autistic appropriation by trans women

Just saw this on Twitter. I’m guessing turning up and discussion biological sex differences in autism presentation and diagnosis isn’t what they’re looking for.

I feel like autistic women are being sidelined by a fashion trend...

Cliques

Thanks. That is really ringing true. He’s talented musically (perfect pitch) and, as soon as we talk about his (extensive and techy) equipment or a composition, he comes alive.

Great tips.

Blue, I hear you.

Datun, there are no set rules as such, but some general rules would be; don’t change plans last minute, try to avoid small talk or social expectations (eye contact, touching arms etc.), if you want to engage then talk about subjects that interest the person (great for establishing a relationship), be someone reliable who doesn’t make behavioural demands (if they want to play with stuff whilst talking to you, this is an aid to concentration, not a distraction), always be clear and if in doubt, ask. Don’t know if that’s any help.

Basically anything that means less work to do from the autistic side is great. Be explicit, if you like them, tell them. That sort of thing is great. Don’t expect body language and things to be picked up on. They may well be, but the people who I enjoy the company of most, don’t make me do the work. They’ll tell me straight.

I am also an autistic woman, and yes, it’s scary. What really terrifies me is that all the autistic women I know do not follow gender stereotypes (of course we don’t, we don’t pick up social norms in the same way!).

We are also black and white thinkers. If you had told me at the age of 10 that my short hair and love of all things “boy” and hatred of pink, meant that I was a boy and not a girl, I would have believed you. I would have “followed the rule”. That’s what I do.

I am an autistic woman and agree with you cliques. My three year old dd is showing signs of autism, and of being "gender-non-conforming". She likes what she likes and does what she does, she isn't conforming or not conforming to anything yet IMO, but it so happens that a lot of what she does and likes has been labelled by our society as 'for boys'.

She has started to pick up on the idea that some things are for girls and others are for boys. And she has said a few times, "I am not a girl" and spoken about being a little boy. I would not be concerned about this in the slightest were it not for thinking that if she encounters a certain type of person she could be guided into thinking she is trans at some point. That does worry me.

T

Moved, again, to offer sympathy to the women on here.

Conformity is something, I believe, that no doubt has some kind of innate benefit. But it is also imposed from quite an early age. Children actively seek conformity.

And when they are ‘outside’ it’s very distressing.

Reading on here how someone who is autistic can be lost in a sea of confusion really touches me.

It makes me feel protective. I’m not apologising for that, it just does.

As I mentioned, I’m not familiar with autism. Although, I now realise that my son’s friend is autistic. From what you have all said.

I detected something, but didn’t know what it was.

Having read how difficult it must be, is it possible to explain to me how best to interact with him? To make sure I’m not making him uncomfortable? Or is that too complicated as there are too many variables?

It's not just a trans thing. So many people are self-diagnosing themselves and their DC, PIL, whoever, Autistic or 'On the Spectrum'.

I am not autistic but have another condition that has recently become fashionable and it's so fucking annoying hearing people with nothing wrong with them claiming to have what I have. So I feel your pain OP. I just don't think it's a trans thing per se, more like an everybody thing.

I find the conclusions strange when it comes to autistic people who don’t gender conform.

I am autistic and don’t socially communicate in the same ways as other people. This is because of my social processing condition.

I am autistic and don’t communicate my sex through societal gender roles. This is suddenly not because I don’t process social conventions etc. It’s because my “innate gender” is expressing itself in a specifically socially conforming what that is diametrically opposed to every other way I work

How is that the logical conclusion? I can’t make it make sense.

It makes sense that autistic people do not gender-conform because (as with all social messages) we do not absorb the societal instructions in the same way as other people.

Interestingly you can find autistic women who have formed the rule that everything must be girly and pink. I would argue this was closer to trans ideology, and is based on blindly trying to follow a rule you have been told without understanding what it means.

Lying hurts me. It makes the world unruly and unsafe. If I can’t find the logic (and I’m used to finding the logic in the illogical ways of social interactions) then it isn’t there and I can’t lie and say it is. So far every autistic woman I’m close to has shared my views and my fears. They can’t make it logical either, and none of them are “gender-conforming”. I try to keep my views hidden, but this is really difficult for me. I say what I think. One day I know this will lead to me being hurt. That frightens me. I cannot make this all make sense. I cannot understand the hatred for women. I cannot understand why a dress is female or a pair of shoes is Male. They’re all made up rules that make no sense.

This is interesting.

My DD, now in her 30s, told me that when she was a teenager she very much wished she could be a male. She said that if it had been possible to transition then, she would have been all for it.
Now, though, she is happy to be a woman and glad that she did not have the chance to alter her body to try to be male.

