Take part: Autistic Gender Critical Voices

Yes, I am having to teach my autistic male teen not to frighten women.

Everyone adapts their behaviour to the situation. This is normal. Eg: using a quiet voice in the library not your football stand voice. We teach our little (NT) kids that . Autistic kids deserve to learn it too. Yes it's more difficult but we do need to learn if we can.

Hiya! I just looked for it and couldn't find it? Sorry, really would love to read it

I came across a TikTok/youtube short on masking the other day. It was someone who had been accused of teaching autistic children to mask and was totally unapologetic about it - that it was about teaching children reciprosity and how to live alongside others. I have previously seen people in autistic groups saying they want this too - so they can fit in at times when they choose to do so (they were shouted down). It was too short a short to really understand the merits or otherwise of his particular approach.

What particularly caught my attention though was that autistic men or their family members had also requested this because they had received complaints about frightening women.

My DD has a condition that has now fallen or been co-opted into the ND ‘community’. Fortunately, she had experienced forced teaming via school early on - all the children with various support needs being chucked together and realising how stupid it was. But trans issues have hollowed out what might have been useful support groups everywhere. There is only one condition that gets the rainbows, sparkles and unicorns it seems. Such a shame but so good you are making a new space.

Oh, yes, the policing of language by 'the community'! Which I personally find odd, as I'd have thought the very idea of community and grouping would be unappealing to many autistic people.

At a course for parents of autistic kids of all places, I mentioned that my teen was more comfortable with the idea of having Aspergers than Autism. I was rebuffed by a loud woman, saying that her teen is 'simply horrified' at the mention of Mr Asperger. I sighed, and said that mine was more keen on clarity than linguistic fashions, and that facts cannot be changed and it was him that first spotted Autism without LD. I guess this woman wasn't a fan of facts or reality. A bit like GI.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia , the incessant positivity irritates me no end

That made me chuckle. I know what you mean!

I'd love to tell my workplace neurodivergency group that GC views are protected, but I'm scared. I'm likely to leave the group anyway because the incessant positivity irritates me no end.

DD is short for 'dear daughter'
DS is short for 'dear son'
DC is short for 'dear children'

It gets a bit more confusing with things like DP which could be 'dear grandparents' or 'dear partner' so sometimes you'll see DGP. Or DS which could be 'dear sister' so people will write DSis

I draw the line at Ddog 😆

I have DC who are autistic. There is certainly a lot of ND in both my and DH family. Am I autistic? Quite possibly, but not bothered about getting a diagnosis. One ND diagnosis is enough. I have long since come to terms with being myself. But more than that, I don’t want to be linked with those who now refer to themselves as the ‘Autism Community’. Indeed neither do the most of autistic people I know in real life (and some ‘Aspies’ and ‘people with autism’ who have been told by the Autism Community they must not refer to themselves that way). This activist group have turned autism into an identity with prescribed beliefs that those who identify (with or without a diagnosis) must follow and part of that is gender ideology. It will be impossible to untangle autism from gender ideology until it is recognised that there is not a single ‘Autism Community’ and those who shout online do not represent everyone.

My DC are not interested in the Autism Community either after being in an autism training session where they were constantly told ‘the Autism Community think this’ and that ‘Autistic people do this/are good at that’ neither of which tallied with them.

I used to pay a lot of attention to the reddit sites for aspergers (generally) and women with aspergers. The general one seemed swamped with so much more negativity, very much in support of the idea that autism often presents very differently in males and females. Then the transwomen started moving more and more into the women's site, and you could really feel the difference. Autistic trans women seem to generally have a very male-presenting autism - I find it difficult believing someone is really female on a psychological level when they come across so male even on an anonymous text-based medium!

I don't go on the sites so much but thankfully I think the balance has shifted back now. I even saw a reply quite heavily downvoted recently for chipping in with "my experiences as a trans person who was male-presenting in childhood" (paraphrasing) when the topic of discussion was what it was like having autism as a female child.

Have a look! The first question asks if you're a natal female because we only admit actual women. You'd be welcome!

