Queer Minds — Cerys Bradley

a pink and worried looking balloon surrounded by hand drawn stars

Hello and thank you for coming to my show. I hope you liked it. I’m sorry I was such a mess. I mean it was such a mess. I mean, I’m sorry I made such a mess.

Do you make New Year’s Resolutions? I used to. Mine were always pretty basic. Between the ages of about 12 and 18 I wished to be cooler. My New Year’s Resolution was, relentlessly, to be more aloof. Obviously, they were never successful. I failed, repeatedly, and then I grew out of trained myself out of setting them and then in 2018 I had a bad time. I was finishing my PhD and I was very stressed and my parents were getting divorced and that was very stressful and I was getting worse and worse and every time I spoke to someone I came away terrified about everything I had said and not said and should have said and thought and did and I started to believe that everybody hated me and every time I went to bed I saw all the ways my loved ones would die on a loop over and over again.

And so, in 2019, I started a project (not a New Year’s Resolution). Not Overthinking Things 2019 was an attempt to reel in the intrusive thoughts and stopping myself. Through it, I was kinder to myself. I rethought my thoughts and I let the death montages wash over me and, eventually, my thoughts became kinder too and now I am happier than I was in 2018.

I have tried to replicate Not Overthinking Things 2019. I have done “Less Judgemental 2020” which ended pretty quickly because of the pandemic (and because it wasn’t a catchy enough title) and “Positive Mental Attitude 2021” which has really helped me rewrite my relationship with art and “Just Do It 2022” which was very expensive but a great one for the doubt in the back of your head and now I’m in “Be Chill 2023” which, I’m not going to lie, is not going very well.

Sometimes I wonder if my brain is like this because I am autistic and gender queer and sometimes I wonder if I am autistic and gender queer because my brain is like this and then I wonder if I only wonder this because at some point in the last century (or the century before that) some psychiatrist decided what a bad brain was and declared that all bad brains were the same. To help develop this show I worked with other neuroqueer artists who live inside their brains about their experiences of having those brains labelled bad. This zine is their art.

I hope you like it. I’m not sorry it’s such a mess.

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a cartoon drawing of Evelyn Hooker who is saying "They are both men and women for whom my little bit of wor and my caring enough to do it has made an enormous difference in their lives. — Evelyn Hooker

thank god for EVELYN HOOKER, that’s all i can say. thank god for her 1.8m of height and the broad, broad shoulders upon which they built the modern gay rights movement (citation needed). what if, she said, we could do a study on homosexuals that aren’t in prison or institutions. you know, the good homosexuals, the ones that aren’t mad. if there’s a way to show that the gays aren’t insane, it’s surely studying the ones that aren’t already in the loony bin because the young homosexuals that i know, well they’re quite lovely actually and they take me dancing so i want to help them, you know, distance themselves from the depraved and the violent and the dangerous homosexuals who have also gotten themselves locked up.

the fact that she dared to study homosexual men caused quite the scandal as proved by the main man from the NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH getting on an actual plane and actually flying out to approve her grant in person so peculiar was the request for money for a project not to prove that homosexuals were a little queer of mind but actually quite the opposite.

EVELYN HOOKER looks like a good egg and was, by all accounts, one as well. she picked up the great big mess of research on queerness and mentalness and she said you’ve been cheating as it fell apart like wet toilet paper in her hands. she said, to all those scientists who thought that the homosexual brain was of a different species or, at least, a little spoiled, i bet that you can’t tell the difference between one of theirs and one of your own and they said we can and she said you can’t and she collected a little collection of RORSCHACH TESTS and gave them to some experts and said there you go, tell me which is which and, you know what? they couldn’t and then everything was right with the world and there has been no queer behaviour towards queers ever since.

they said what’s the trick and EVELYN HOOKER stood to her full height which was nearly 6 nebraskan feet but felt like more and said the only difference between my study and all the studies before it is that i found my research subjects through a nice young man who just happens to be one of my students, and when SAM FROM, and they said SAM FROM where, and she said stop she said SAM FROM is one of my brightest students and he said if you scientists studied gays like me instead of, like you, hanging around prisons and boxes and closets, if you made friends with some respectable young things then when you compare like with like you’ll find the queers aren’t so different after all.

a star man looking sad and confused as a part of himself wooshes out of himself — You are not trans, you are just autistic.

