Insights into a Trans Autistic Life

This story is about my journey from where I was to where I am now. It focuses on autism and gender diversity, as well as difficult life experiences and discrimination. This story outlines a journey to positive self-knowledge and acceptance. I’m hoping you will find it helpful to hear about the life of someone whose brain may work very differently from yours.

I am Yenn Purkis, an Autistic and ADHD advocate with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. I have been doing autism advocacy since the release of my first book in 2006. I now have thirteen published books with several more on the way. I am also non-binary gender and I am asexual.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. I was the kid who was always reading books and remember wanting to be an author myself. I started writing poetry when I was seven! Writing comes completely naturally for me and I couldn’t imagine life without it. My first book took four weeks to write, two to edit and three for the first publisher I sent it to to say ‘yes’.

My books are all about autism.They cover many topics within that, including employment, mental health, advocacy and resilience. I have also contributed to a bunch of other books. I have two shelves on my bookcase for my Yenn books!

I am also a professional presenter and have been giving talks since 2002. I love giving talks and would do it every day if I could. I have a social media presence of over 30,000 people. And as well as all of this I work full-time as a civil servant. I have been promoted twice and my work is very much appreciated by my managers. Work has enabled me to purchase two properties over the years – one which I lived in from 2008 to 2020 and the other which I am living in now. To purchase a property on a single income is quite an achievement!

I am very close to my family, especially my mum. My mum is also diagnosed as autistic and we get long really well. We are like a club of two. My mum has always been my strongest supporter. I love her so much but our relationship has not always been positive. I spent some years of my life doing the wrong thing and seeking out negative things which I will talk about later in this article.

Terminology

Before we go any further, here are some words about words. There are some terms used in this article which you may not have come across or that you may have some questions about. These include:

• LGBTIQA+: This term refers to anyone belonging to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer and or Asexual communities.
• Transgender: Somebody who is transgender identifies with a different gender to that which they were assigned at birth. For example, a trans woman may have been assigned male at birth and then affirms her gender as female rather than male.
• Non-binary: Somebody who is non-binary identifies as neither male or female. There are lots of different non-binary identities.
• Asexual (or ace for short): Somebody who is asexual experiences no or few sexual feelings or desires.
• Queer: Queer is a word which can be a bit fraught. Some people see it as reclaiming a word once used as a slur. Some older LGBTIQA+ people do not identify as Queer for that reason.
• Cis gender: This simply means a person who is not trans and is not gender divergent. It is not an insult. It comes form the Latin ‘cis’ meaning ‘on the same side as’.
• Neurodivergent: This means having a neurology which is not typical. Neurodivergent conditions include autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and Tourettes.
• Neurotypical: This term describes people who are not neurodivergent.

Childhood

I am a member of a family of four. While only two of us are diagnosed neurodivergent it is clear that the male members of the family are probably neurodivergent as well. I have unofficially diagnosed my dad as ADHD given that he satisfies a lot of the criteria. This meant that as a child my family life was mostly very supportive and affirming.

I got straight A’s in school and spent some time at a weekend school for gifted kids called Byron House. As a teen I experienced a lot of bullying at school but family was always a safe place. I was very close with my grandparents as a child. My grandfather was Christadelphian author Melva Purkis. I didn’t realise that his work was loved so much, but as an adult came to learn his writing had make a big impression. To me he was just a very loving grandfather who would play with his grandkids. He would sit on his chair and smile kindly at everyone. I thought he was wonderful. I loved my grandma too. She thought I was wonderful because I was the youngest and I was the naughty one! As an adult my grandma was a great support. She lived to be 100.

When I was s child we went to the Christadelphian church (or Ecclesia to be correct!). We would go in the morning where there was Sunday school for the kids, and then in the evening where there was a lecture with no activities for children. I learned to entertain myself using just my brain when this boring adult activity was going on. I would make up science fiction stories mostly or play very quietly with my brother! We read the Bible every day at home. We took it in turns to read passages. I think we started at Genesis and worked through to Revelation and then started again!

My mums’s faith has always been extremely strong. She was a fan of the prophets and especially the book of Revelation. When I was sad she would read to me from the Bible, often Revelation. I knew all about the Whore of Babylon and the Number of the Beast, but nothing about popular culture. I remember a school student calling me Janet Jackson – a popular singer at the time – and me having no idea who she was.

When I was a child the Christadelphian meeting was a safe place for me. All the adults in the meeting liked me and it was a great community.

When I was 11, my brother, my parents and I moved to Australia to start a new life. Life changed for me on a fundamental level when we moved. Mostly I liked it. The weather was very warm, there was a lot of interesting nature and I got to move schools – something I was very relieved about because school in England basically involved everyone bullying me or bullying anyone brave (or maybe foolish) enough to be my friend! School in Australia was also pretty dire in the bully department, but much better than it had been in England.

