Michael Craig at Tavi: Are autism and gender dysphoria linked?

I've been out and wanted to come back to @GreenAndSpringy

"This just adds legitimacy to what is obvious to Autistic people:
”Nothing about us without us”

No one Autistic voice is going to provide the answers. An Autistic minority is not enough either."

You would say the opposite to “nothing about us without us” ?

No, I agree with what you've written in these two paragraphs.

I meant 'I think the opposite' regarding this comment:

What is very, very definitely clear here is that too many professionals who understand Autism academically have set the framework. It’s a framework where Autism and Gender Dysphoria have been split into separate sections.
If more people affected had been included it would have been understood from the start that these cannot be segmented

My reply was around the fact that GD is a very different condition to autism

But now I understand that you meant that the traits of gender non conformity which is wrongly interpreted as "trans" hasn't been included in frameworks of autism?

But @VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia and @Stigglet are you the single face of autism? I think you are describing the experience of some high functioning female autistics who are a small proportion of the autistic population.

@AstonsDataThief thats a very good post. Well said.

That was my point. We feel as much compulsion if not more to comply with social norms.

we’d be better off levelling up society’s opinion of traditionally female things, so that they aren’t associated with shame or inferiority

This, otherwise we are just promoting misogyny and fueling more "I wish I was a boy" thinking.

I’m autistic. I don’t feel less compulsion to conform with social norms. I still say excuse me when I burp, keep to the right on the escalator, give old people my seat on the bus, etc.

If you’re talking about wearing dresses and makeup because I’m female, then I don’t feel that’s a social norm so much nowadays? Or that I’m violating social norms by not doing those things? A woman in hoody and jeans is hardly a revelation.

He has done so much harm to autistic women and girls.

“nothing about us without us”

What is meant by those demanding this is ‘we set the priorities and decide what is best’. There are three issues with this:

1. who is ‘us’? ‘Us’ is generally a politically active subset with very specific goals they see as beneficial to themselves. It is a bit like ‘include lived experience’ or ‘must be [condition] led’ which often means ‘include me’ or ‘led by me’ or at least ‘people with the same set of priorities as me’. There is no attempt to assess whether this is actually a widely held view in the whole population.

2. It ignores bias.

3. It ignores the value of prior knowledge/expertise

‘Gender affirming treatment’ on tap is the outcome of precisely this approach. No external assessment is permitted, no application of knowledge allowed, no differentiation or safeguarding. The ‘us’ (adult men) apply their wants to another group (young teenage girls) by suggesting they are the same. This also happens in autism. For example the rounding on that DNA study of autism. A study which may or may not have had other issues but much of which is now being carried out elsewhere. There were cries of ‘eugenics!’ But also ignoring those who have autism as part of possibly unknown genetic syndromes and what identifying and building knowledge about those could do to help syndromes that come with a range of health issues.

‘Nothing about us without us’ would be fine if it meant that studies involved gathering views from a wide range of sources, including ensuring efforts were made to engage with those offline and those who purposefully disengaged from groups. But it generally doesn’t as that is too much like hard work when you have a group of activists ready to jump in.

My DC as toddlers declared at various times a wish to marry me, my DH, the cat, various friends of both sexes, their teddy, their sibling…. In terms of a DD toddler saying they want to marry mum it is more likely because they seen mum as the carer/protector and the idea of being without that is scary so marrying mum simply means that they will be there the whole time when they are older.

I was saying "to the contrary" to this bit:

". People with autism feel less compulsion to conform to societal norms, he says — an idea also mentioned by Baron-Cohen in his study. “This frees us up to connect more readily with our true gender,” Lawson said."

I wanted to be a bloke and I remember expressing that explicitly to a friend on a number of occasions.
Me too. But not because I wanted to be male. It was because I wanted the freedom and physical strength that comes with being male. I wanted acceptance into male social groups (which I found easier to navigate because they’re less complex than female social groups). I wanted to be welcomed to join in with male hobbies (which matched my interests better than female hobbies). And I wanted to be free from sexual harassment and basically being treated as a walking pair of tits.

I’m only able to express this complex reasoning now because I’m mature. At 16 I would just have said “I want to be a boy”.

