Here is a sneak preview of H Howitt’s chapter Bender
BY H HOWITT
I’ve always been bendy. When I was little, I’d be mindlessly chillin’, sitting on the floor, like all the other kids, and someone would yell, “Ewww, why you sitting like that, you weirdo?!”— my legs arranged at seemingly impossible angles, shaped into a “W,” my hip, knee, and ankle joints splayed like one of those wooden articulated toys gone slack. As I got older, I realized my bendy body made for cool party tricks, like using my arms as a skipping rope. Older still, when those super-intense hand-dryers came into public toilets, I would make my friends roar with laughter by hanging my loose skin over the jets of air, the flesh turned violently wobbly, like the inflatable air guys outside car showrooms.
I’ve also always been a little rigid around certain things.Since earliest childhood, I’d only eat specific foods. I could not tolerate particular fabrics, clothing labels, or socks. I refused to walk past a butcher’s shop because of the smell. Strip lights appeared to me as flickering and torturous, and if I had to tolerate them for too long, a terrible feeling would bubble up inside me until I was carried out of the supermarket or department store, screaming. Sudden loud noises resulted in a similar explosion, and every Christmas my Pop would carry me out of the pantomime at the first “bang” and would spend the remainder of the performance trying to soothe me in the foyer. Despite my own rigidities, I struggled with structures—time made no sense, I had a complete inability to sit still, and the innate skill other kids seemed to have to remember their PE kit or not lose their bus money, I possessed not.
During this same developmental period, I was frequently asked by my peers if I was a boy or a girl. Around age seven, my mum cut all my hair off and my family dropped the first letter of my given name for a bit, opting for the boyish “Ollie.” My sister, throughout my childhood, called me Oscar (ostensibly because I was grouchy, but the gender feels were the same regardless). I adored makeup and would frequently get in trouble for covering my face in my mum’s lipstick (more Leigh Bowery than Marilyn Monroe). I had a certain innate flexibility around what I was rapidly understanding as discreet gendered categories. My sexuality, too, seemed a little loose. My main criterion for attraction then is the same now: does this person smell good to me? Gender seemed to be about the least important trait. I liked boys, I liked girls, I liked dykes, I liked fags, I loved confused straight boys, and I loved confusing straight girls. My biggest early crushes were on people whose gender flexed and shimmered, changing color in the light like an oil slick—I guess in some ways this made me homosexual.
Many years later at a queer night in Brighton, on the south coast of England, I met a special person. Their name was Frances. We got chatting and they told me it sounded like I had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS)—a connective tissue disorder—and that meant that I was probably autistic and ADHD as well (AuDHD, we call it these days). They had this theory that EDS was a neurotype that seemed to include queerness. Almost a decade later, and research is catching up with my friend. I’m one of the many who have diagnoses of gender dysphoria, autism and ADHD, and EDS. Although there is now extensive research that shows the links between autism and trans identities (my favorite of which, by Reubs J. Walsh, posits that the autistic brain is functionally resistant to cisnormative and heterosexist social conditioning), and between autism and EDS (Jessica Eccles shows that if you’re bendy, you’re seven times more likely to be autistic and six times as likely to have ADHD than non-benders, and Emily Casanova suggests EDS might be a subtype of autism), and between EDS and transness (one study by Alirezer Najafian et al. found that of all patients undergoing gender-affirming surgeries, 2.6% had an EDS diagnosis—that’s 130 times more than the general population)—I don’t yet think there is anything on these three things combined—EDS as neuroqueerness.
I’m not saying that all bendy people are trans and neurodiverse, or any other combination of those prescriptive formulas, but what I am saying is that I think Frances was really on to something. I’m captivated by the idea of EDS as a neuro(queer) type. I love the story that my gender and sexuality are bendy, my brain is bendy, my body is bendy—everything is all loose and floppy and resistant to categorization and arbitrary boxes. I love the fact that I sometimes need rigidity to hold things still for just a moment, like the straps on my joints, the leg I wrap around a chair for stability, the ready-salted Hula Hoops I have every day, and my strict bedtime routine. I’m fascinated by this juxtaposition between rigidity and flexibility, between hypersystemity and hypermobility. A sort of coming together and falling apart.
In a world where our systems fail to hold us so spectacularly, where being a bender is still life-threatening, I am reminded of how grateful I am for the ways we hold each other, the body nurturing and mind celebrating of my bendy kin; the conditions that we create for support and soft landings from our endless yielding. To benders everywhere, the ones reading this, and the ones that didn’t get to, I dream of a future where we don’t have to fight, where we’re seen and held, a world that loves us like we love each other.
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