In this episode of Autistica, hosts Dr. Angela Lauria and Matt Lowry, LPP take listeners on a virtual culture trip into the intersections of autism, sex, gender, and sexuality. This episode spotlights the life and work of Alfred Kinsey, the ground-breaking scientist who transformed how society understands human sexuality.
🎧 What You’ll Learn:
- Why Alfred Kinsey’s autistic traits—like bottom-up processing, obsessive data gathering, monotropic focus, and a drive to uncover hidden truths—fueled his pioneering research.
- Kinsey’s famous 18,000 interviews that became the foundation of modern sexology, and the revolutionary Kinsey Scale showing sexuality as a spectrum.
- How Kinsey’s work directly challenged conservative Victorian attitudes about sex, sparking backlash that contributed to his declining health—a reflection of how autistic advocates are often punished for disrupting the status quo.
- Connections between Kinsey’s findings and today’s research, showing that autistic people are more likely to reject binary notions of gender and sexuality.
- His commitment to justice and advocacy, including volunteering in prisons, as an expression of autistic values of fairness and honesty.
- Reflections on Kinsey’s early death, which Angela and Matt frame as symbolic of autistic burnout and heartbreak—an urgent reminder of why autistic life expectancy remains so low.
- A celebration of autistic strengths like intense focus, honesty, and data-driven thinking, and a critique of how flawed diagnostic criteria and allistic systems erase or stigmatize autistic and LGBTQ+ identities.
Resources:
Related episodes:
Apple is Autistic
The Trouble with Temple
Greta is Autistic
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