Any GC feminists with autism?

[GCandautistic]

Hi all. NC for this. I am currently awaiting diagnosis for autism. I’m in my late 30s so it is a later life diagnosis. I am strongly gender critical but cannot be open about this at work. I am pretty high functioning in my career. I struggle a bit socially but not too badly.

One of the things I struggle with is how anyone can take gender ideology seriously. And also how someone can just not care. It’s just so blatantly a load of rubbish. Because this realisation about my autism is quite a recent one, I wonder whether being autistic has anything to do with my way of thinking. Obviously the majority of GC feminists will be NT but it would be interesting to hear from anyone who thinks their autism influences how they approach this issue.

[quote Alicethruthelookingglass]@GCandautistic

Thank you for sharing your experience on this thread. I was told I was probably autistic about the time my son received his diagnosis over 25 years ago. I refused the 'label' figuring that I had made it so far, and since my DS had it worse, I would be silly to think I had the right to say it affected me.

As I said before, I am nearing 60 and exhausted. It was interesting when I got my testing. One test they gave me was vocabulary. 'Bring it on' says I, I have a huge one. Then they hit me. With words that were perfectly english, no jargon or scientific stuff, but that I literally could not read, parse or pronounce. And that's when it hit me. I had memorized literally everything at some past point. That was the reason I had to drop out of IT training, because a ARM looked like a RAM and neither meant anything unless I forced myself to discern them every time.

Much of my casual social interaction is a series of reflexes and I am having problems with this coping device as I age and the sheer memory and energy that used to underpin it fades away. I am lucky to have some long time friends, and new friends that have looked past my oddness to get to know me better.

I am pursuing a diagnosis so that I can make this official and seek assistance for the problems related to my autism, etc so it can finally be addressed in situations where there is need for it.[/quote]
Thanks for your post. I wish you all the best with seeking an assessment. I can well imagine that it gets harder to keep it up the older you get - masking takes so so much energy. I think it’s easy to think that you don’t need support or that you’re not ‘properly’ autistic because there’s such a narrow portrayal of it in society. I hope that changes and that there is more support put in place. I’ve just spent the past hour having a bit of a wobble over some work stuff. It just strikes me as so easy to resolve - I just need clear instructions about what to do and enough time to do it. Sadly for these particular tasks, I have been given neither and it’s showing to me how badly I am coping. Also, often I appear to have it together in public but then have to go straight to bed as soon as I get in from work just to recover. It really takes its toll.

It’s a shame that autistic spaces are being sucked in by all the wokeness. I’ve found a good YouTube channel by someone called Yo Samdy Sam, an autistic woman in her 30s. She’s got pronouns in her bio and occasionally talks about being cis but other than that I find her really helpful and I try to ignore the gender woo stuff. She does lots of quite short videos about female later-life diagnoses which are good.

@MnaWomanIreland sorry to hear that your DD has been sucked into it. I hate how it preys on vulnerable people who just want to fit in and find their place.

Hello. I haven't RTFT but I'm a gender critical autistic woman. We have a Facebook group and everything.

There is a huge overlap between autism and trans identity so I think if anything the correlation is the other way round.

@FrankensteinIsTheMonster

Namechangecosguilty — you see a lot of young low-support-needs autistics heavily involved in gender-ideology stuff, and I think there's a few reasons behind that:

• Many are preoccupied with fairness, and this is the current most fashionable social justice campaign
• Most will have personal experience of what it feels like to be the outsider, and instinctively side with those they perceive to be in that position
• Many societal gender roles and norms are arbitrary and not backed up by logic, leading autistics to question them, and modern gender ideology is often the main thing they come across when they start to investigate
• Many autistics will struggle to play the gender role society allocates to people of their sex (and would struggle with playing any societally-imposed roles, because of the nature of their brains) and genderism provides an explanation and a get-out

Additionally, a lot of online "autistic" communities have moved heavily towards a self-ID framework. Identifying as "autistic" (regardless of whether one would meet diagnostic criteria including the requirement for symptoms to have significant detrimental impact on say-to-day-functioning) shares many benefits with, and had a great deal in common with, identifying as gender-variant in some way. A ready-made and validating community, vindication of one's differentness/specialness, the ability to claim one is disadvantaged or subject to discrimination, justification for flouting arbitrary social rules, and so on. The individuals who are drawn to identifying as some variety of "queer" are often the same ones who are drawn to identifying as "neurodivergent". So in addition to there being what seems to be genuinely high levels of autistic people who are of a minority sexual orientation or identify as gender-variant in some way, there's also lots of people describing themselves as queer and autistic who haven't been assessed for autism, don't want to be assessed for autism, and IMO likely wouldn't meet criteria if they were.

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