Autism and gender ideology

[Opinionpolecat]

I was diagnosed with autism this year and of course I’ve been down the online autism rabbit hole searching for information/help/anything so that I can make sense of my life/the universe/everything. What I’ve found is a lot of useful stuff on youtube, podcasts and so on, but so much of it is very heavy on gender ideology. It seems to be really pushed in so many autism spaces. Research I’ve found on PubMed is full of gender to the extent that it’s normally impossible to tell what sex the research participants were, despite the researchers claims about their ‘male’ and ‘female’ participants.

There also seem to be lots of late diagnosed autistic adults who’ve only discovered their gender identity following their autism diagnosis. They seem to be mainly women in long term heterosexual relationships and with children, who decide they’re non binary or agender, seemingly on the basis of preferring to have short hair and wear comfortable clothing, and seeing this desire to dress more comfortably as indicating that they aren’t women. There’s talk about not ‘feeling like a woman’ but without any ability to define what ‘feeling like a woman’ actually is, how they know that this feeling is universal to people who identify as women, and how they differ from it. There are a lot of very woolly explanations about gender and sex that make no logical sense.

Are there any other autistic or ND people here who’ve noticed this? Why is the autism world so in thrall to gender ideology?

It is not ableism when it is pushed by autistic ideologist to conform to autistic trans stereotypes. Quite the opposite.

‘Ableism’ is thrown around by many of the autistic ideologist activists in the same way as ‘transphobia’ is thrown around by trans ideologist. It is not less harmful in trapping individuals into the ideology and prevent any questioning. Any attempt to teach an autistic child is ‘ableist’ - the fact that all children need to learn, grow and mature in their behaviours is ignored. Any attempt to change the behaviour of an autistic child is met with cries of ‘ableism’ - including speech and language therapy. And adults who self ID excuse unacceptable behaviours as ‘autistic’ and therefore not being allowed to behave that way is ableist. These activists have taken something that would be reasonable pushed it way beyond that and the victims include children with severe autism (and yes I do think non-verbal children with classic presentations are more severe than adults who hold down jobs, families and live independently).

I agree with you @TrumptonsFireEngine. I teach autistic children in a send school; many have very little ability to communicate either verbally or non verbally. I also teach children who are very capable communicators but who need an awful lot of support to learn social interaction skills. (Nope, you can't go around thumping everyone to get what you want. And basic daily simple social skills.)

what I mean is that this is a new pressure for those who are autistic and able to communicate (possibly late diagnosis and were in mainstream schools) to be more socially accepted if they're trans than "just" autistic.

In the flip side, I know of a young autistic man who doesn't want to share his diagnosis with anyone due to the way autism is now synonymous with queer/ tra etc.

Any attempt to teach an autistic child is ‘- the fact that all children need to learn, grow and mature in their behaviours is ignored. Any attempt to change the behaviour of an autistic child is met with cries of ‘ableism’ - including speech and language therapy.

I had to do quite a bit on ableism for a course and really struggled with some of the messages as it's all we do. But it's as you say - all children need to learn.

A lot is down to the age and the stage the child is at - judging whether a child is going to be able to access what we teach (from a social interaction perspective) and most is ad hoc 'in the moment' as much as planned. The word appropriate is used a lot - both 'is this appropriate for the child in question based on what we know' and 'is how the child is communicating/ behaving appropriate.'

I think ableism can be a very difficult area. I've seen TRAs in pshe teaching groups insist that autistic children can be taught pronouns. Based on the kind of arguments I've used above

Ah pronouns; I was horrified to see how many speech and language therapists have been captured by this. All children need to learn what pronouns are and how they are used. Children with language disorders (which includes many autistic children) need to be explicitly taught when he and she apply. Now just imagine that being taught by a TRA - what hope does that child have? It also ultimately undermines TRAs as when they become divorced from sex why bother? Men demand to be referred to as ‘she’ not because it is the pronoun linked with some feeling but because it is linked with sex and they know it is linked with sex and they want others to be forced to refer to them as if they were that sex.

