Growing Up Mormon and Autistic Coded Female

This piece was commissioned as part of the In Our Own Words series, which seeks to share the voices and experiences of marginalized individuals. You can find all of the pieces in this series here.

By Mette Ivie Harrison

When I think about my childhood experiences at church, they are almost all good. I liked reading scripture stories. I was good at reading and good at memorization and most of the social interactions were straight forward and overseen by adults. Looking back, I can see that I missed things, but it was probably for the best. I was bullied in school and wasn’t a popular person at church, but I often missed those social cues, which was weirdly protective.

One of my foundational experiences was just before puberty, in fourth grade, when I spent a year pretending to be a boy (I was “Eddie” instead of “Mette” because the school got my name messed up in my transcripts). My mother was happy to cut my hair short, which she thought of as more practical, and to buy me more durable masculine clothing when I directed her that way. I was happy to experience the world (briefly) as a boy. I got to experience the world as a boy, complete with math teachers who suddenly treated me as smarter, and other boys who slapped me on the back, had farting contests with me, and also never, ever touched me or cried.

Ultimately, I decided I didn’t like being a boy any more than being a girl. But the next year, puberty struck and I couldn’t pretend to be a boy anymore. As an autist, I recognize this clearly as a very common problem with gender that corresponds to a much higher rate of transgender identity among autists than among the normal population. I tend to call myself either “agender” or “autigender” because I don’t think I really understand what gender is.

After puberty, I tried to fit in as a Mormon teen girl. I tried to wear makeup for a few years. I tried to wear more fashionable clothing—though I was admittedly terrible at this. For a while, I believed that all girls wished they were boys, felt uncomfortable in dresses and heels (how could you not?) and were confused by gender. It was only as I had more female friends and became close enough to them to ask about their experience with being female that I realized that my uneasiness in being female was very unusual—something that I wasn’t to talk about or even think about clearly.

As an adult woman, I often come across as kind of masculine in approach, but I’ve come to see this isn’t because I’m masculine. It’s because whatever we call “masculine” happens to be what I am naturally. I can be aggressive and blunt. I don’t talk around things. I don’t know how to guess at other people’s intentions. I would sometimes find myself more comfortable in conversations with Mormon men rather than Mormon women, which made my place in Mormondom even more fraught. (For instance, as an Ironman triathlete, men are often interested in racing stories and seem to be impressed by my athletic prowess.)

There are just as many ways that I am feminine, however. Again, this has nothing to do with my physical gender. I am always baffled by how we sort interests into genders when I can’t see how they have anything to do with body parts. I love to knit and crochet (though I hate sewing and don’t quilt often). I loved being a mother and think I’m good at it, though I’m quite untraditional in my mothering. I think I’m nurturing, but not necessarily in typical ways. I listen intently to my children and I’ve learned to trust their ways of experiencing their own lives, mainly because I felt like adults so dismissed my experiences when I was a child and a teen.

The Family Proclamation and its language about gender being “eternal” has bothered me more and more over the years. I studied enough about gender in graduate school at Princeton to understand that our ideas of what is “male” and what is “female” have changed a lot over time and change from culture to culture. Just one small detail is that the color “pink” used to be considered very masculine and “blue” was feminine in the 1800s. Now it seems we can’t imagine that those colors wouldn’t be coded the way they are today.

Given this historical reality about gender changing with time and culture, what could it possibly mean to be eternally female in a celestial cosmos? I am as baffled by this as I am by all gender essentialism. It makes no sense to me at all. I heard plenty of Mormons insist that it’s not difficult to understand at all, that gender is what you’re assigned at birth, and that being feminine or masculine just comes naturally and easily to everyone unless something is terribly wrong with you. But this is all very strange to me. Academically and historically, this is obviously not true, but one cannot say this at church in most settings.

I haven’t attended a Mormon meeting for five years now, and I could say that it was because of LGBT+ issues, which it was, in part. It was also because I could not find any way to talk about the problems I have with ideas of gender within Mormonism. I tried to sing “Heavenly Mother, Are You Really There?” and to sing about “I am a child of God, and they have sent me here.” I tried to make it work again and again, but even in feminist Mormon communities, it was hard to explain what my experience with gender was like. Talking about a Heavenly Mother as well as a Heavenly Father didn’t really help me at all because that was just more gender essentialism and I had no more hope of becoming a goddess than I did a god.

As an autist, this is just the beginning of a long list of problems that I had in Mormonism and could not solve, as frustrating as that is for someone who assumes everything in the world can be analyzed and figured out. There were other problems for me, including sensory sensitivities to perfumes, noise, cold, and just the overwhelming expectation of seeing so many faces and trying to figure out what they were saying without the help of written words. I hated what felt like “fake” interactions and constant “lying.” I’m aware that this is not how other people think of what they might call “being nice,” but that was how I often saw it, especially when I heard the opposite of what was said to my face was being said to others. The way I display emotions is also often “wrong.” As a woman, I don’t cry enough. But I’m also stone-faced or angry too often.

I fell into a deep depression about a decade before I stopped attending church and I still remember the advice that was given to me from almost everyone in my ward was advice that might work for a neurotypical person who was not as introverted as I was, but was ridiculous for me. Spending more time with other people was the opposite of helpful for dealing with my mental and emotional needs. But a church that is extremely extroverted and can’t see that there are people who don’t fit the mold—and keeps hounding us to just try harder to do so in so many different ways—was harmful to me.

Being coded a woman within Mormonism meant that I wasn’t allowed to advocate for myself as an autist. I couldn’t demand that other people pay attention more to my needs because I wasn’t supposed to have any needs other than continuing to give and give to others. This makes me sound selfish, I suppose, but being a little more selfish might have allowed me to keep attending for longer. On the other hand, being autistic might have made me stay a lot longer simply because Mormonism made my social life easier by offering me assigned friends through visiting teaching and callings in organizations that required me to work with other people.  The whole idea of having a body that is supposed to feel like it is “naturally” attached to my brain is something that I’m not sure I can appreciate theologically. I have never felt like I belong inside my body. It is more of a “meat sack” that I have to constantly drag around and make operate in ways that will always be clumsy.

Mette Ivie Harrison is a writer and fiber artist living in Utah. She raised five children and now works in the financial industry. She was diagnosed with autism in 2017, at the age of 46.