The intersection of being neurodivergent and also queer.
how does your queerness relate to your neurodivergency?
is the way you experience your gender influenced by your neurodivergence? (relevant link: neurogender on gender wikia, unfortunately the wiki entry on nobinary wiki is gone)
does it shape the way you experience sexuality and/or romance?
i'd like to hear all about that!




(Hey, @LB_Lee, is this topic relevant to your interests?)
We're a multiple system - many people, one head - so it absolutely does on pretty much every level. Each of us has our own gender, romantic and sexual orientation, patterns of relating to others, etc.
For example, I (J.) am genderqueer, pan, and poly. Au., who shares a significant portion of body control, is agender and somewhere on the ace/aro spectrum, probably demiromantic and ace. An., who also shares a significant portion of body control, is male and bi. That's just the three of us who tend to be here most - we also have women, straight folks, completely ace/aro folks... and as far as I'm aware, only two of us are poly.
Then you have individual tie-ups. Au. kinda-sorta crushes on one particular person. An. likes someone completely different, as do I. Others are completely uninterested in anyone. Sharing a body, unfortunately, isn't like sharing an apartment. Au.'s especially lamented not being able to try for anything more serious with the person he's crushing on because he has to take the rest of the system into account, and the majority of us do not want to be tied down and some of us aren't sure how well they'd get along with the person he's crushing on. We're not sure if we'll ever be able to form romantic ties with anyone else out-world.
We have different attitudes about sex as well that I won't get into, but which range from being very casual about the idea and interested in kink, to being repelled by sex in general. We have very strict rules re: sex in our system that require getting consent from everyone, even if they're not going to be around for the main event.
The women are fine with our body as it is. The enby and menfolks hate it. One contentious topic in our system is voice - our women don't want to lose our current vocal range, some of the rest of us cannot talk because of it. We've agreed to try lowering our voice with voice training before trying T.
We've also encountered bullshit in which people think our orientations and genders aren't real because we're multiple and know of cases where it's been used to deny people resources, but that's a topic we don't care to get into right now.
Collectively, we identify as poly, non-binary, and pan, since I guess that's what we average out to. It works.
Aside from that, we've also got a lot of trauma bullshit going on and possibly autism. The trauma's definitely influenced how we experience romance and sexuality, but much more in an interpersonal way than in a way that affects our identities. Unsure about autism, but wouldn't be surprised if it was something along those same lines.
~ J.
A summary of my answer:
In a sense, I guess that is an answer in itself. I'm alexithymic and so I have real trouble identifying or understand or sometimes even noticing how I feel about things. Which includes how I feel about things like gender and orientation and whatnot.
I've previously mentioned my term 'schroedinger's orientation', which I find a kind of useful description. It's a bit impossible for me to tell how I feel about anything until I'm actually experiencing it (and often not until afterwards and I've had time to properly process an experience). So if I'm not actively involved in sexual/romantic situations then my orientation is kind of... everything and nothing.
So far the biggest clue I have about my orientation is the fact that I have yet to ever really be involved in any major sexual or romantic situations. I interpret that (combined with the fact that I have had theoretical opportunities to become involved in such situations) as a hint that something in me doesn't particularly want to be involved in those situations. So I find asexual and aromantic useful best-guess descriptions for now, but actively saying "I am asexual and aromantic" comes across as much more certain than I feel!
Similar things apply to gender, but I have a bit more 'evidence' of my actual underlying state, from things like the way people treat me and the way I interact with society. I have enough evidence from those experiences to be confident that I'm nonbinary. I've had enough examples of being treated and perceived as binary (one way or the other) and finding it jarring and uncomfortable. So I do feel fairly certain in saying that I'm agender - but still not completely certain.
One particular problem is the question of physical transition. I have a vague sense that I'd like things about my body to be different, gender-wise. But because of the aforementioned schroedinger issue, I actually don't (can't!) know exactly how I would feel about changes until they happen. Which makes it kind of scary risk to take with major body-altering medical treatment, so I'm still wibbling about that and wondering what to do (if anything).
I have been summoned by @NinethLions!
And yeah, since we're multiple too, it's DEFINITELY an influence. Of our eight folks, we have one straight woman, one ace girl, two ace non-binary folks, a bi man, a straight man, and two gay men. So we're all over the map.
We've dealt by basically compromising. We don't have any external romantic/sexual relationships (too COMPLICATED), we call ourselves queer, and we've tailored our body to be as comfortable for as many of us as possible, which has led to a fairly androgynous presentation that the various genders can swing whichever way they want.
It SEEMS that had we remained singlet, we would've been some form of gender variant. I have no idea what sexuality said hypothetical person would have, though.
--Rogan
I'm an autgender. (please don't call me an autigender >.>)