Born On The Wrong Planet: The Natural Dysphoria Of The Neurodivergent Child

A review of 'Fairy Child: A Memoir' by Forest Van Slyke

Forest Van Slyke did not have rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD, as a youth. It happened in her early 30s, during a burst of ideational romantic interest in a woman. “Hazel” surely disliked Forest discussing her as a pseudonymous love interest on TikTok. Forest writes that “the hardest lesson I had to learn was that even if you know why there’s a miscommunication, it doesn’t mean the other person is interested in solving it.”

Her crush followed a breakup. “Transitioning was on my mind constantly after breaking up with Charlie”, she writes. Dysphoria was the expression of a sexual neurosis she had built up over years. “I didn’t know how to have sex with Charlie without pretending to be someone else”, she says. This too was secondary to her essential problem, autism. Forest had always felt unfit for the world, alien, a fairy child living uncomfortably in human society. She inhabited the margins, gave up trying to succeed, lived on the streets, went on the dole, prostituted herself.

“I didn’t understand it then,” she writes of a doctor who refused to recognize her obvious autism, “but I would later learn that allistic people — or non autistic people — are more interested in hierarchy than the truth.” Nothing is more offensive to the autist than an untruth. Nothing is more socially offensive to everyone else than the child who calls out, ‘the emperor is naked’. Contrary to the folktale, in the real world, parents will silence the child for social approval.

Autistic children thus learn to wear a mask, perform the role of a human, and suffer impostor syndrome in the process. No wonder autism is over-represented in the young people pursuing ‘gender transition’. Girls who do not feel right with the world become women who struggle to fit the world. ‘Gender medicine’ has offered them false ways to fit their flesh to the shape of the world.

Forest has “floated around” since childhood, “trying to figure out where I belonged. No matter how hard I tried to pass as human, I was always found out to be a fairy.” The world always eventually realizes she is autistic and draws back, afraid of her magic power. “In Celtic folklore, a fairy child is a human-like creature that’s left in place of a human child”, she explains of her book title. Emphasis added:

It was what we used as a reason for neurodivergent or disabled children before we had a better understanding of what that meant. Fairy children, or changelings as they were often called, were seen as having uncanny insight or displaying unusual behaviour when they were alone. They were seen as magical creatures, but really they were probably just autistic.

Forest does not want to be ‘cured’. “A cure is eugenics, because without my brain I wouldn’t exist. The world would rather prevent autistic people from being born than understand us.” She argues that “the negative impacts are due to ableism and living in a capitalist society where different ways of being are pathologized.”

One wonders what to make, then, of the putative link between vaccines and autism a quarter-century ago, when science now understands autism to be an immune-related disorder. The most likely reason so many children seemed to develop autism after vaccination is that they survived illnesses which would have ordinarily killed them before the invention of vaccines. The median ‘cure’ for a fairy child, centuries ago, was a deadly fever, no fault of anyone.

Put another way, the “ableism” and “pathologized … ways of being” experienced by the fairy child are the result of society reacting and adapting to the sudden emergence of more fairy children than usual in recent times. Stories of children with unique spiritual gifts, special contact with the divine, powers of a medium, etc. are quite ancient. Perhaps something deeper and older than capitalism is going on, here. Perhaps the fairy child is the original esoteric child.

In an essay for The Esoteric Child, an academic work on esotericism published in 2014, Daniel Klein defined the esoteric child as “a gifted child who is the harbinger of the coming new age and possessor of special gifts” within a cultic system of belief. Klein examines the case of the so-called Indigo Children as an example of the esoteric child-construction.

This correspondent met a ‘Native American’ woman (who knows her real ancestry) at the Harmonic Convergence in 1987 who declared me an Indigo Child. “What is that?” I asked, instantly, because I did not know, and desperately needed to find out, being something of a misfit myself.

So I did the reading. In 1986, Nancy Ann Tappe published Understanding Your Life Thru Color. It is a distillation of esoteric ideas dating back to the 19th Century American religious laboratory of Spiritualism (i.e. séances), Theosophists, and so-called New Thought philosophers, a ‘bricolage’ of occult rituals and beliefs and practices that were transmitted through the hippie generation and advised by its disappointments. Although she was not the first writer to use color schemes in categorizing personality types — the seven-color prism is a meaningful symbol in occult religion — Tappe was the first writer to claim that she could also see auras around people, the color of which revealed their true inner selves, or soul-beings.

