home from school?” So, again, the problem was all my fault, and I was left to suffer at the hands of others with the conviction that it was only what I deserved. Those were nightmare years for me.

So, I want you to understand that if you want your daughter to feel like the door is open for her to come to you to talk about sexual issues (and I do hope that is what you want!), your openness starts many years earlier. How you respond to non-sexual problems in your daughter’s life will set the tone for what she will expect if she comes to you with a sexual problem. Do you shout when she doesn’t do her homework? Do you nag at her not to flap her hands or walk on tiptoe or spin around? Do you dismiss her concerns when other children treat her harshly? Do you force her to apologize when she has conflict with others, regardless of how she feels about offering an apology? These are the sorts of interactions that are paving the way for a future where she fears to approach you to discuss a sexual issue.

You also want to indicate that you are open to talking about sexuality specifically. I know this can be really hard for some parents, but it’s crucial. My parents were very uncomfortable about sexuality, and that discomfort came through loud and clear to me. For example, once I put some old clothes to be donated to charity into a big cardboard box I got from behind the grocery store and set it in the living room to wait for other contributions to be added. My father got upset and demanded the box be removed from his sight. I asked if it was because it made the living room look messy and he said, “No, it’s because . . . because . . . of what’s written on it!” and he left the room. I looked at the box and it said, “Kotex.” He was so uncomfortable with the thought of menstruation that he could not even bear to look at a cardboard box with a tampon brand name on it.

My mother tried to give me sexual information at puberty, but she did it by handing me a small stack of books and saying I should read them and come to her if I had any questions afterward. I am not very good at reading tones of voice most of the time, but it was clear even to me that her tone of voice was saying, “Please don’t have any questions! Just read the books and don’t talk to me about it!”

That backfired on her, though, because the books never mentioned that the first menstruation can be (pardon the mental image I’m about to give you) kind of brown and gummy. Mine didn’t look how I expected; I was waiting for blood to come. Blood is a bright red liquid. When I saw a sort of mud coming out of me, I was terrified! I thought I had cancer or something! I mean, I can laugh about it now, but I genuinely thought I was dying, and I was so afraid that I couldn’t speak. I went to my mother with some of the “mud” on a piece of toilet tissue and just held it up for her to see. I couldn’t make words at all. It was one of the most horrible and frightening experiences of my life, and the books did not prepare me for it. My mother was disgusted and impatient with me—in fairness, since I wasn’t speaking, she may not have realized how scared I was—and hustled me back to the bathroom to hand me a pad and then rushed away with no reassurance or explanation.

Don’t let your daughter go through something like that. Make sure she knows you are okay with talking about sex. And if you aren’t okay talking about sex, it’s time to start getting okay with it. Do whatever you have to do: read books, talk to yourself in the mirror until you can do it without shame, but really work hard on this because your daughter will need you to be there for her, and she will need you to communicate with more than just your words that all these things that are happening with her body and her mind are okay and natural and nothing to fear.

If you want your child to grow up healthy and happy and safe, you need to create an environment where they feel comfortable with their sexuality and where they feel allowed to own their body and sexuality. There is a sort of autism therapy, compliance therapy, that goes under many names, but the end goal is to ensure compliance with adult demands at the expense of the needs and emotional well-being of the patient. You will want to watch out for it because it is very dangerous to all Autistics and, in our culture, especially dangerous to female Autistics.

Let me talk for a moment about one very popular type of compliance therapy, behavioral momentum, and then I will explain why it is so dangerous and suggest an alternative.

Behavioral momentum is a type of therapy that seeks to increase compliance. As described by behavior analyst Dr. Teka J. Harris, then director of the May Institute, it is similar to playing the children’s game “Simon Says.” In that game, participants are asked to do simple things like raise a hand or take a step forward. By requesting many simple tasks in a row, each one prefaced by the phrase “Simon says,” the game leader lulls the players into a state of compliance where they are accustomed to following directions. When the game leader then makes a request but does not preface it by saying “Simon says,” many of the players will automatically obey the command anyway, even though they know they are not supposed to comply if the leader does not say “Simon says.”