Completely agree on all of that! I don't think it's a coincidence that doctors' pay has fallen so far behind during the period when it's become a profession with so many women in it.

Fair point - he could have been lobbying behind the scenes.

i do feel that rather than finding women who succeed in traditionally male areas (ultra competitive sport, maths, physics etc) we’d be better off levelling up society’s opinion of traditionally female things, so that they aren’t associated with shame or inferiority. Big boobs should be no more remarkable than being tall or having brown hair, caring professions should be seen as a successful career etc.

You and I have very little (if anything) in common with relation to parenting.

How would you know? I have no memory of ever interacting with you here before. Maybe you've name changed recently. I haven't. I've said nothing at all on this thread up to now about my own children, who are both over 30 now. One of them is on the autistic spectrum, diagnosed while at primary school. I too have always listened to my children and taken them seriously - we wouldn't have ended up at CAMHS as early as that otherwise - but I haven't always taken what they said literally, any more than I do with anyone else. I check for reasonableness, I look for supporting evidence, and so on and so forth. Misunderstandings happen, memory can be faulty, children who get a reaction often say or do the same thing again and again to get attention, without understanding that they are causing concern.

For what it's worth, we're a very close family too.

I will draw a line under this now, however, as we're not getting anywhere.

And thinking of metaphors, I agree that retorts of "transphobia" are an excellent parallel to describe the gagging effect of knowing that you're constantly a whisker away from being called ableist, ignorant, condescending or similar when you're a neurotypical person who is commenting on the issues related to the autism/gender identity link.
When I first joined X, I had lots of conversations with autistic people where I ignored the barrage of insults that were slung my way and focused on the substance of the conversation. Many ended with no substance left to discuss (just lots of posts throwing a variety of insults at me in a scattergun way - so I whack-a-moled them down with a repeated single polite/sarcastic exit comment, depending on the context) but some took me to interesting places and the insults stopped being hurled. To exit on a positive goodbye was a good outcome for me because it gave me hope that such conversations are possible as long as I'm prepared to take the insults on a "reasonable adjustments" basis, if there is a good conversation lurking in there somewhere.

It made a sort of sense as shut, though. I assumed you were very tired and touch typing anyway.

😂😂😂
This is the best typo loop ever 🙃❤️
Sending hugs, virtual contact lenses and an empathy for the "fat finger" moment (that bloody u being next to the i).

If it helps to know, I took your "shut" eyes as a metaphor about accidental typos ❤️

Did I miss a bit here, what does wanting to marry a parents have to do with autistic children being trans?

I’m sorry I don’t really understand what you mean by a “recent data set”? Do you mean you read a thread on Reddit (that appears to have children professing their wish to marry all sorts of responsible adults in their lives regardless of sex or age) and this lead you to believe it was ver niche behaviour? How did you come up with the figure of 5%?

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
You and I have very little (if anything) in common with relation to parenting. I’ve always listened to my child and taken her seriously. She’s 14 now and we have only become closer and closer. She’s not much different now to who she was back then.

——
Am just about to box and pack away these thoughts, but just before doing that I have dredged up a recent data set to check my own assumption about my kid’s certainty that we would marry (this insistence lasted over 3 years, well into Reception, maybe even year 1) being an outlier example (5% or less). Am also taking into account that the Reddit list is skewed and leans towards accounts that are likely to have been considered noteworthy by the contributors.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Preschoolers/comments/15fa5jh/daughter_wants_to_marry_daddy/

Nothing in there to change my perception of it being outlier behaviour.

My eyes are shut at the moment

SHIT!

My eyes are shit. Waiting for new trial contacts and taking ages

My point, is that if you were to enter an average school and, somehow, gather data, on the children who say they want to marry a parent, the amount of children from conventional partnerships who want to marry their same gendered parent, would be in the outlier territory (less than 5%) How do you know this?

As is said it’s common in my experience, and I have a larger than average family so obviously have conversations with a large number of parents. People often ask me about things that worry them and tell me about things they find cute or funny in their children. I am perfectly happy to accept that you don’t find it common and it’s a very niche and telling experience in your experience. I wonder why you find it hard to extend me the same understanding?

