What Could Happen?: Autism, Aromanticism, and the Problem with “Social Skills”
“Jake has a crush on Sally. Jake asks Sally to go to the school dance with him. Sally says no. What could happen?” the therapist asks.
I shrug and tuck my hands deeper under my legs, staring at my feet that swing above the floor. At six years old, I’m still too short for my feet to reach. I know the swinging is a problem. This same therapist told me so. But I don’t know how to fix it because I can’t will my legs longer. I only know that it’s annoying and I’m supposed to stop.
“Just think about it,” the therapist says. “I know you can figure it out.”
She repeats the question, reading it off the little card from the weird board game where every turn I take I get presented with a scenario and asked what could happen. I know we don’t get to move on until I give her an answer, so I try to find one.
“Sally might not go to the dance with anyone,” I say, shrugging again. I don’t see what the big deal is. I’m only in first grade, so school dances are an alien concept to me, existing only on TV. And personally I’d rather spend time by myself than hang out with some boy who has a crush on me.
“Do you think Jake’s feelings would be hurt?” the therapist prompts, and I know this is the Correct Response she was looking for.
“I guess,” I say. Another shrug. She’s disappointed, I can tell, even though she thinks I’m too stupid to see it.
“I think it would really hurt Jake’s feelings,” the therapist explains. “And who knows? If Sally went to the dance with Jake, she might end up liking him. He might even end up being her boyfriend.”
It’s in sessions like these that I learn that having a boyfriend is important, that if you don’t like someone you should try dating them until you do like them, and that what you want is never as important as the feelings of someone who wants you.
Growing up an autistic girl, I spent most of my childhood in places like that therapist’s office. While other girls were playing with their friends, I was being shuttled between psychotherapy, speech therapy, ABA, social skills classes, and occupational therapy, all with the intent of making me, as they say, “indistinguishable from peers.” Being aromantic was not compatible with that.
I didn’t learn the word aromantic until I was in my 20s, but I’ve known since I was a toddler that I had no interest in dating or marriage. I also knew, even at the age of three, that this made me different. That people thought it was weird. That people thought it was wrong.
If you’ve never been through the battery of therapies autistic kids are subjected to, it can be hard to understand just how dehumanizing they are. A key part of that dehumanization is hetero-, cis-, and allo-normativity. It bleeds through into every aspect of autism therapies, often in ways that even the therapists themselves don’t always seem to realize. But when you’re the queer autistic child who has to deal with it and the long-lasting consequences, you notice. You might not understand it or know how to name it until you’re older, but you notice.
Take occupational therapy, for example. Many OTs try to desensitize autistic kids to sensory stimuli that they can’t tolerate, or even ones they can tolerate but just find unpleasant. For me, some of these stimuli include goopy or sticky or powdery substances on my skin. Among other things, this includes makeup. I’ve hated it since I was a kid. The feeling makes me squirm and cry and want to scratch my skin off. In occupational therapy, one of my “goals” (not set by me, but by the OT in consultation with my mom and my psychotherapist) was to wear makeup. Their reasoning: it was important that I engage in behaviors that were expected of my gender.
The cisnormative, gender essentialist rules said that girls wear makeup and assumed that if I was just “normal” (not autistic, not having these sensory sensitivities), then of course I would want to wear it because that’s what girls do. So day in and day out, I had my hands held down in trays of sticky goo and had random substances smeared on my face, all because some adults decided that the hypothetical possibility of a kindergartener one day wearing makeup was just that important.
But social skills training was where things really got intense. That was where the ideas of dating and romance and conformity to gendered expectations were pushed on me and so many other kids the hardest. In the beginning of this essay I talked about a game I used to play with my therapist. The point of that game was to “teach social skills” by presenting a hypothetical scenario, asking the child what could happen in that scenario, giving them a small prize if they gave the pre-written correct answer, and taking away something if they didn’t. Positive reinforcement for giving pre-scripted, allistic-approved answers. Positive reinforcement against asking for clarification, creative problem solving, and questioning the social rules. And many of those hypothetical scenarios presented were related to dating and flirting.
When I was in second grade, my mom put me in a social skills group, where five or six girls in my age group would be taught and practice our (again, extremely gendered) social skills together. One day, the therapist in charge said that that week we would be focusing on how to tell boys we had a crush on them. As if it was a given that we would get crushes and that those crushes would be exclusively on boys. I remember asking “what if I just don’t get crushes?” and being told that was a stupid question, because even if we hadn’t had one yet, everyone in the room would get a crush one day.
In all this social skills training, I was taught how I should dress, how I should laugh and when, what facial expressions to use in response to which statements or questions. And so much of it was framed in terms of “boys like this.” The hetero/allonormativity was present on two levels. First, hypothetical attention from boys was presented as an incentive for performing “normal,” non-autistic behavior. Second, my lack of interest in boys or girls (or any gender, though those were the only two the therapists acknowledged to exist) was treated like a symptom, and only by pretending to be allo and straight could I be considered “fixed.”
Looking back, I understand it better now. I was being taught how to be “attractive.” And I was being taught how to be alloromantic and straight.
This is only a small window into the the ways heteronormativity and amatonormativity present themselves in autism therapies. But the fact is, they are baked into the very foundations. The “gold standard” of autism therapy is Applied Behavioral Analysis, or ABA, which was pioneered by Ivar Lovaas, who was also heavily involved in the development of gay conversion therapy. The practices of ABA therapists inform those of speech therapists, occupational therapists, and psychotherapists who work with autistic children, and many of those professionals use ABA techniques in their work.
Growing up aromantic, autistic, and a tomboy who may or may not be a cis girl, I was taught the steps to fake femininity and straightness and neurotypicality. What I actually learned was that only the normal kids get to be queer. When you’re autistic, it’s a symptom.
I scribble frantically in my journal, trying to get another memory of the therapist and the weird game she used to make me play down on paper in the hour or so I have before the baby wake up and cries to be fed. I’m twenty-five now, but still remember clearly, viscerally, the awkward discomfort I always felt as I rolled the dice and waited for her to pick up another card.
“Sally says no. What could happen?”
The Correct Response is that she’ll hurt the feelings of the boy who likes her.
The real answer is this: if Sally says no, she could end up in therapy.
Notes:
Dawson, M. (n.d.). The Misbehaviour of Behaviourists: Ethical Challenges to the Autism-ABA Industry. Retrieved April 23, 2022, from https://www.sentex.ca/~nexus23/naa_aba.html