There’s a small corner of the scientific literature reserved for the exploration of the intersection of being trans and being autistic. It began, as these things so often do, with a handful of case studies. Some psychologists in the nineties had patients who were autistic and presenting with gender dysphoria. They decided to investigate. No one can tell me what gender dysphoria is. No one really knows what autism is either, so, what happens when the people whose job it is to make abnormal subjects normal try to understand the link between two poorly defined undefinable “conditions”? They panic. They start to worry about these poor autistic kids who are chattering peculiar nonsense about their genders all of a sudden and the access they might acquire to hormones and surgery and life altering body-modifications and they become determined to get to the bottom of it. It’s very important that we understand why so many autistic people have been hoodwinked into thinking they’re trans, they say.

two starmen dancing, one is crying and the other is looking up and holding their starbrother — You are not trans, you are just autistic.

Their investigations have led to the conclusion that, according to science, you are not trans, you are actually just obsessed with the sensations of femininity. You don’t want to wear dresses because you are a girl, you just want to touch them because you are autistic. You are not trans, you just have an extremely male brain. You don’t want to be treated as a boy because you are a boy, you just don’t feel like a girl, because you are autistic. According to science, you are not trans you just don’t realise that it’s not ok to transgress gender norms. You are just more rigid about gender norms. You just can’t relate to your peer group. You just don’t understand yourself. You just cannot connect to your body. You are just not doing cis right. Because you are autistic.

You are not trans, you are just autistic.

People are very afraid of what might happen if autistic people (de)transition. All of the science says that transness isn’t real and that autistic people don’t really know themselves so they need to be protected from this new phenomenon before they do something irreversible to hurt themselves. [There is only the true self and the doctor’s job is to help you find that true self and be it forever. There is nothing worse than change.] The idea that we might be afforded the ability to experiment with gender or the agency to reject the construct of gender itself is inconceivable. [Don’t forget, there is a correct answer here. You are something and science exists to help everyone else work out what that is.] They have their theories. Everyone and the Parent of An Autistic Child has their theories and it’s ok to speculate because real harm is being done here. [Autistic children are 3, no 6, no 10 times as likely to want to paint their nails and use a handbag and refuse to put on skirts and ask when they’re going to grow a penis and feel more comfortable as some kind of they than anything else and break the rules that everybody else agreed without telling us than normal children and we can’t have that.]

a small star under a microscope is being observed by a cluster of oblongs with curious eyes — You are not trans, you are just autistic.

It is very important to understand why there are so many trans and autistic people these days and the answer cannot be just that we are looking for them. Trans and autistic are both bad adjectives and so if being autistic makes you trans then we know that trans is a bad thing because it is caused by a broken thing. Glitches in the system must be fixed.

This zine would not be possible without lots of wonderful people and so it is now time to thank and celebrate them.

The London LGBTQ+ Centre and Colchester Arts Centre provided us with spaces to meet and create.

Arts Council England funded this project which enabled us to provide all the materials and give away the zine for free.

And we are so very grateful because whilst you can make art without money, money does make things a lot easier.

And now, to the artists! Thank you so much to everyone who contributed their work. It has been exciting and inspiring to collaborate and work alongside such talented people who have been so generous with their time, thoughts and practice.

Aleks Jagielski

Alex

Alia

Beth

Hana

Jane Hearst

Janet Luo

Jen Rooks

Mary-Ann Ambrose

@ohfeelingsmonster

Pseudonym

Rowanna Cadman-Bell