@TrumptonsFireEngine when it comes to not changing the behavioural traits of those of us with asd we are unfortunately in an overcorrection from ABA, when we were fighting back against ABA what we wanted was to be allowed to stim and have our ear defenders or headphones. For a while, we had that, and it was great, we could stim and not fear being beaten for it or being forced to mask until we have mental breakdowns.
Then when the self IDing crew came along they took our requests for reasonable accommodation such as me being allowed in to have sole use of the desk squeezed into a little corner with my headphones on into demanding that everyone else works in absolute silence and all desks being set up my way. Now me asking for the desk noone actually wanted and allowing me to where headphones affects noone else yet enabled me to do my job well ,yet the entitled demanding of the new lot is justifiably missing off most people and then my reasonable adjustments begin to be looked on in the same way as the demands for absolute silence. As I've been saying for some time a push back is coming and now it's here as it's getting harder and harder to get people to accept reasonable requests which means that my dc and I can no longer do things that we used to and because of all the trivial cries of abilisum the word is now a useless joke. And where in all of this are our charities why they're actively pushing all this harmful nonsense

There’s no gender ideology without gender stereotypes, which have become so much more rigid over the last 20 years.

If other autistic people are like me it can feel safe to follow rules, they help the world feel more predictable and safe, so going by gender stereotypes, if teen girls are more comfortable with short hair, boobs well under control (movement and bras = uncomfortable - I dream of wearing something that will comfortably hold everything in and the material doesn’t move, but if I look for it I find breast binders), comfortable clothes, then they fit male stereotypes.
Couple that with unlimited time online with people saying “well duh, you’re obviously a boy”, and looking at the rules, arbitrary though they might be, and thinking “well of course I am”, and the adults in charge, instead of pointing out that stereotypes are a load of nonsense are affirming this, well, what on earth could go wrong.
(sorry that was a real stream of conscience).

I’ve distanced from most autism groups on or offline, it’s too much. I look like I should be trans or a they/them but I’m just me, and I got sick of people telling me I’m just internalising transphobia. I’m not though, I’m just horrified at what is being done to autistic girls, horrified that pretty much every autism charity is ok with their girls being transitioned rather than help them through typically shitty years.

Like the above poster said people are reluctant to consider reasonable adjustments, probably because the gender crowd has made them really wary of making any allowances.

A local autism SM group run by autistics for autistics decided that a fun activity in pride month would be to highlight which local businesses weren’t celebrating pride and transness, why didn’t they have flags up, did they hate autistic trans people? They seemed to think they were doing a great service when in reality all they did was alienate more people from autistic people and those who identify as trans. I used to be quite happy to be open about my autism, but not any more, there are too many negative connotations.

NitroNine, it’s a very interesting point about the very vocal group who are engaged in identity politics. I don't know if it's just the particular content I'm seeing, but it mainly seems to be middle-aged women in straight relationships who are identifying as non-binary and therefore queer. It's interesting when listening to some of them talking, that they feel oppressed because of their gender (non-binary) and sexuality (queer), but often describe themselves as privileged because they are white and various combinations of, as they call it, cis passing, straight passing and female presenting. They suggest that being female presenting or cis passing, which seem to be the same thing, give them privilege, rather than leaving them subject to sexist discrimination. I'm getting the impression that actual sexism is being erased here. It seems like another aspect of sexist ideology where being female is being presented as privileged, so these women can no longer claim to be oppressed due to sexism, but instead are oppressed because of their gender. Since they have identified as non-binary, this seems to automatically make their sexuality not straight, and means they can also be oppressed for their sexuality. In a way this gives them more power as being a member of the LGBTQ community, especially under the dual banners of trans and queer, is accepted as being part of a marginalised group, in a way that being female is not. There's a lot of deference to this so maybe they feel more listened to as trans queer autistic people rather than "boring old middle-aged women". There might be a lot to untangle in this area.