We found a great Christadelphian meeting in the nearby town of Beechworth. In Australia the Christadelphian meetings were split into the Logos and the Shield meetings. Logos was notoriously conservative so we went to the Shield meetings. My parents were not in any way hardline and we very accepting of pretty much everyone. I enjoyed going to the meeting in Australia. One thing bothered me though. At that time, even in the Shield meetings, women didn’t get to do very much. They could play the organ, do the flower arrangement or serve the cup of tea and cake after the meeting. Oh and they could teach Sunday school. But they couldn’t do the reading or the prayer, preside over the meeting or give the lecture / exhortation. I thought this was a bit limiting. The other thing which worried me was the fact that I was expected to marry a man and have children. I didn’t want to do either of those things and felt very trapped.

Some words on gender identity and autism

My gender identity has always been non-binary. I just didn’t know this until I was in my forties. As a child I rarely wore skirts and didn’t do many ‘feminine’ things like playing with dolls or wanting to wear makeup. I remember when I was eight years old taking off my shirt on a hot day and getting in no end of trouble. This baffled me because surely the reason women didn’t take of their shirts was because they had boobs. I didn’t have boobs – I was eight – so surely if I wanted to take off my shirt I should be able to!

I wish we had more understanding of gender diversity when I was young. It would have made my life a lot easier. I am glad we do now and that there is more understanding of transgender identity.

I now identify as autigender. This is a term denoting a strong identity of being autistic and gender divergent. A lot of autistic people are trans but not all of them identify as autigender. For me, my gender identity and my autistic identity are probably the biggest parts of my how I understand myself.

In terms of my gender, I do not actually have one. When I look inside myself to see my gender identity there is a blank. I am not a boy and I am not a girl. I am something which is a sort of subset of my non-binary identity and this is called agender. I liken this to my sense of national identity. When I was eleven I moved to Australia from England with my family. I have never felt English and I have never felt Australian. If you ask me for my sense of national identity I simply don’t have one. When Australia plays England in the cricket, I really don’t care who wins! This is similar to when someone asks me if I am a boy or a girl. Basically my answer to that question is ‘no’.

Undiagnosed autistic

As well as being non-binary and not knowing about it, I was also undiagnosed as autistic in my early life. Being undiagnosed autistic in a world where there was little to no understanding of autism was brutal. I felt like I was the only person like me in the world. I had few friends at school and life was very confusing.

I was bullied every day at high school, often many times, and nobody seemed to want to help. Teachers would say highly unhelpful things, like, “Just keep away from them.” It’s a schoolyard, not a country so it is quite hard to keep away from them! Apparently ‘boys will be boys’ (this one still gets used and is never OK – a person’s gender is not an excuse for violence). Nobody seemed to know or care about what a hard time I was having. It was like I was alone in an increasingly hostile world. I read lots of books, wrote poems and stories and took comfort in food.

Anyway, now back to my life story…

Teen years

When I was fourteen I was baptised. This was a big thing. I didn’t really understand what it meant. Apparently my sins would be forgiven, but aside for shoplifting a couple of times when I was five I didn’t know of any sins I had committed! I knew I wanted to commit myself to the meeting, but on reflection it was more about being accepted socially in the meeting then being accepted into the Kingdom of God. I think everyone thought I was too young to be baptised. The baptism took place in the bathtub at my house. I felt very grown up, but that was pretty much all I felt.

A year after I was baptised I did something decidedly un-Christadelphian – I joined the International Socialist Organisation!

Autistic people often have something they are passionate about and my passion at the time was far-left politics. Shortly after my baptism there was a split in our meeting. I felt betrayed by the meeting and no longer wanted anything to do with these people I had previously liked and respected. I left the meeting and joined the socialists not long afterwards. I went from being accepted by the meeting and loving my Christadelphian brothers and sisters to wanting nothing to do with them. As a socialist I had 100 instant adult friends who treated me as if I was an adult too. It was wonderful!

Being a socialist was great in some respects but not others. I argued constantly with my dad and couldn’t wait to move out of home. As soon as I finished school I moved 300 kilometres to Melbourne, from my parents’ home in the country. I got myself a job in the middle of a recession and lived completely independently at the age of 17. It was liberating and terrifying!

The next couple of years involved studying art at university and working in a fast food restaurant and living in shared houses.

In 1994 I was 20. I had a partner called Claire who was 18 and I was in my second year of a Fine Art degree at university. I had quit my job due to sexual harassment from my boss and was living on student income support payments.

Just after I turned 20 I met someone who would change my life, and not in a good way. ‘David’ was almost ten years older than me. I met him through the socialists. He was a real bad boy and I was drawn to that dark nature due to the trauma I had experienced through almost constant bullying at school and several experiences of sexual abuse and violence. I was very negatively-focussed and wanted bad things to happen to me. I started a relationship with David which turned out to be a very bad idea. David was not a socialist, he was a violent criminal. By the time I had worked out just how bad news he was, I had got in way too deep. I knew if I left him he would probably kill me, so I went along with his criminal acts and ended up going to prison for six months.