Thank you for the posts on this thread, fascinating. My DD is 19, identifies as male and was diagnosed with autism this year. I recognise so much of what you all have said in her. I do think that before this era she would have struggled with this and then come to her own conclusion. I fear now that "being trans" is seen as a innate in born thing, she will be funnelled towards medical treatment.

Growing up I was definitely confused, but I can't remember it being in a black and white way, ie. I wear non-feminine clothes, I prefer typically male activities, I have short hair, I wear no makeup, therefore I am a boy, it was more the dawning realisation that I was wrong, I didn't stand a chance of fitting in because everything about me was wrong. I tried to conform but couldn't get it right. I can't remember thinking at all that I must be male.
If I was growing up now, with social media telling us that boys can be girls and vice versa, I would probably have a lightbulb moment and believe fully that I was a boy. Growing up with an absence of Internet meant I had to, to a certain extent, work things out for myself and reach a point where I knew who I was, although with hindsight that was impossible until after I was diagnosed, and I'm still working stuff out that ideally should have been worked out years ago!

In the 90s I remember a local school having an "epidemic" of anorexia, so many girls in one particular school developing it. Nowadays I see whole swathes of girls suffering from anxiety, and in some schools lots of girls deciding they are boys. It's obvious to me that there are groups of vulnerable girls who are going unidentified and are having mental health issues in various presentations, and it makes me wonder if they are on the spectrum, and makes me strongly think that CAMHS and other services that support them should really gen up about autism in girls, because I don't think we're even seeing the tip of the iceberg yet, and if they are autistic NT strategies may not fully help them. Allowing people to change their gender is all well and good, but as part of a decades long pattern it would be interesting to know what's really going on and if, as I suspect, it is all connected.

I am extremely grateful to, and in awe of, gender critical autistic women who are speaking up.

Thanks Bloop, it's something I wish I could write about publicly but I am not strong enough to weather the inevitable shitstorm.

returnofthemack I won’t even pretend to understand what you wrote about gender there but I get the feelings bug I don’t quite agree with it. It shows either a very old fashioned understanding or very little understanding of autism.

I would also like to point out that the autistic community don’t use person first language very often. We are not “with autism” most of us are autistic. You cannot separate the autism and the person, you don’t say with gayness or with blackness. Autism isn’t a handbag you carry with you. If as you appear to be saying, you come from some kind of clinical background, you should be aware of these preferences in laungauge, if not, you now know.

DarthVaper your explanation is so much better than mine so yeah, what you say!

I love this conversation. I think the issue is a lot of things and that part of it appropriating and part of it is how much easier for people to recruit, for lack of better word, autistic people to causes when we don't have very strong boundaries. CaseyJeanC, who is a detransitioned autistic woman, and I think a lot of fit makes sense for me.

The black and white thinking as others mentioned. and how a lot of social media sites works against us. I've seen it repeatedly, people being told "if you've felt X, you must be Y" and that happiness will only come through admitting and living as Y and that that is the only ethical route because if you don't you're harming people, and the silencing rules of if you want to be good, you can't listen to/read/retweet/reblog/repost those people. For me and other autistic detransitioners I know, this sort of BITE model mindfuck seems to really get under all the things we've used to cope and been taught so the link that I've heard about for a while now, I can totally see.

On the appropriation side, I think some of it is label collection, some of it is wanting an excuse for doing something rather than owning up to it which really frustrates me, and some I think are, like the above convinced that because they've felt/done something on one of the many lists, that that is them because that's the message that is everywhere. I mean, I've had a trans woman come up to me, tell me how happy she is that I'm "out autistically" (I'd flapped my hands with my kids, one of my kids wears ear defenders - she loves those things - I think those are what was meant by that) and told me how she had suspicions but didn't match much of "the lists" until she'd read the "women's lists". Seemed very sincere, genuine, trying to be nice...but I think it's the "if you feel it..." and the rules around discussing anything to do with gender or identity that makes it hard to put boundaries in place at the moment which is hurting so many people.

I'm not Autistic so I'm sure you're right, I was just commenting on my observations of people with Autism who are also identifying as trans or just seem to be confused full stop

I'm not sure Mack that those shouting loudest about self-ID (and they do shout loudly) are going to present at clinics so you won't encounter them unless you're active in online social spaces.

It is very difficult being an autistic woman in autistic spaces at the moment unless you fully embrace the cult of trans.

I don't think it's the 'radical trans community' drawing people in all cases. A lot of the Autistic and trans/confused people who I've spoken to don't know much at all about the radical trans community and would have no interest in it because they're going to forge their own path regardless but that's IME and obviously I can't speak for everyone.

