We’re Lesbians on the Autism Spectrum. Stop Telling Us to Become Men
"If there was ever a case for a trans child, I was it. Let’s take a look at the DSM-5 guidelines and its diagnostic definition of gender dysphoria, followed by descriptions of my own experience:
A strong desire to be of the other gender or insistence that one is the other gender.
When I was in kindergarten, my teacher called home to express serious concern that I was developmentally confused, due to my insistence on lining up with the boys to go to the bathroom. Well into adolescence, I went to great pains to “pass” as a boy and even got reprimanded for going into women’s restrooms. I liked this, considering it a sign of my success.
A strong preference for wearing clothes typical of the opposite gender.
When I was in first grade, I began refusing to wear my hair long or to dress in anything other than boys’ blue jeans and polo shirts, or similar attire. This “phase” lasted through my junior year of high school, when I finally accepted (following a long and arduous puberty) that I would never “pass” again.
A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.
I had a rich internal fantasy world in which I pretended to be male characters from my favorite books and movies. I dressed as male characters for Halloween every year between the ages of six and 16. When I imagined myself interacting with my friends or the kids from school, I always saw myself as a boy. Even now, when imagining myself, I often involuntarily see a man.
A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.
My favorite toys were action figures, dinosaur figurines, sports equipment, and fake weapons.
A strong preference for playmates of the other gender.
All of my chosen friends were boys. The girls frightened me, always seeming to communicate in some kind of secret language.
A strong rejection of toys, games and activities typical of one’s assigned gender.
The one time I owned a Barbie doll, I dismembered it Dexter-style within an hour of removing it from its packaging—a signal to my parents that classically-feminine toys were unacceptable to me.
A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.
As I began to grow breasts, I took to wearing sports bras several sizes too small, in a painful attempt to flatten my chest. This “phase” lasted until I graduated college.
A strong desire for the physical sex characteristics that match one’s experienced gender.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve stared at well-dressed men and perused men’s fashion sites, not because I find these men sexually attractive, but because I so desperately want to be like them. To have a beautifully flat chest, narrow hips, and a strong jawline. Long, powerful arms and legs, and dark stubble on my face. I wish I had been born in a better body, one that would never turn against me and bleed at the worst moment. One that would enable me to move through the world more gracefully, unencumbered by male attention or by my own physical ineptness. One that would be more attractive to other women. I have yet to grow out of this “phase.” I doubt that I ever will.
There are probably many of you out there reading this, nodding along. Likely, many of you are teenage girls or young women around my age. Others, likely teenage boys or young men in their 20s, are probably feeling that this list would apply perfectly to you, if only the sex and gender roles involved were reversed. You perhaps identify as trans, or non-binary, or at least gender-questioning.
And I don’t blame you. When I first discovered the DSM-5 guidelines, it was jaw-dropping, so much so that it’s one of those moments that imprinted itself in my mind forever. I still remember where I was, what I was wearing, and the exact texture of the rock that was stuck in my shoe.
This is likely where mine and my readers’ personal narratives begin to diverge. While their reactions to reading these guidelines, or discovering a trans Internet forum, or stumbling upon a trans group at school, were likely of relief at finally finding an “answer,” mine could never be that simple. The analytical wheels of my brain started turning, wondering how something so common as a tomboy could become a psychiatric diagnosis...
I was saved by the grace of discovering this phenomenon too late. By then, I was 20 years old, and had already found ways to cope with my so-called gender dysphoria that didn’t involve turning myself into a lifelong pharmaceutical patient, or subjecting my already fragile body to more and more unnecessary surgeries.
You see, even at 20 I knew what that meant in a way most people don’t. I was already a lifelong pharmaceutical patient who’d been through multiple (unrelated) invasive and damaging surgeries due to factors beyond my control. The idea that anyone would do this to themselves—or worse, to their child—for the simple sin of not conforming to gender norms in the Year of Our Lord 2016 was beyond my comprehension. (If you think I was disturbed by this, you can imagine my dismay when I discovered “Body Integrity Identity Disorder” not much later.)
So I quietly began mulling all this over, gently dipping my toe into these waters with those I considered like-minded at school. I was pleased to soon learn that the trans community doesn’t actually like the DSM-5 guidelines, and that being trans is “way more complicated than that,” according to one of my particularly woke friends at the time. I figured they must see what I see, and the psychiatrists were the ones who got it wrong.
That fantasy was a brief one: I shortly realized that the reason the trans community on campus disliked the guidelines wasn’t because they were overly broad, but because they were apparently oppressively narrow, withholding lifesaving medical interventions from an already vulnerable population. And the emphasis here was on medical interventions, i.e., puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. It struck me that these individuals didn’t seem concerned with actual psychological treatment.
For the following two years, I aggressively researched the topic. Not one for social media, I never made my way to “Gender Critical” or “TERF” sources or forums (in fact, for most of this time, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what those terms meant), as they were never offered up to me by Google algorithms. Instead, I read studies on trans people, attended trans-supportive academic talks, studied more psychiatric guidelines, and read LGBT+ activist websites and testimonials from trans people themselves.