This started a very negative time in my life, I spent the next five years in and out of prisons and psychiatric hospitals as I had gained a schizophrenia diagnosis in 1995 in addition to the autism diagnosis I had gained the year before. I was the most desperate and broken person you could imagine. I sought out bad things for myself and I definitely got them! Most people that knew me – including my parents – thought that I would soon be dead. I agreed with this sentiment myself. Life was hellish and it seemed that there was no hope for me.

The funny thing about hope is that it can surprise you. In 1999 I was a prisoner, was homeless, and I couldn’t remember how it felt to work. The millennium was fast approaching and I had well and truly had enough of being a prisoner. I wanted something different. I thought that a new millennium should equal a new life and it turned out that it would. I was released from prison for the last time in February 2000. I went to a residential service for people with mental illness and my life changed in a big way. It turns out that what-you-want can become what-you-get. When I wanted defeat and negativity I got them. And when I wanted a new and better life I got that too.

My two brain-related diagnoses bothered me. I didn’t accept my autism or my schizophrenia for some years – seven years for autism and fifteen years for schizophrenia. By the time I accepted my autism I had been back at university for a year and was living in a different residential program for people with mental illness. Acceptance of my autism related to acceptance of myself, so this was a big deal.

While my ex-partner David had been a very negative influence in my life, when I was 30 I met Polly who was a catalyst for positive change in my life. Polly was a world-renowned autistic author and advocate. I met her at a training course for autistic adults who wanted to give talks to school kids about autism. Polly and I became very good friends and she encouraged me to write my life story, which I did. I have now published a further twelve books. Having my autobiography published changed my world in a big way. Within three months of the book being released I had applied for jobs in government administration – one of which I was successful in despite my criminal history, mental illness and autism.

The moment my autobiography came out in 2006 I was thrust into the world of autism advocacy. It was at once amazing and terrifying! I began both my careers – as an advocate and as a public servant – at roughly the same time.

Gender diversity and sexuality – coming out

In 2018 I came to realise I was non-binary gender. I had always known my gender identity didn’t conform with the accepted norms, but there was no language to describe my experience of gender. Being non-binary was an absolute liberation. I felt like I was my true self for the first time. Shortly after I came out as non-binary I came upon my true name of Yenn. Yenn has a lot of different meanings for me. Most people who have commented on my name really like it, as do I. While I sometimes accidentally call myself the wrong pronoun, I never call myself by my ‘dead name’. I am always Yenn.

I am also asexual. For me, this means is have no sexual or romantic attraction to others. It took a long time to work out that I was asexual because it was almost never discussed. I have discovered that there are a lot of other asexual people who are also non-binary and autistic. There are lots of different kinds of asexual identity.

Being non-binary and ace is amazing and I am constantly delighted about it. After I came out I spent at least three months wanting to dance down the street. Sometimes my cat sits on the floor and purrs loudly apparently for no reason other than that she is happy to be alive. This is exactly how I feel about my non-binary and ace identity!

Sadly not everyone is with me in terms of acceptance. I discovered when I came out that there are many people who will hate me simply because I exist. Transphobia is very real. I don’t understand the hatred. I am a person who will not hate or judge. The fact that there are people out there who do hate and judge on something as meaningless to them as my gender just baffles me.

Reconciling myself to my past

These days I have reconciled with my past and the issues I had in the criminal justice system. I now understand that I was not ‘bad’ so much as my health issues were treated with a criminal justice response rather than a health one.

I know I am a decent and kind human being and that my work has changed the world, even if only in a small way. I used to struggle with the Christadelphians and my history in the meeting. I have been back a couple of times in the past ten years and I was greeted with love and welcome by pretty much everyone. I once thought the meeting was limiting and not good for women, but I think things are different now. I tried and failed miserably at being a Christian a few times over the years but Christianity isn’t really my ‘thing’. Despite this I respect people’s faith and recognise it can be an amazing support for a lot of people, just not me!

I think a faith community that accepts LGBTIQA+ folks is such an important thing. A lot of trans and non-binary people would love to worship but feel anxious that churches won’t accept them. This is really sad and I hope it changes. I actually don’t think God cares about a person’s gender identity. I mean if gender diversity wasn’t natural then presumably transgender people would not exist! The God I think of when I pray is very accepting and loving. I wish that the church communities that are exclusionary of LGBTIQA+ folks would understand this. I myself stopped going to church when I came out as non-binary as I was concerned that I would be rejected and judged.

My journey has taken me to a number of challenging – and liberating – places. I am glad I was brought up a Christadelphian. I will never belong to the Christadelphian meeting again but it was ‘home’ for me as a child. I have been to places in my life where most people do not go and I have used this to create a life for myself which is positive. I have reconciled the negative things and am now strong in my own identity. My life is difficult but very affirming. And I like the person I have become.