Among her claims was that some children were appearing in the world with purple, or “indigo,” auras, and that this was a harbinger of Aquarian global transformation. Looming catastrophes (opportunities?) in both the year 2000 and the year 2012 (one a western contrivance, the other a colonial projection) would see these “indigo children” emerge as new world leaders, imbued with magic power to heal the planet and save us all.

But by the time the 21st Century got going, American society was deeply concerned with ADD, ADHD, autism spectrum disorders, and questions about medicalization. The modern anti-vaccine movement had been born out of esoteric anxieties over autism within the granola-mom Whole Earth Catalog demographic. During the first decade of this century, quacks sold puberty blockers as an esoteric “cure” for autism. Ritalin became a new suburban scourge, justifiably attacked as an over-easy medicalization of complex problems. Forest’s ADHD diagnosis suggests that her autism is part of a larger phenomenon.

It was in this atmosphere that Doreen Virtue (real name!) published The Care and Feeding of Indigo Children, a collection of pseudo-spiritual writing explicitly connecting the “indigo child” to the “problem child” of her contemporary classroom. Virtue eventually found Jesus and disowned the indigo child as a New Age innovation, proving that beliefs are malleable where human bodies are not. Virtue’s list of characteristics distinguishing this special new kind of person, according to her book Contemporary Esotericism, includes the traits that Forest Van Slyke describes in herself.

Perhaps the ‘Indigo Children’ were a spiritual explanation for the new abundance of fairy children in the world. The rest is really just human nature, starting with overworked parents, followed by people who will take advantage of the fairy child, or even try to kill her. Principally, but not entirely, those oppressors are men.

Forest writes that her principal problem was getting male doctors, who were concerned with their own status as knowledge-bearers, to heed her diagnostic test results. This misdiagnosis seems common in the Canadian health care delivery system, which I note is single-payer rather than a free market model. “Women talked about how they went in for an autism diagnosis and came out with Borderline Personality Disorder or Schizophrenia. They were given medication that didn’t work, or made their mental health worse”, she explains. Something other than capitalism must explain the way male doctors refuse to recognize autism self-diagnosis.

Forest thinks she missed something critical at an important stage because her parents had demanding careers. “When they got home from work, they were too mentally drained to pay attention to me so I was raised by the TV”, she writes, putting me in mind of Jim Profit, the character played by Adrian Pasdar in the 1996 drama Profit.

Although he is a killer executive with a penthouse apartment, Profit still sleeps the way he did in childhood, curled in a fetal position at the corner of a cardboard G&G shipping box, watching television. In the course of the one season of the series, we learn how Profit developed his ability to wear a mask and manipulate other people from watching endless television, alone in his box, as a latchkey kid. Perhaps there is something to the arrival of screen-based childhood and the rise of autism, too.

“I have this theory that high-masking autistic people score high on the machiavellianism test”, Forest writes. “After being misunderstood and treated like criminals for so long, we learn to behave in the way we’re forced to in order to survive.” This was most obvious to Forest during her career in self-prostitution. “When I worked as an escort, I manipulated men by telling them what they wanted to hear, and they rewarded me with the ability to accommodate and financially support myself.”

She was a performer, adept at wearing masks, good enough to dream of becoming a courtesan. “But the cost was the exhaustion of masking my authentic self”, creating issues that have played out in her attempts to form relationships with men. “There’s a misconception that escorts sell sex, but what they’re really selling is a manufactured intimacy.” In her attempts at romance, Forest always found herself masking with each man, unable to be herself.

“I once talked to a clinically diagnosed psychopath who told me she enjoyed escorting because most of her clients were like her. She said meeting with clients was the only time she didn’t have to mask”, Forest Van Slyke reports. “I wished I could just see autistic people.” The world is not easy for fairy children. A sojourn in solitude on Cape Breton Island, where the fairies are said to have emigrated from Scotland, was helpful, but impermanent.

Yet there is hope, a flame kindled. “I’m still seeing Anthony”, she tells me of the man who “felt like home”. She met him on X when she started tweeting about her dysphoria and found herself “smiling ear-to-ear” as she exchanged text messages in a hammock, among autistic friends, fellow fairy children. She has made her own world to live in, one that understands her.