Behavioral momentum uses this natural human tendency towards compliance after a series of easy-to-follow requests that lull the Autistic into automatically complying with a request the Autistic person is resistant to. Dr. Harris says, “An individual may refuse to complete a task for a variety of reasons: the task may be too complex; a physical limitation may hinder completion of the task; or he or she may lack confidence. Regardless of the reason for non-compliant behavior, behavior analysts have a strategy to deal with it—behavioral momentum.”1

Re-read what I just quoted from Dr. Harris. That statement alarms me and, if you want to be more in tune with how your child experiences the world, that statement should alarm you, too. Dr. Harris bluntly says that it doesn’t matter why the child doesn’t want to complete a task. It could be too complex, it could be physically impossible, it could be frightening or overwhelming—none of that matters. All that matters is using a strategy to trick the child into doing it anyway.

This is key to my alternative suggestion: Don’t try to trick your child into doing what you want them to do. Become a detective and find out why they don’t want to do it. They may have a perfectly good reason. It might be dangerous for them to do it. Don’t assume that you know better than your child just because you are the grown-up and you are not Autistic. Listen to your child and work to understand why they don’t want to do something before you force them into it.

A perfect example of an Autistic child being non-compliant for a good reason is the story of the day that Emma refused to get off the school bus. Emma’s mother, Ariane Zurcher, tells the story on her blog, Emma’s Hope Book.² Emma was going to go to a new school. Her mother explained everything to her. Emma was ready. But the bus driver didn’t understand and, instead, began driving to the old school.

Emma, who was ten years old at the time, said it was the wrong way. No one listened. Emma shouted that it was the wrong way. Again, no one listened! The adults assumed they knew better and when Emma refused to get off the bus, they treated it as an instance of non-compliance. When the bus driver finally called home to complain to Emma’s parents, they straightened everything out: Emma was right to be non-compliant because the situation was wrong, and Emma knew better than the adults around her. Her parents were understandably overjoyed and praised Emma for advocating for herself.

The story of Emma refusing to get off the bus illustrates perfectly why it is more important to understand why an Autistic child does not want to do something than it is to try to force them to comply with what the adults want them to do. Now imagine a child who doesn’t want to comply because of a serious problem. Maybe the child doesn’t want to hug a family member because the child doesn’t like hugs or doesn’t feel like hugging right now, or maybe that family member has been doing something inappropriate with the child. Isn’t it more important to find out why your child doesn’t want to hug someone than it is to force them to hug? It is better to respect the child’s right to decide what they do with their body and who they show affection to than it is to force them to hug someone so they won’t be rude or hurt someone’s feelings. Your child’s sense of owning her body is more important than offending someone by not touching them!

And that is where the real danger of compliance therapies comes in. Compliance therapies that do not care why a child is not complying are teaching your child that she does not own her body and that she is not allowed to make her own decisions. What makes behavioral momentum particularly insidious is that it models the way young boys attempt to encourage young girls to engage in sexual activity before they are ready.

Now don’t think that I’m trying to demonize boys here. I’m not. But sexual urges can be very strong, and some (not all!) boys will resort to all kinds of manipulation to try to gain access to a girl’s sexuality. I’m reminded of a scene from a movie that I saw so many years ago that I can no longer recall what movie it was. A young couple sat in a car, watching a movie together at a drive-in theater. The boy put his hand on the girl’s shoulder and asked, “Do you trust me?” She smiled and said, “Yes.” He moved his hand to her upper chest. “Do you trust me?” Again, she responded, “Yes.” He moved his hand partway into the top of her blouse. “Do you trust me?” . . . Do you see what he is doing? It is behavioral momentum in action!

If you allow your daughter to be treated with behavioral momentum—or, really, any compliance therapy—that disregards the need to discover why she is not complying, you are training her to say yes again and again, no matter where the boy moves his hand and no matter how she really feels about his hand being there.

As if that weren’t horrifying enough, behavioral momentum and similar compliance therapies are taking unfair advantage of a feature of the Autistic brain. We experience, in varying degrees from person to person, something that we Autistics have come to call “Autistic inertia.” A simple definition of inertia in physics is that objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force. In a way, we are like those objects. We can have a hard time switching gears. When we have difficulty starting our homework, it’s not always laziness or simple resistance. Sometimes we really want to do our homework but need help switching gears from what we are already doing. Sometimes we get started with our homework and then get stuck there and can’t stop. I have spent twenty hours straight researching a topic for a paper. Even after I knew I had enough material to begin writing the paper, I couldn’t switch gears to move from researching to writing, so I just kept on going, hour after hour, until I collapsed from hunger and exhaustion.