FractionEngine, I agree gender stereotypes have become much more rigid, which a lot of people claim is progressive even though it seems complete rubbish to me. I suppose I'm still baffled by the fact that so many people who I would have thought would know better, including apparently intelligent adults and those of my own generation, seem to completely believe in the stereotypes. It seems to be hard to find an autism group that isn't pushing this.

The results of all this for autistic children and teenagers sound dreadful. I knew about the disproportionately high rate of autism in children and teens referred to gender identity services but I suppose I'm now starting to see how the dots join up and it's horrifying.

Great analysis ⬆️⬆️⬆️

To add (my italics):

The results of all this for autistic children and teenagers sound dreadful. I knew about the disproportionately high rate of autism in children and teens referred to gender identity services but I suppose I'm now starting to see how the dots join up and it's horrifying.

This is what keeps me up at night and drives me forward in this hideous mess. I'm going to do everything that I can to support my autistic daughter and hopefully help her to engage her critical thinking so that she's not another victim of this medical scandal. Sadly many of the victims are yet to even set their endocrine systems on a pathway to fail and/or remove body parts in their quest to feel more at ease with themselves. So many more will do this, due to schools and society ramming gender identity belief down their throats at every turn, making them believe it's exactly what they need to do 😢 It's going to take years for the world to see the scale of this scandal and finally pull the brakes on.

Edited for clarity.

It's really taxing my brain trying to unpick this stuff, but to add more thoughts. I've noticed that some of the female non binary identifying people I'm hearing from make comments about gender not really having an effect on their lives or not experiencing a strong sense of gender, which they interpret as being non binary or agender. This idea that everybody must have a gender identity, even if that is to be ‘agender’ is heavily promoted and is accepted as a given. It's also baldly stated in quite a bit of published autism research, without anything to back it up and without a definition of gender identity. I suppose if you buy into this idea that gender identity is a fact and that everybody must have one, then you could end up concluding you must be non binary under these circumstances, when a person with exactly the same lack of gender feelings could also conclude that everyone having a gender identity isn’t true.

From listening to some of this stuff there seem to be a few ideas running through it:

• Cisgender and heterosexual are conflated (into cis-het) and once you identify as not being cisgender then you automatically become not heterosexual. I’ve heard a non-binary female person talking about being worried about losing kudos for being married to a “cis-man”.

• Neurodivergent people are more likely to identify as not being cis-het, so cis-het is seen as associated with neurotypical people.

• People who are not cis-het have spent a lot of time thinking about their gender, so cis-het people aren’t curious/deep thinkers and haven’t thought about it, and their views are therefore ill-informed and can be dismissed.

• Being cis-het is undesirable and there is pressure to think a lot about gender and not be cis-het

I wonder if, in the neurodivergent community, the idea of being neurotypical is also being lumped in with being cisgender and heterosexual. I've seen the view expressed that conforming to masculine and feminine gender stereotypes is a neurotypical expectation, and I can understand why autistic people with sensory sensitivities might often prefer to have more comfortable and practical clothing and hairstyles which are usually not the styles not fitting with feminine stereotypes. It seems like simply dressing for comfort and practicality is now regarded as gender non conforming, leading to the experience of other people assuming that you must be non binary or transgender that FractionEngine describes.

There seems to be the impression that the majority of neurotypical people are “cisgendered” and that the majority of neurotypical and cisgendered people believe that conforming to sexist gender stereotypes is very important. This then positions being gender nonconforming alongside being neurodivergent and maybe increases the expectation that if you are neurodivergent you must be, or ought to be, both gender nonconforming and non “cisgendered”.

I get the impression that neurodivergence and being trans are somehow being positioned as very similar. Both are being positioned as normal human variations. I'm not really sure how they can be conflated like this since being neurodivergent, as far as I know, is associated with reasonably well evidenced structural differences in the brain, which being transgender is not. The last time I checked, my autism diagnosis didn't come along with any recommendation that I required, or at least had the option of, taking medication to help me be my true authentic autistic self, or having any normal and healthy organs removed in order to achieve the same aim. I also can’t identify out of being autistic, I’m stuck with it. Maybe it's similar to TQ being teamed with LGB when one is about sexual orientation and the other about identity, or maybe it's just a reflection that TQ takes over as much as it can.

