Bi The Way, I’m Autistic: Learning to Navigate Sexuality as a Neurodivergent Individual

By Claire Thomas Hawnt

I knew I liked boys and girls, but I didn’t want to like boys and girls. I didn’t think my life could take getting any more complicated than it already was. I didn’t need *another* reason to stand out.

There were already plenty of reasons: how I couldn’t make friends, how it felt like all the other kids already knew each other; they knew rules that I didn’t know. There was the meltdowns I had, my inability to regulate.

People didn’t say autism then. Not about girls. If you’d said autism then, people would have thought of a little boy, silently lining up cars in rows, not looking at you. They wouldn’t have thought of a bright, tactless, know-it-all girl with her face always in a book.

And liking girls as well as boys? It was the ‘80s. There was no way to talk about that.

I told myself that I’d grow out of liking girls as well as boys. I felt like I needed to pin myself down to one or the other. Was I gay or straight? There was so much casual biphobia floating around in society at the time, and I soaked it up like a sponge.

I heard people dismiss bi girls as acting for male attention. I heard lesbian friends say they’d never date a bi girl. They didn’t know that one was listening to every word they spoke. I piled their words up in the back of my mind, evidence that weighed my lips shut. Don’t tell them.

Eventually, late one night with the only friend that I’d confided in, and three-quarters of the way down our second bottle of red, she said, drunkenly: ‘You – you know what your trouble is? You think that there’s something wrong with you being bi. And there’s not.’

The truth of this hit me with the force of an epiphany. Of course there was nothing wrong with me. I was fine with anyone else being bi. Why wasn’t I fine with it for myself? I realised, then, that it was time to extend that fineness to myself, to start owning who I was.

According to studies, autistic people are significantly more likely to identify as LGBTQ+. For people classified as rigid thinkers, it’s true that many of us are over sexual and gender norms. We question stuff; we don’t respect arbitrary norms for their own sake. Of course, I didn’t know I was autistic back then. It took another fifteen years, the pandemic and another chance remark from a friend before I’d start my diagnostic journey.

Before you know you’re autistic, dating can feel like making your way across a room crowded with furniture in the pitch black – banging your shins, tripping over, breaking things. You keep making mistakes because you can’t see what you’re doing. Diagnosis turns the light on; you learn strategies to avoid the coffee table or the fragile vase. You have the opportunity, with help, to navigate your way across the room unhurt. Before that, something always gets damaged.

Embarrassingly, I can’t flirt, or tell when people are flirting with me. Dating girls compounded this for me. I was so terrified of coming off as creepy that 90% of the girls I liked had no idea I even wanted to be in the same room as them. And the girls that were interested in dating me? Unless they’d hired a skywriter, they couldn’t convey their interest enough for anything to ever get off the ground. And because I didn’t know then that I was autistic, this happened a lot.

Even successful dating was fraught with further issues. Autistic people often get fixations, and I often fixated on people that I was in the early stages of dating. It’s hard to play it cool if all you want to do is read poetry – or worse, write it. If I didn’t frighten off my potential partners, my own judgment on whether I wanted to keep dating them went right out the window. I was too fixated to think clearly. Just recognising my tendency to fixate as a symptom has helped me to control it; ironically, I’ve finally learned to deal with my fixations long after I left the dating market.

I was thirty-eight when I started on the diagnostic journey for autism. Finally, the pieces of myself fell into place. I realised how long I’d spent masking parts of myself, and the energy that I’d put into trying to be normal. I worked so hard. No wonder I was always so exhausted; no wonder my creative energies were sapped. I’d spent so long trying to pass for neurotypical – just like I spent so long trying to pass for straight – that I’d worn myself out.

I finally let go of the idea that if I hung on long enough, worked hard enough, I would somehow change into a person that I’d rather be, someone who fitted in. I realised that since that would never happen I’d better start learning to accept and love the person that I was.

It wasn’t always easy. There was a stage of grieving myself; I was never going to fly under the radar; never going to fit in. And later there was a stage, too, of grieving for myself, for how long I had laboured alone and unsupported. I started to find the parts of me that had grown, unappreciated, in the darkness while I pursued anonymity, and to notice them and value them: my ability to love and support; the intensity of my passions; my ability to notice and find joy in tiny things like roadside weeds and fungi growing from damp leaves.

I’ve learned to appreciate the joys of being both bisexual and autistic. I love that I don’t have to choose. I can be attracted to people regardless of gender, and because of it. I love the well of empathy that autism has brought me; it’s all wrong to say we don’t feel deep emotion. We do; we just don’t always know what we’re feeling or how to express it.

I love the deep and vital sense of justice and fairness that springs from my autism; it’s what has made me a public advocate for bisexuality and for autism, and fed into my day job as a head of equality and diversity, where I live and share my own truth. I’ve finally learnt not just to accept myself, but to celebrate myself too.