The Gender Critical Autistic Women’s Thread

[SporadicSpartacus]

I never thought i’d be starting a thread aimed at such a very specific demographic, but there do seem to be a few of us out there.

Anyway, I thought we could use this thread to talk about the interactions of being autistic and participating in the sex/gender debate.

I think it’s particularly relevant as a lot of the argument hinges on clarity (or obfuscation) of language - when many autistic people need clear and unambiguous language to be able to understand, process information and express our own points of view.

Credentials/about me: i’m 31, diagnosed with ASD (Aspergers presentation) last year, and awaiting an assessment for ADHD. I am female, bisexual and married to a man. I’m not a mother yet, although would like to be- and have found Mumsnet very welcoming regardless.

From experience with DD what she needs is sensitivity re her differences and patient and calm understanding otherwise her self esteem and feelings of safety in the world are damaged and then being out of control is more likely, worse when it happens and it happens more frequently.

That's the thing isn't it? The more frequently I'm under stress, the more my behaviours are perceived as inappropriate.
This can cause issues at work or at home.
My words come out wrong if I can get them out at all.

Being able to be in sec segregated space is such a huge way of healing and working out how to be in the world.

I accessed support through women's aid a few years ago where I did explore some of my difficulties with a gender identity worldview. My therapist was v helpful but a therapist now in 2018 would probably have been on an LGBT youth Scotland course and might have found it difficult to square that with my POV.

Clownstar I forgot to acknowledge your comment about self identified vs self diagnosed.
Even self diagnosis is made using external criteria which are publicly available. That distinction made total sense and rang v true.

It's sadly becoming somehow desirable to have an identity of autistic.

The stress I've experienced due to being autistic in a v inhospitable world is not something I would wish on anyone although I do like being autistic.

I generally try not to get noticed and not to be a bother to anyone.
Can't imagine posing about the place demanding to be accommodated in outlandish ways in the manner of the people who I have in mind when I talk about self identifying.

I’m not sure. DD’s psychologist has been quite supportive and agrees with me re the damage it could do to DD to be exposed to these ‘re-education’ and ‘get over it’ things.

I think it probably depends on the therapist TBH, which it shouldn’t, it should depend on the person who is having therapy’s needs.

Can I join please? I got an adult dx of ASD last year (via a sympathetic GP and a 2 year waiting list).

I never considered myself a feminist but, having started reading I'm now getting a bit obsessed. And I would class myself as GC.

I guess I am lucky as being, cough, older a child of the 70s/80s I was never exposed to the idea of gender identity as a child. I went through phases when I wanted to be a boy. But I knew I was a girl and that couldn't be changed. And my parents never referred to boys' toys and girls' toys. And we didn't have the pink/blue divide that we have now. Although puberty was horrible.

But I think of girls like me growing up in today's climate and I worry about them so much.

One of the main practical difficulties of things becoming segregated more by gender than sex is going to be learning a whole new set of social rules.

I had a small taste of this the other week - I was at a tourist attraction in Brighton(!) where all the toilets were unisex. All standard cubicles, you couldn’t see anything, but the sinks were communal. And even though no-one else was in there at the time, I froze. I simply didn’t know how I should act if someone with a male body came into the area as that isn’t a situation I’m normally in so haven’t learnt the appropriate response. And that’s without adding the additional anxiety / uncertainty about whether the man was supposed to be in there. It’s not a situation I thought would be a problem: logically the provisions made sense there (and at least avoided the queue for the ladies’ room), but it was far more unsettling than expected.

I’m also scared about how I will be treated if gender becomes everything - I don’t think I could learn how to fit in with female stereotypes but I’m definitely not a man.

Hello, thanks for starting the thread.

Self dx here (GP agrees but diagnostic provision in my area unlikely to deliver a formal dx for some years) and GC with a heavy heart (heavy that it should be necessary). Sometimes I think the transgender movement has made me old overnight. I am tolerant in the sense of wanting everyone to be treated equally and with dignity regardless of their position in this debate...and yet...I have so little patience with the parts of transgender politics that present themselves so clearly to me as arrant nonsense. I can't believe we have come to this point. It's like the emperor's new clothes.