This is such a great post.

My autistic daughter and I had a conversation in the car yesterday about gender identity. One that I never expected to have right now, given she's only 15 and this is pretty mind-blowing stuff for adults, let alone children. We didn't conclude anything but we didn't need to.

She said that she didn't really have any sense of gender so she could see why non-binary made sense. I told her I didn't have any sense of gender either.

She asked me why I didn't identify as non-binary. I said it's because I don't believe that anyone has a gendered soul. She then said that most of how I looked (my clothes, my hair etc) was in line with a female identity. I said I agreed with her that I looked like a stereotypical female a lot of the time.
She then said "so you know you're female. That must mean you have a gender identity". I explained that I know I'm female because of my biology, nothing more than that and that being female had impacted how people treated me, the choices I'd been offered in life e.g. the gifts I'd been given as a child, the lessons I'd been given at school (girls did netball at my primary school in PE when boys did football). I told her that I felt my personality had been formed partly as a result of how I decided to navigate all of this, whether I accepted it or pushed back on it.

I've got no idea how she'll process all of that because we arrived at our destination at that point and the subject changed to what we were doing. On a plus note, she didn't get angry at what I was saying. She would definitely have done so previously.

The way we ended up on the subject was because we were talking about the poor girl who has been banned from playing football for 6 matches under the recent FA ruling (for asking a transgirl player "are you a man?"). My daughter thinks the ban is ridiculous, that biological sex is important for safety in sport.... and asked if we could go to the protests that are happening. I explained that we could but it's a really controversial subject because of all the arguments about gender identity. She (rightly) said that it shouldn't be controversial.

So much knowledge and wisdom and experience and helpfulness on here - I hope OP and others find the support they need.

I've nothing useful to add, but I had to post to say thank you to FractionEngine
for putting succinctly into words what it would take me a paragraph to express:
There’s no gender ideology without gender stereotypes

Very well said, and I'm going to steal it and use it again and again, if that's OK
FractionEngine

She then said "so you know you're female. That must mean you have a gender identity". I explained that I know I'm female because of my biology, nothing more than that.

BonfireLady: this is such an important point. One of the things that completely baffles me about gender ideology, and which nobody who believes in it seems able to explain adequately is the idea that gender identity is completely independent of biological sex and is the thing that identifies a person as being a man or a woman (or neither). What I interpret them to mean is that there is an internal feeling, completely unconnected to the person’s physical body, that determines whether somebody is a man or a woman. That internal feeling must also be shared by all people with the same identity in order for them all to know that they are all a man or a woman or neither. An understanding of these feelings must be shared by all people who identify as non binary or agender, in order for them to know that they’re not either a man or a woman. The idea that all transgender and cisgender women share a feeling that they know they have in common with each other yet nobody is able to describe is a mystery to me.

Your daughter suggests that understanding you’re female is the same as having a female gender identity, but how could that work for transwomen or transmen who must clearly understand they have a biological sex and what that sex is. Simply understanding that you’re either male or female based on your biology must be a completely different thing to understanding what you are based on your gender identity, otherwise being trans wouldn’t exist.

The neurodiversity community is very vocal and in control of most autism groups, but the relationship between them and autism is more like this:

I think you're right with this and it's a depressing thought.

It Is depressing that they have become the voice policy makers listen to, but also reassuring that most autistic people are not caught up in this crazy ideology.

Unfortunately their influence seems to be growing. I don't have the link to hand but I remember seeing footage of a rainbow club at a special needs school where some students were autistic (and would be described as "low functioning" in what can often be controversial parlance) and were being encouraged to understand their "gender identity". I saw another with a group of children and young adults with Down's syndrome, all waving flags etc.
The vocal neurodiversity gang unfortunately claim to speak on their behalf and call anyone ableist (and fascist, nazi, bigot etc) if they challenge it.

