Following up to the article I posted about the other day, here's the excellent and ever-growing Metafilter discussion on unpaid emotional labor. Thanks to the site's comment moderation it's got a lot more light than heat and makes both the concept and consequences of unpaid emotional labor much clearer. Lots of good food for thought in there.

This comment about how "autistic women learn early in life that they're expected to perform emotional labor, pick up just enough cues from others to maintain the performance even if they don't understand the nuances, and then miss out on getting diagnosed because they present too 'normally'" led me to the MeFi post about women on the spectrum: "Women are diagnosed with autism at a much lower rate than men, but there is growing concern that this is a result of gender-biased diagnosis criteria, since our criteria are not inclusive of the way that autism manifests in women. Many of these differences seem to arise from the different ways that men and women are socialized, especially with respect to mimicry, special interests, and social interactions". I remember writing about this years ago and then of course being 'splained at that it wasn't the case.

I found myself described in many places, from this list of female Asperger Syndrome traits to this comment: "I can sometimes sound really insightful and emotionally intelligent when talking about things that happened in the past, once I've had some time to reflect on things - but if you ask me the same questions while it's happening, I'll be lucky if I can remember my own name, much less identify how I'm feeling, much less identify how anyone else is feeling. All of that information has to be processed intellectually before it becomes available to me at all." Yeah, that; I don't tend to know how I'm feeling until I've had a chance to think about it. With years of practice I've gotten faster, but the processing delay will always be there.

So I'm thinking about how being woman-assigned intersects with being aging, non-binary, and autistic. Nice to know that I'm not alone in a lot of it: "If I start talking about the interactions between my autism-spectrum-ness and my (non-binary) gender identity, I'll be here all day, so I'll just mention that they definitely exist."