”Nothing about us without us” has pressed one of your buttons. I am starting to understand why. I’m not sure I have “buttons” or that I was particularly focused on that slogan, though now you highlight it, yes it is a bit daft. What is your understanding of why that phrase would “press my buttons”? It’s sounds weirdly threatening and like you are trying to imply I’m some sort of anti-autism bigot? Am I supposed to be frightened to tell you my experience of what kids say about marrying their parents?

What I can't understand is why you are giving this any thought, though. When a tiny child says something about the world that an adult can see is nonsense, that is because she is a tiny child with very little life experience and her brain is still at a very early stage of development. Hence the number of children who say they are dogs or cats or unicorns or announce that when they grow up they will be Emperor of the World or similar unachievable things.

I hope I've got this wrong, but I'm getting a sense that you thought your very young daughter saying she wanted to marry you when she grew up was a sign that she might be a lesbian or, alternatively, that she might have a female body but a male gender. This for me would be on a par with that US psychologist who thought pre-verbal girls were indicating their transness by pulling the hairclips out of their hair, or pre-verbal boys undoing the poppers on their onesies so they superficially resembled a dress. Children do odd things. Lots of children hate having things in their hair or find the poppers irresistible. No very young child can have any grasp of what life will be like on the other side of puberty when they are adults. They can try to imagine it but they will be missing such huge chunks of knowledge about what it's like to have an adult body and especially an adult brain that they can't possibly get it right.

Suffice to say, when I wrote this my daughter did "finally realise that she was female"... and, inevitably, since then the risk that I have been mindful of the whole time did come to pass: she went back to ruminating on it. That's why I have kept going, working as hard as I can to remove the influence of bias. The risk hasn't gone away.

Phew!

I wanted to pop a "thanks" on to your post but the missing word is what stopped me! 😁

On a personal note, we have finally secured a handover from CAMHS to the Occupational Therapy team (via the EHCP process) which explicitly sets out my daughter's needs around body disassociation and how these should be met by the OT team. I knew it was going to be a difficult subject, so I liaised with the receiving OT team (including looping in the school) to make sure that professionals could talk to professionals (I'm simply the layman "glue" to make this possible) to get everything moving in the right direction. This all went very well and and receiving OT team was completely on board with why work on body disassociation with an autistic girl with puberty-related distress was so important and how this needed to be considered within their work plan.
Until..... the OT supervisor decided it was all irrelevant and left it all out of this year's planned work.
Suffice to say I'm not going to take that lying down. This is just a small example of the hand-cranking that I'm having to do at every stage of this to get the right support for my daughter. After a frustrating beginning, things have gone in the right direction with CAMHS. I will now push the OT team. We've not come this far just to have it dismissed. I'm expecting the escalation journey that I'm about to go on to be slightly easier now that a) I have my MP's support (he's aware of this block and is ready to help me as soon as I ask for it) and b) we have the Cass Report.

It's been a long time since I posted it, but here is the earlier part of our journey, up to the start of 2023:
https://www.transgendertrend.com/teenage-gender-identity-crisis/

It's taken over a year, but we finally got a differential diagnosis from CAMHS and a recommendation for specific body disassociation (OT) and cognitive processing (SALT) work to address her needs. I'm not giving up. My daughter's future mental and physical health is too important. I'm also working with CAMHS (and my MP) to understand how the positive parts of their approach can be scaled up to help others. So far so good.

I cannot give you “credibility” because you aren’t making any effort to differentiate between “extremely common” in numbers and “extremely common” as a percentage of children in conventionally paired partnerships.

That you have as many experiences as you say you have makes me understand that the context of those experiences is skewed - and you yourself will know why that is.

My point, is that if you were to enter an average school and, somehow, gather data, on the children who say they want to marry a parent, the amount of children from conventional partnerships who want to marry their same gendered parent, would be in the outlier territory (less than 5%)

Yes, in numbers, 5%, 4%, 3% is, commutatively a LOT of children. But that doesn’t make it “extremely common”. That you are intent on conflating these concepts is what affects your credibility here.

”Nothing about us without us” has pressed one of your buttons. I am starting to understand why.