Behavioral momentum takes advantage of Autistic inertia to get our brain’s gears turning in one direction and then uses our difficulty in switching directions to steer us right into disaster. I would like to see new therapies that don’t manipulate and abuse our gear-shifting difficulties but rather work to help us learn how to shift our own gears and how to overcome or work with our Autistic inertia. Autistics who learn to work with our inertia in positive ways accomplish amazing things. We are dedicated and hard workers; help us learn to master that tendency and harness it for our own good.

Behavioral momentum and similar therapies do the opposite of that: they train us to become victims of our Autistic inertia. And when someone comes along who naturally coaxes others by using momentum techniques like I described from that movie scene, we are primed to play right into their hands. Teach your daughter to own her body. Teach your daughter to listen to her instincts. Teach your daughter how to say “no”—and how to mean “no” and how to enforce “no”—beginning from an early age. Do not train your daughter to mindlessly comply with what others wish from her.

You may think that I am saying to let your child run amok and always expect to get what they want. I am not. Help your child understand what society expects from people. Help your child to understand how others feel and how to balance what others want and need with what they want and need. But also help your child to know that it’s not okay to let people hurt them. Too many of the standard autism therapies out there don’t really care what your child wants and needs. They care what she looks like and they care about how easy she is to “manage.” Don’t let those therapies “manage” her straight into victimhood.

There’s one last thing I want to talk to you about, with respect to your daughter’s sexuality. Do not make assumptions. Your daughter may grow up to be sexual and want to date men. She may want to wear a lacy wedding dress, and she may want to have and raise children. But do not assume that she will grow up that way, and be careful not to give her messages that these are the only ways she can be if she wants your love and support.

Autistic females sometimes grow up transgender and choose to take steps to live as a male. Autistic females sometimes grow up to be lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or asexual. Autistic females sometimes decide to never have children. Autistic females sometimes grow up to be heterosexual females who do not wear makeup or shave their legs. Just like non-Autistic females grow up to express their sexuality in many different ways, Autistic females can develop specific, personal, and sometimes complex sexual and gender identities.

Give your daughter room to grow into the person she truly is. Do not try to cage her into what you think a female ought to be. Do not try to steer her into being mainstream solely due to your fear that life is already hard enough for an Autistic and that a non-mainstream sexual identity would just add to that burden. What will add to the burden of being Autistic in a society that does not understand us is also having a non-mainstream identity but feeling forced to suppress and hide it from everyone—particularly from the people who ought to be most supportive, one’s parents.

You don’t have to teach your daughter to be “different.” Simply allowing her to have access to the many role models out there is enough. When your daughter sees that author and scientist Dr. Temple Grandin is openly asexual or that anthropologist Dr. Dawn Prince-Hughes is both Autistic and an open lesbian (and the first Seattle Miss Leather as well!) or that author and educator Dr. Liane Holliday-Wiley grew up to marry and have children, she will understand that Autistic women can grow up to have many different identities and that this is okay. She will not need you to tell her this specifically if the books written by these Autistic women (and others!) are available for her to read. Encourage your daughter to read autobiographies written by as many different Autistic women as you can. It is good for her to understand the community and culture of those who share her neurotype as she is growing up and seeking to understand where she fits in to this big and often confusing world.

And the final piece of advice I would leave you with is completely unnecessary. Love your child. I don’t really need to tell you that because I know you already do. You are reading this book of essays written by Autistic people because you love your child and want to do everything you can to help them grow up strong and healthy. But I will say it anyway because it is the most important ingredient in raising your child: love them and make sure they always know that you love them. We Autistic people aren’t always good at what they call “reading between the lines.” Don’tmake your child struggle to see your love. Make your love explicit in your words and actions. If you raise your child so that they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are loved and treasured always and unconditionally, everything else will flow from that, and you will most surely raise a child who is strong and healthy and confident in every way.