In short, I did exactly what the trans community was telling me to do: I educated myself, using their preferred sources and their firsthand reports of their experiences.
The result, however, was not what they intended. The more sources I read, the more questions I had, with none of my previous questions being answered in the process. No one seemed to be able to define terms such as trans, gender dysphoria, non-binary, or gendered soul without using what struck me as obvious gender stereotypes. No one could define the word woman, either. In fact, I started being reprimanded for even daring to use the word woman or making any references to female biology in a political context at school...
And then my closest friend in the whole word, a classically masculine straight computer nerd obsessed with sci-fi and video games, told me he was a lesbian. After that, he moved back into his childhood bedroom, stopped pursuing further education or employment, and began a series of invasive medical interventions all while engaging in some rather disturbing roleplay in which he was a 12-year-old anime girl. Apparently, this was my breaking point...
Here’s the thing about ASD: One of its hallmark symptoms is discomfort in one’s own body, and with the physical world more generally. Especially in this day and age of self-diagnosis, and the sea of misleading “autism” memes on social media, it’s hard to realize that there’s more to the condition than social anxiety. In fact, I’d argue if you’re hyper-aware of your own social ineptness, especially in childhood, you probably aren’t on the spectrum. The issue here is social obliviousness, not social anxiety. Sure, the anxiety often comes along later, when you finally realize you’re doing something wrong, but it’s not the source of the problem.
For people like this, not at home in their own bodies and unable to pick up on the social cues and socialization that surround issues of gender, sexuality, and romance, it’s easy to see how they would identify with the trans movement. Add in black-and-white thinking and an obsession with categorization (also common ASD characteristics), and Houston, we have a problem. To these kids, a transgender identity presents a straightforward and treatable solution to their lifelong pain, and who wouldn’t want that? Even many trans activists now recognize the high number of ASD sufferers who are transitioning...
What is it that I want to become? I don’t just want to become a man per se. “Man” is a pretty big category, after all. I want to become a conventionally attractive, socially and romantically successful man who has a lot of physical grace. And this is often the image that is sold to us in the trans-affirmative discourse. The trans role models held up as most desirable are often the ones who both “pass,” and seem to have quite a bit of sexual and professional success.
This is a very small sub-category. Let’s just face it: if I were a man, I wouldn’t be Chris Evans in The Avengers; I would be Steve Carrell in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. This is all assuming that I could even become a man in the first place, a premise that relies on a particularly faulty brand of Cartesian dualism that rivals the worst historical impulses of the Roman Catholic Church (“intrinsically disordered,” anyone?).
But I digress. My point is that what these young people are being sold is a lie, a lie that the mind and the body are separable, and that there is a magic-bullet solution to a lifelong problem. And it isn’t a white lie, either; it’s a lie that brings along with it a lifetime of medicalization, possibly a shortened lifetime at that, and the neglect of the root-cause issues at play, not to mention a permanently hyper-limited dating pool...
Asperger’s isn’t the only area of my life in which I find the idea of a quick solution attractive. When Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg pronounced in a 2019 speech that if there had been a pill to make him straight when he was a teenager in the ‘90s, he would’ve taken it, I remember my progressive mom murmuring in shock and horror. I shrunk down in my chair next to her, thinking that I’d take that pill then and there, in 2019. I couldn’t say that out loud, though, even to myself, because I was so deep in the closet that I could almost see Narnia.
Here are, in no particular order, the reasons I would take the Buttigieg Pill: Often, it feels like “lesbian” is more a porn category for men than anything else these days; a significant number of men treat those few women who do call themselves lesbians as if they are themselves walking porn categories; many of the actual women in my dating pool are either injecting testosterone or in a relationship with a man and looking for a sidepiece or a threesome; some of the small number of women out there who are also lesbians and agree with me on the trans issue are self-identified “radical feminists” who would probably hold it against me that I’m not also a radical feminist; I dislike cats (which are apparently required to be a card-carrying lesbian); I find women far more difficult to communicate with than men (and that’s saying something); I find women far more difficult to relate to than men (ditto); the rest of my dating pool seems to consist of either dudes in fetish gear pretending to be women, or emotionally needy and stunted dudes who think they’re women; and if I dare to say anything about any of this out loud, or under my real name, I will be cannon-blasted into unemployment.
So, the day my best friend in the world told me he was a lesbian was the day I resigned myself to being in the closet forever, because that was when I realized once and for all that being myself isn’t okay in the modern western world, and that coming out doesn’t matter because that giant list in the previous paragraph means I’m going to be single for the rest of my life anyway. Narnia beckons.
After reading all this, ask yourself: Is it any wonder that any young gay person would prefer testosterone injections or estrogen pills over living her or his life authentically?
Given what we know about autism, is it really that surprising that this movement is spreading like wildfire?
For that matter, given what we know about the multi-faceted nature of being a human, is it any wonder that if we define the categories of “man” and “woman” using absurdly strict gender roles, most people who buy into those definitions won’t consider themselves men or women anymore?"