IME it's been more of a 'black and white, you have to be one thing all the other and a male is like this and a female like this' view based on wider societies stereotypes of gender.

So very tall, broad and not stereotypically 'feminine' young women who love world of warcraft or whatever who fancy girls thinking that they 'fit' better as a male.

Same with males who like soft clothing, the less constricted feeling of skirts or dresses and like my little pony (Bronys in other words) thinking that makes them more female.

And some males who perceive that women are more naturally empathic and 'better' at social communication and more adept at reading verbal and non-verbal cues who seem to think that transing to female will make them better at it too. When of course it won't because the reason they struggle with that is because they're Autistic and no amount of hormones or surgery will change that. I feel particularly saddened by that small group.

I think some are probably influenced by stuff online but they tend to be the people that seem utterly confused and veer around between genders and non binary/gender fluid/whatever the latest is.

So one week they want to be called a different name and are dressing in a certain way and it changes all the time. Sometimes it's a 'mash-up' of different things representing gender stereotypes. But they're not (currently) seeking assessment with GI clinics thank God as I have very little respect for their assessment processes from a clinical perspective.

Darth: "for the NTs I guess it does as hiding our autism really doesn't help us at all" - Thank you for this insight. I (NT) hadn't thought of it that way before (I had only seen advice to parents about how to help your child adapt to a NT world, not that learning to adapt might be detrimental for the person who is autistic.)

I think there are 2 main forces pushing autistics, and more likely undiagnosed autistics, particularly teens and young adults, towards the trans stuff.

Firstly, we tend to reject, ignore or be oblivious to social constructs like gender, unable or unwilling to 'play the game', so we often, without even thinking about it, don't comply with gendered expectations. Well-meaning parents, teachers and therapists often encourage autistics towards social conformity, like sex-role stereotypes, as it's seen as a way of making life easier (for the NTs I guess it does as hiding our autism really doesn't help us at all). As many of us are aware, autistic behaviours and thinking are heavily pathologised. Trans ideology provides a way to pathologise our rejection of gender.

Secondly, our feelings of otherness, the alienation and all the vulnerabilities that go with being an autistic young person (and older too), make us prime targets for a movement that welcomes us and encourages us and gives us solidarity, friendship and what seems like an explanation for why we feel so different, wrong and awkward. I can totally understand why the trans people are so appealing to vulnerable autistics, so until we start properly identifying and supporting autistic children and adults they/we will continue to be vulnerable to this sort of manipulation.

returnofthemack is it really true gender confusion or is it a situation whereby people with different neurology are experiencing “human confusion” and looking for any kind of acceptance and the radical trans* community are drawing in vulnerable and confused people with an ideology that can be adapted to fit a variety of scenarios? I don’t think your theory is far off the mark but I’d question whether it’s that autistic people are as gender confused as you say or whether they’re finding people who for whatever their personal reasons, are also seeking acceptance from a defined peer group of social outcasts.

Sporadicspartacus - I didn’t last long on tumblr. The problems with self diagnosed autism have grown exponentially. Initially I fully supported self diagnosis as I understand there are still huge issues of difficulty accessing diagnosis, particularly for women but as someone up thread so aptly refered to label collectors (I’d like to add hunters to this) who move from self diagnosis to self diagnosis becoming more vocal as autistic community representatives, it marginalises those who are clinically diagnosed.

I’ve seen similar happen with other conditions considered more acceptable or even (I hate to say) trendy. An ex-friend found more public sympathy & acceptance claiming to have bipolar disorder instead of talking about her actual diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. She became a very prominent bipolar voice but has a completely different unmentioned diagnosis. She went apeshit at a mutual bipolar friend who questioned her viability as an actually bipolar voice (not publicly questioned fwiw) and very publicly was threatening to destroy said friend and her family across a variety of social networks to the point the friend left. That’s one less actually bipolar voice online.

Oh okay 🙂 personally, I think gender confusion is so frequently seen in people with Autism that we should treat it as part of the Autism rather than what I'm seeing from gender identity clinics which is - 'this person is transgender and of course we know that's common in people with Autism'.

Is it? Or is it that people with Autism are more likely to be confused about their gender as part of their neurodevelopmenal disorder?. Because that's my view but the GI clinics are approving people for hormones and surgery that I don't think should be.

But my opinion is very unpopular in certain circles.

Returnofthemack you’re absolutely right I didn’t mean diagnostic criteria which is the same for men and women, I meant to write presentation of diagnostic criteria which is different.