Xeno Washburne

Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Fellow

20152016 Forum on Sex

Xeno Washburne

English; Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies

College of Arts and Sciences, 2016

Autistic Gender Non-Conformity: Negotiating Narratives of Pathology

I will analyze the experiences and narratives of autistic transgender and gender non-conforming people juxtaposed with medical and scientific interpretations of autistic gender non-conformity to examine the contradictions between and within these approaches to gender deviance in autistic individuals. This narrow focus will allow me to examine the intersections of norms of gender and sex and norms of ability and ultimately explore the relations between gender, sex, disability, embodiment, and autonomy as crystalized in the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming autistic individuals and their resistances to medical narratives of pathology.