Yep.

It feels like a big conversation for adults to get their head around, let alone children. I think we'll be coming back to it in bite sized chunks, with sport (particularly football, given my daughter plays on a girls' team and loves everything to do with football) as our anchor point.

Nothing to add, but thank you everyone for your very insightful posts.

I am also worried about it being presented as fact in many of these support groups that 'autistic children are more likely to be trans'.
Whereas what I hear is, autistic children are more vulnerable and therefore more likely to be bamboozled by this new cult.

I am personally lucky that ASD DD declared one day that all the kids in the LGBTQ etc group in her school were 'brainwashed'. I was relieved to hear say that. She had been giving me some pushback whenever I mentioned anything to do with GI while eye rolling (me). But for her it was more about me 'being rude'. Thankfully she didn't have the vocab to call me a bigot yet!

She was 15 by the time of the brainwashing comment and out of the danger zone, I think. She said it was all 'very year 7'!

I listened to the latest episode of the Neurodivergent Woman podcast, which I’ve found quite useful in the past, although some of the episodes are questionable. The latest one is on gender. They're qualified clinical psychologists and they got another clinical psychologist on to talk about this and the incoherent drivel they're putting out is mind boggling. Many people are going to believe this tripe as they'll think these psychologists will know what they're talking about. They say sex isn't binary and actually has over 42 different 'variations' and lots of people have these without ever knowing. They say sex is 'assumed at birth' and make it sound like that's a really inaccurate process based on if you have a 'visible external body part' but without taking into account internal organs, chromosomes or hormones. They saythat everyone, irrespective of sex, has oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone and they aren't distinct in any binary sense (so why is it a problem to not take them into account when ‘assuming sex at birth’?). They don't give any definition of what gender is, except that it's nothing to do with sex, but say gender identity is 'the gender we identify as, regardless of sex, regardless of physical attributes or characteristics, and regardless of the gender presumed for us at birth'. So if sex can have over 42 variations and is assumed at birth, and is nothing to do with gender, how is gender being assumed at birth? There’s a huge amount of evidence free word salad about ‘resonating’ and feelings but no foundation to any of it.

It drives me mad, people promoting this anti scientific crap, although it offers an insight into the total rubbish some people believe.

https://www.ndwomanpod.com/blog/gender-diversity-with-lumen-gorrie

You know you are female biologically and you go along with some of the conventions associated with the way that women dress and present...because you have adapted yourself to reality, and have chosen to accept that, to some extent, we all play a role in our society or in our culture. As people we cannot exist entirely independently of our culture.

Trans ideology stems from post modernistic concepts of the Self in which the individual can shape and create their own reality...and that we can effectively "be anything we want to be". Nothing is fixed. Truth is negotiable. We can rebel against oppressive structures ( associated with gender) by rejecting them and denying them a reality.

Add to this we live in an age in which natural limits ( or any limits, or boundaries) are seen as oppressive, and that mankind can conquer nature and its seeming natural limits and bend them to his will. Our body is just "a meat suit"...nothing to do with our real selves, and we can chop and change it to suit our desires.

Thanks @Opinionpolecat I might check it out. I try to keep listening to different viewpoints though it is sometimes hard when there is a lot of word salad.

I've also reread some of your posts and your analysis seems spot on. I sometimes wonder if this whole debacle isn't caused by different types of neuro divergence i.e. those more religiously inclined and those more scientific. I don't mean you can't be both but spiritual truth is not the same as scientific truth and shouldn't be confused as such.

What I also find ridiculous is that they go to all these lengths to deny that biology is what makes you a man or a woman, that only "gender identity" is real and matters. But then why do gender identity categories include "man", "woman" and "non-binary" - and why does being trans so often involve surgery and hormones that affect sex characteristics and try to destroy the ones you have naturally? The idea of man and woman must have come from somewhere in the first place. It's odd that "gender identity" would base itself so firmly on categories it claims are unimportant/meaningless/non-existent.