Gender, Integrity, and the Pattern of Performance
A reflection on Lorde, autistic perception, and the human need for coherence
Like most things in pop culture, I wasn’t paying much attention until the noise became unavoidable.
But apparently the musician Lorde made a comment about gender—something subtle, honest, and thoughtful—and the internet, predictably, lost its collective shit.
“I just love the open back. It really represents where I’m at, gender-wise. I feel like a man and a woman, you know?”
And in a later interview:
“I had come back from London to New York after this period of great turbulence in my personal life… and started to feel my gender broadening a little bit.”
So, she shares a lived and evolving sense of self. She doesn’t renounce her womanhood or change her pronouns—which, to be explicitly clear, is perfectly valid. But in response, discourse around her statements fractures in exhaustingly familiar ways—oversimplified, performative in tone, and dismissive of even a hint of any real complexity.
Some argue that using she/her pronouns while expressing gender fluidity undermines the legitimacy of that expression. Others claim that without an explicit nonbinary label, her words feel hollow or opportunistic—part of a growing trend where queerness is worn aesthetically by public figures without the social cost.
And to be fair, not all of these critiques come from a place of hostility. Some stem from lived frustration—a protective reflex against the aestheticization of identities that others have paid a high cost to live openly.
But there’s a pattern here: identity is only affirmed when it follows an approved script. And anything that deviates from that script—especially if it refuses to resolve into certainty—is seen as suspect.
And what makes this backlash especially exhausting is that it’s not just coming from reactionary corners of the internet—it’s coming from people who claim to care about gender liberation. The same people who rally behind fluidity one day are the ones enforcing purity tests the next.
If your solidarity collapses the moment someone’s expression doesn’t follow your script, that’s not advocacy—it’s performance.
And it’s deeply counterproductive. Not just for public discourse, but for the very people these conversations are supposed to support.
But I digress. This post isn’t really about Lorde. Or gender, for that matter. It’s about the pattern. The predictable loop of projection, discomfort, and performative certainty that plays out any time someone—especially someone visible—expresses identity in a way that resists categorization.
As an autistic person, I feel this loop in my bones.
Not just because I’m used to being misread, but because I see the structure of it. The shape. The performance of understanding without the labor of it. The demand for clean definitions in a world where people—real people—don’t operate on toggle switches.
My brain, like many autistic brains, is built for pattern recognition. That’s not just a quirk—it’s a survival function. We learn quickly that when people say one thing and mean another, or when social cues contradict emotional truths, it’s not just confusing—it’s dangerous. Like when someone’s tone says one thing but their body says another. Or when praise carries a tension you can’t name, but you feel it anyway—because it doesn’t match the structure of sincerity. We compensate. We over-process. We build internal scaffolding to make sense of incoherence because the world rarely offers coherence freely.
This leads to a kind of heightened vigilance—one that often gets mistaken for intensity or even rigidity, when in reality, it’s about integrity. Structural integrity. Emotional integrity. Conceptual alignment. I’m not just looking for who’s right or wrong—I’m looking for what holds up. What actually tracks.
And what I see in the discourse around Lorde is a lot of noise that doesn’t.
People perform allyship by policing identity.
People claim to defend gender fluidity while demanding rigid confirmation.
People treat ‘nonbinary’ like a password—something to be earned or unlocked—rather than a lens through which someone might honestly describe their experience.
They miss the point because they’re still trying to fit it into a binary frame.
And I get it—ambiguity is uncomfortable. But if the goal is actually to honor lived experience—not just celebrate it when it’s convenient—then we have to get better at holding ambiguity without trying to collapse it.
When Lorde said she felt like a man and a woman, she wasn’t asking to be categorized. She was sharing a lived sense of self. That is human. And if your framework can’t accommodate that, the problem isn’t her—it’s the framework.
I write about this not just as an observer, but as someone whose entire cognitive process is shaped by a need for coherence—not simplicity, but truth that fits. That resonates. That sustains itself under pressure. That means something, even if it doesn’t mean that something easily.
This is why performative behavior unsettles me so deeply. Not because I think I’m better than anyone acting in bad faith—but because I’ve spent my entire life learning the difference between signal and noise. And I see the cost when noise gets mistaken for signal. I see how it undermines the very things it claims to support—empathy, inclusion, authenticity.
And I know where that vigilance comes from.
It’s not just logical. It’s not just cognitive. It’s trauma-shaped.
My pattern recognition doesn’t just help me make sense of things—it helps me stay safe. I’ve had to become fluent in contradiction, hyper-attuned to context collapse, and highly sensitive to the disconnect between presentation and intention. And I know I’m not alone. This is part of how many autistic people survive and connect. It’s not dysfunction. It’s adaptation. It’s a kind of intelligence born of necessity.
Because at the heart of all of this—my writing, my work, my advocacy—is one goal:
To validate autistic connection as human connection.
To show that the way we process, express, and engage with the world is not broken, not lesser, not other. It’s real. It’s valid. It’s worthy of being heard without needing to be translated into something more familiar first.
So when I speak up, it’s not just about gender discourse or celebrity headlines. It’s about defending the legitimacy of honest, nonlinear self-expression in a world that too often mistakes performance for truth.
Lorde doesn’t need defending from me. But maybe the space she opened up—the one where it’s okay to feel like both, or neither, or something else entirely—does.
And maybe, if we let that space exist without trying to collapse it, we’ll be better for it—more honest, more human, and maybe even a little closer to ourselves. ∞