FWIW,
I am very much older. Grew up before girls were even considered for autism unless the symptoms were absolutely obvious. I have had some testing and I have been told to seek a diagnosis, but this was right before covid, LOL, but it's been almost 60 years so what's a few more?
I've done OK so far, but the thing is, 60 years later, all those social routines and sub-routines are breaking down. It is exhausting to put this much work into dealing with others and when i get exhausted, then the echolalia and other compulsive speech erupts.
I will lie about a friend's dress. Like someone said above, I'll find something that is positive. The color, a detail, etc. This is so different. To have to search my memory banks everytime I meet a person for pronouns (never mind they can arbitrarily change) as well as recognizing their face and associating their name with it and playing make believe with them about who they are...well at that point, I give up.
My son is ASD, diagnosed as a child, he's in his thirties now and is, as they say, a productive member of society.Neither of us can understand the gender stuff. It just seems so foolish to try to lie to everyone, including yourself as to who you are.
I do remember wishing I could be a boy around puberty. Mostly because girls' worlds start getting smaller and more socially managed at that point. I wore a lot of the seventy's unisex clothing and was lucky to have the chance to grow up when my mom and my friend's moms were establishing careers in the wake of the second wave. I became a woman who went into a 'male' field in my own right.
I'm so glad my son was born before the internet. He encountered it later, but before social media was a thing. I think he also did well because I fought to get him into a special program/school that featured small class size, disallowed and actively policed the kind of bullying usually tolerated on a high school campus, etc. I think some of the autistic men who take on the message that they are not men, but non-men (must be women then, what's that about a binary again?) have been subjected to that kind of verbal abuse from others. The internet and isolation has just made it worse.
Both of us agree that you can't change sex. He is one of the few people I've been able to talk to about this since 2015 when I discovered it and discovered that he'd known about it longer. We agree that the sterilization of gay and autistic children as well as children under care to be one of the most chilling occurrences in this whole episode.