My autistic teen has perfect pitch, a facility for languages, and an unusually beautiful baritone voice. He lacks the ability to understand group dynamics, Gen Z slang, or the social rituals of his peers. Worse, to him the west’s current social and political moment appears to be the exact reversal of all that is beautiful and true, a cheapening and derogating of the good that’s been motivated by greed and cynicism.
This combination of musical ability and social disability, along with intolerance for what he sees as false, has meant that his chances to engage in the musician’s greatest joy — making music with others — have been limited. He’s performed in some local choruses and theater productions, but in each one, he’s come in as an asset and left as a liability.
My son has loved Gilbert and Sullivan since early childhood, when he first saw a BBC television performance of H.M.S. Pinafore. When lockdown lifted, he had the chance to sing in the sailors’ chorus of a local production of Pinafore, but it ended up being a confounding experience for him, and for the theater company as well. He was hoping to meet other teen G&S nerds with whom he could vibe, and he did, but he was unable to enter their friend group for several reasons: 1) they had all grown up together in the Gilbert and Sullivan company, which was run by their parents, and he was an outsider; 2) they were, to a person, LGBTQ-identifying, and presented with a baffling — to an autistic person with rigid thinking — array of recently-adopted names and pronouns; and 3) rather than going with this flow, he pushed back against it. He called a cast-member who wore a large “They/Them” button “she”; when his fellow teens were discussing Pride Month, he told them he didn’t think being LGBTQ+ was a point of pride; when he was paired with a pierced, blue-haired, obese nonbinary woman in the finale of Act I, he was heard to complain about wishing his “lady” was more attractive. The result was that, even in an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan company that self-consciously called itself “the island of misfit actors,” he did not exactly fit in.
The next year, he sang a splendid audition for their upcoming Gilbert and Sullivan production, but (apparently after much debate) they decided not to cast him because of his social immaturity. The director phoned me (not my son) to break the news, and explained that, though son has a “fabulous” voice, social harmony was more important. As it happened, the male role he auditioned for was cast (in a move which the directors perhaps thought daring) with a young woman identifying as nonbinary. I don’t know how the show went, since we didn’t go. But since Sir Arthur Sullivan was an extraordinarily skilled composer, he orchestrated his baritone roles with an instrumental texture that a female voice, whether singing in the original octave or transposing up, would be unlikely to cut through. Key transpositions of this role don’t exist, and the amateur theater people who run the company lack the skill to transpose or write new orchestrations. So I can only surmise that it may not have turned out to be the mind-bending theatrical coup they had hoped for. Although son was invited to come back and audition at some future time when he’d become “more mature,” I doubt that he will accept the offer.
I think my son was disappointed to find that so many young people who share his offbeat love of G&S are also captured by the pseudo-religious ideas concerning sex and gender that are current among his generation. According to Jean Twenge’s book Generations, “Among young adults born in the 2000s, identifying as transgender jumped 48% between late 2021 and late 2022, and identifying as nonbinary leapt 60%—in one year.” Whether you think this is a good or a bad thing, a socio-sexual shift of this speed would seem to cry out for further study. Years of teaching this generation have led me to conclude that young women who reject the relentless sexualization of the culture tend to cut their hair, don baggy clothes, and call themselves boys as an avoidance strategy. I suspect that many of them feel the way Olivia Rodrigo memorably describes in the song “all-american bitch,” and have chosen to walk away from the toxic demands placed upon girlhood.
My male students who’ve adopted trans identities, on the other hand, tend to be highly intelligent social outcasts, many of them weaned on anime. I’ve seen a wide overlap between trans-identification and neuro-atypicality among both male and female students. However, while my female trans-identified students have been multi-ethnic, the men skew whiter. One male student who fit this profile also felt shame about his conservative evangelical upbringing and a sense of solidarity with the oppressed; as a white man, coming out as a trans woman gave him the credibility he craved. In general, the autistic kids who declare new gender identities get a level of social approbation that they’ve probably never experienced before, making it a tempting choice for this lonely cohort.
As the celebration of these coping mechanisms has become official policy, it’s also become necessary to construct bureaucracies to enforce it. Contrary to what we’ve been told, there’s actually a great deal of job growth in academia — just not for faculty. Before I quit my teaching job, I witnessed an autistic kid get accused of a Title IX violation for telling a trans-identifying male student that the latter “look[ed] ridiculous” in a dress. It takes a good deal of manpower to create and sustain systems of ideological surveillance and punishment that conflate trash-talk with civil rights violations — hence the job growth.
The college where I taught for nine years used to invite interesting speakers every spring for a day of themed activities across disciplines that drew on the speakers’ work; past speakers included the already-mentioned Jean Twenge, as well as the poet Carolyn Forché, climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. This academic year, however, the tradition has been scrapped in favor of a campus-wide event at the end of the school year to be titled “This Is Who We Are,” which sounds like it could have been scripted by the writers of the show “Community.”
But even if the institutions have lost their way, the great music of the western classical tradition has always been the repository of standards and integrity. We don’t expect our great musicians to be great (or even good) people; if we did, we could hardly listen to or perform the music of Strauss, Wagner, Puccini, or even Beethoven — not to mention Gesualdo! — with a clear conscience. At best, listening to and performing great music helps us to become better people, though that outcome is far from guaranteed.
But it seems to me that a group of amateurs in the true sense of the word — lovers, that is — would want to spread the love. If you love Gilbert and Sullivan, you want other people to love them, too. If you find an autistic but musically-gifted young person who loves them, and whose abilities with their music raises the tone of your group of amateurs, surely there must be a way to incorporate that young person in a way that everyone feels comfortable working together. In fact, it wouldn’t even take that much effort.
Ironically, the directors of this particular group are vocal about their adherence to the commandment of “Be Kind.” But just as the institutional mission of academia has become hollowed out, so too have the rules of kindergarten. One can’t Be Kind to everyone. When it comes to a desperately lonely, musically gifted, autistic Gilbert and Sullivan aficionado who could raise the level of your performance with some guidance in group etiquette and self-control, the doctrine of Being Kind can only extend so far. As my son has discovered over and over in the public sphere, Being Kind is a tool for gatekeeping, not inclusion. Our LGBTQ activist neighbors, for instance, who have a prominent “Be Kind” sign on their lawn, told me I should put him “in a cage.” Of course, autistic people on the right side of history are included, but, as my son has frequently described it, “I’m the wrong autistic kid.”
In the end, embracing autistic people into the broader activist coalition is going to prove difficult for the Be Kind contingent. To the extent that young people’s adoption of trans identities is being used by many teachers, parents, and clinicians as a kind of shadow autism treatment, it will work. But for the subset of autistics for whom biological reality cannot be trumped by will or desire, it will not. So autistics who question the current Topsy-Turvydom will be kept out. And what will happen to them then? There is a certain tension between activists’ desire to de-pathologize autism under the rubric of “neurodiversity,” and their horror of the autistic traits that undermine their worldview. The result, as I have predicted since reading the first hagiographic press accounts of trans-presenting children about twelve years ago, is that autistics will be left behind. So much for Be Kind.
This is one of the most heart-wrenching entries I've read from you so far. I feel so bad for your son!""
"Our LGBTQ activist neighbors, for instance, who have a prominent “Be Kind” sign on their lawn, told me I should put him 'in a cage.'"
That is powerfully emblematic of the exact place to which we have come.
I will say that "all-american bitch" is a fantastic song. I'll be listening to that again.