This is also very personal for me. As a young woman, I rejected gender stereotypes and found sense and direction in feminism. But as (I now know) an autistic person I also have lived a long time with that acute sense of being a square peg in a round hole. I'm alarmed to think how these two intertwined perspectives would likely have steered me in the direction of gender transition if I had just been born 30 or so years later than I was. I watch one of my children struggle with exactly these complex thoughts and concepts and have had to learn the hard way that the professionals gender-confused children come into contact with, at best, really do not have their heads screwed on very firmly, and at worst are actively peddling a damaging agenda.

Much more I could say, and perhaps will as the thread unfolds.

What a response. :D

I’m going to have a proper read and digest of the discussion. How excellent to see so many views - from diagnosed, non-diagnosed, parents, NT/allistic posters and interested parties. It is great to be able to discuss these issues with you all.

I am probably autistic. Was on waiting list for formal assessment till recently but got removed because I was ready under secondary care for anxiety. Very annoying. need to go back to doctor and restart process, but I have so many traits and all my children have dxs

I'm concerned about the whole trans agenda especially from an autistic point of view because I believe that a massive amount of the new transgender cultists are actually autistic which is why they are so profoundly confused by their identity and uncomfortable with their bodies. Anorexia and dysphoria in that sense is also an autistic issue.
My eldest son told me he was gender fluid a couple of years ago. We had a big talk. I told him he could dress and act how he liked but I didn't validate anythi g about him not being actually male. He hasn't really talked about it much again.
My daughter wanted to be a bit for a couple of years. She's now ten and is quite happy being a girl and understands that there are millions of different ways of being a woman and we know many many interesting and unusual women and that just because she finds the whole ultra feminine thing about little girls at school not easy to relate to, it doesn't mean she isn't female. Several things she's said have made me think she will probably just end up gay.

I do wonder if I would have been into this whole trans subculture if it had been around when I was a teenager

Thanks to the OP for this thread!

I'd suspected I was on the autism spectrum for many years, and had first requested an assessment over 10 years ago, with many other requests made to GPs & psychiatrists in between (one psychiatrist told me point blank within 5 minutes of meeting me that there was 'no way' I could be autistic because I was able to make eye contact - he also admitted when I challenged him that he had no knowledge of how differently autism could present in females compared to males).

Long story short, I recently paid for a private assessment at the National Autistic Society's Lorna Wing Centre, and finally received a formal diagnosis that reads: "(DuddlePluck) meets the criteria for a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder as seen in women ".

Despite my own personal suspicions over the years, I'd never once 'self-identified' as autistic, nor joined any online ASD support groups etc because I don't think autism self-ID is any more valid than gender self-ID.

One of the reasons I'm so opposed to gender ideology is that I'm fairly certain if I were a teenager today rather than in the 80s, I'd have been pushing hard to transition - I didn't fit the mold of stereotypical girl in any way, despite my parents' at times rather brutal attempts to force me into that mold - I hated my developing female body, and it took me many, many years to find ways to be at peace with my embodied reality. I'm eternally grateful that I was able to have the time to do so without the pressure of having my gender non-conformity being interpreted & acted on according to today's transgender ideology.

An interesting aside is that I had a series of miscarriages trying to conceive my 2nd child, and tests showed that I had much higher than normal testosterone levels - when I next fell pregnant, I had regular hormone jabs for the first few months (can't recall now which of the female hormones it was), and that child has turned out to be the only NT/allistic one of my 3 kids - not saying there's any validity to the male/female brain ASD theory, but it has given me cause to ponder whether hormonal factors play a role - don't have any answers, but would love to see research on it if anyone knows of any..?

an autistic womens board would be nice

YY to not having learned responses Smiling

I'm the opposite of offred in terms of being accommodating - I am perceived as incredibly tolerant, understanding, etc. But I wasn't when I was young, and as an undiagnosed autistic girl, my social responses were always wrong - awkward, difficult, smart-arse, clever-clogs, opinionated, rude, arrogant - so I learned that it was very important not to state a boundary as this could be offensive.

My learned response for difficult social situations is to smile too much, put my own feelings aside, and try to make the other person feel better. I am an absolute walkover for someone who is manipulating me.