My DD is in uni and she is a gender critical autistic woman. She doesn't feel comfortable accessing any support for autistic students because they are all genderists. It makes me so frustrated for her, she is missing out on so much because of this ideology.

Ha! Just realised that made an assumption:

Are you a woman OP? I think your user name subliminally took me to the conclusion that you are.

Autistic boys also face a risk in relation to gender identity belief, just a different one. From what I have observed, it's split as follows:

Girls: identifying out of girlhood

Boys: as their sexual feelings wake up due to puberty, the combination of their ND cognitive processing and (most often) heterosexual desires are effectively weaponised against them by adults online: they are encouraged to see female gaming avatars and/or anime characters as an extension of themselves and to find this erotic. They begin to think of themselves as lesbians. Obviously there are homosexual, autistic boys who find themselves believing that they are women but I don't believe that there is the same sexual element to it.

I backed out of the parents of ND children support group for exactly the same reason. I had asked some questions very tentatively about the propensity to believe you're not really female because of a combination of cognitive processing and societal pressure to "identify" in some way. But it was clear that my questioning was being received as bordering on "ableism" so I had to drop it.

When I listened to Maia's speech, there were moments where I could hear the analytical voice of my own daughter coming through.. only right now, when we do occasionally stumble on this topic - it's a topic best avoided for the most part (I need to prioritise maintaining our relationship in our conversations) - her analytical thinking skills have been whirled in to action using misinformation. The latest "gem" was to tell me that "you don't know anything, Mum. This is why I can't talk to you about this stuff" when we found ourselves on the topic.

It went like this, driving back from school yesterday....

Her sister: Mum, we've got Miss X again (cover teacher). She's still really sexist and hates the boys. She's keeping them all back at the end of class again because some of the boys are talking. There are girls who talk too, but she doesn't seem to notice or care.

Me: Ah yes, I remember her. She's the one who was telling the boys that wars were all their fault when she covered your history class. She went in to lots of detail and told the girls that she felt sorry for them because of the actions of men. Yes?

Her sister: yes

ND daughter: she's really old mum. She's got old-fashioned views about what boys and girls do. She's not sexist. She's just from a different time.

Me: you could be right <my non-confrontational opener> but I'm with [sister] here. I think she is sexist because there were lots of other examples too that I remember [sister] saying. If I'm being kind, perhaps she was trying (badly) in the war example to talk about aggression. Leaving sexism out of it, boys and men are typically more aggressive than women because of the effects of testosterone. There are lots of examples where men who take additional testosterone, anabolic steroids, get more aggressive. So perhaps she was just really bad at explaining what she meant....

<I got cut off>

ND daughter: testosterone doesn't make people aggressive. It just gives them confidence.

Me <in my head.. WTAF?!.. deep breath... calm voice... despite raging concern about where on earth she has heard this.. she wants confidence.. she lacks it... FFS... will this onslaught of adults (or other misinformed children) telling my daughter utter shit on the internet/IRL never end?>....
"I'm afraid that's incorrect. It's a known fact that testosterone is linked to aggression. And also to libido, to people's sex drive. <Yes, that's right. I tried to swerve the conversation on to sex, just to avoid getting in to an argument about gender identity!!>"

ND daughter: you don't know anything, Mum. That's why I can't talk to you about this stuff.

Hmmmmmm. I talked to my husband yesterday evening and he agrees that her misunderstanding about testosterone is yet another risk and that she still could end up deciding to take testosterone when she is 18. She's desperate for more confidence, like most girls her age. Her autism, in ways articulated brilliantly by Maia in that clip, leads her to seek and analyse information in ways that result in a misunderstanding about what it means to be female.

So, I plough on. My focus is to try and remove as much bias from around her as I can. We're not going to stop her using the internet, it's how she communicates with her IRL friends - they game together and it's lovely to hear her on the mic laughing etc - and it's how she researches tornadoes and other favourite topics of hers. Currently it's volcanoes.

I'm heartened by the idea of an ND resource, run by an ND woman who wants to challenge gender identity belief with some thoughtful questions and blogs. Thank you OP 💐

I remember reading a comment by Hazel Appleyard (also autistic) on X where she said that once enough autistic people understand what's going on here, they'll be fired up to fight it 💪