Guest post: And everybody will clap for you
Originally a comment by Papito on Rainbow autism.
The prevalence of autistic kids among those who self-identify as trans is much higher than that in the population at large. Sometimes it seems the entire complex taxonomy of gender identities and rules was created by autistic people; who else could be bothered. As you mentioned here in February, Barnes says, in Time To Think, that the Tavistock ignored evidence that 97.5% of the kids showing up there were autistic, and 35% of them moderately to severely so, versus around 2% in the general population. The Venn Diagram is practically concentric circles.
Growing up autistic – especially if you don’t know it – can be exhausting, alienating, and confusing. A simple answer like Trans comes along and promises everything is magically better if you transition, plus you get this incredible Pokemon-like complexity of definitions and transforms, and you to get to yell at everybody to follow your complex rules, and everybody will clap for you.
The associations representing autistic people and kids have been taken over entirely by TRAs. You can’t go seek community, as an autistic person, without encountering such cheerleading. You can’t run an autistic support group without bowing to them.
This tweet could be read as “I will immediately lose my job working to support autistic people if I’m not also trans-affirming.”
I’m an austitic person myself. I spent much of my adolescence in the 1990s worrying that I was “gay” because I didn’t like soccer, cars, or loud noises. I also felt frightened and alienated from my changing body, and on several occasions I found myself privately wishing that I was a girl, because I naively thought that teenage girls might have life easier than teenage boys.
I’m fine now. But all I can say is, thank goodness that there was nothing like Mermaids or the Trevor Project when I was a teenager.
I’m sure it helped that every time you misread the complicated social codes dictating what teenage boys are allowed to wear to school, another boy would correct you by saying “Those shoes are gay!” or some such.
My son is autistic, and I had a front-row seat to how much more difficult that makes adolescence. By all objective measures, his childhood was easier than mine, with less trauma, fewer adverse events, etc. Subjectively, it seems to have been harder, and an extra (and unnecessary) part of that difficulty was overcoming gender ideology.
Gender ideology is the worst thing ever to happen to autistic kids.