I’m not asking anyone to not contribute. I was simply making an observation that frequently people will assume things based on their ideology.

Often people have had it explained to them repeatedly what is being said and what isn’t but they persist in ‘what GC people are saying/think is’ statements when nothing of the kind has actually been said, it’s simply what they have assumed some statements mean.

Knowing what you do not know is often more important that knowing what you do.

Oops wrong thread!

Oh crikey Clownstar yes - I am a big smily doormat. Not as much as I used to be.

It's to do with how my parents tried to drum social skills into me I think.
And female socialization in general. I worry a lot about conflict and anger.

Thanks for reposting that, SA

I experience something quite similar.

I think I have decided at some point that, since I get things wrong socially, I will blanket defer to everyone else on social issues, as they get whatever it is that I am not getting.

It was a very useful coping mechanism for learning how to human as a child, but has got me into some bad situations, and I’m trying to unlearn it. I had some counselling last year which wasn’t especially helpful on the whole, although it did identify that I don’t know what to think/feel about unfamiliar situations without someone else to defer to or previous experience to draw on.

I hate to say it as I am very independent, but i’m with ClownStar on this - it probably does make me easy to manipulate.

And yeah, had this gender selection box Tumblr stuff been about when I was a teenager (early 00s), I’d have been all over it.

I remember people thinking I was a boy and my reaction was very positive. Still is tbh. Strongest memory of it is as a 17 year old.

Has everyone here had a look at the "taking it out on ourselves" thread in fwr too? Was very relevant for me, so thought it might be for others as well

Something practical that occurred to me today (my son has one last CAMHS appointment before transferring to adult services so I was idly daydreaming about all we’ve been through while I waited in line for his ADHD meds)...

CAMHS is massively overstretched as it is, and more and more children of both sexes are needing specialist support due to a variety of mental health challenges.

I saw the alarming graph re: referral to gender clinics a few days ago, but it’s only just clicked that these referrals are likely not coming from GPs, because GPs would surely do CAMHS referrals first.

Now I’m wondering if some CAMH services are referring on to gender services more quickly than is optimal, due to their own pressures.

And I’m also wondering if the uptick in gender issues is making waiting all lists for all CAMHS longer?

We already know there is seemingly a statistical comorbidity with ASD girls and dysphoria - we don’t yet know if one (being ASD and gender non conforming due to general non-neurotypical behaviour/oppositional sociable around societal roles) is simply being mistaken for the other (being trans) but I can’t help but think it is ASD girls who are being most let down by the current climate.

And crap knows they’ve already been let down for generations.

Can I join too? I don't yet have a formal dx however looking at my childhood and subsequent struggles/strengths it's painfully obvious (two family members who have high level expertise in this field first gently told me that what I had myself suspected for some years was almost certainly the case!). I just can't bring myself to go through the hell of an NHS diagnosis when there's bugger all help,out there anyway... Anyway, to get back on topic I am most definitely GC - I try my best to be kind to others but feel very bullied by the TRA ppl. It's difficult as I have trouble articulating to my mostly liberal lefty mates just why I'm troubled.

I think I am going to have to articulate some of my issues around this tomorrow to my boss.
I'm often quite articulate but it goes out of the window when I'm stressed.
I don't think 'nah I don't fancy us having racist, homophobic training thanks' would go down well.
She's good at listening but I just don't know if I want this to be yet another thing I'm being awkward about. I feel like I'm always being awkward about something.
This issue impacts on me in so many different ways and I know so much about it all I find it hard to summarise and to sift through what is important, what is in line with our organisational values etc rather than going on and on about something I've researched to the nth degree.
I do get quite distressed thinking about women-only spaces being eroded. I find it v hard to make sense when I'm distressed.

Off topic, I'm v glad of a diagnosis personally. Mostly due to the above - it helps at work. Also if I ever have to go into hospital or residential care.
There are various groups the NHS run here but I haven't accessed any. They have 1:1 support at drop-ins too though.

It was an intrusive process but not hellish. The psychologist was lovely. It brought up a lot of childhood stuff but I think I needed to deal with it anyway.

That's good to know. However we plan to move to oz next year so I think there's no point going on the waiting list here...