instantkittenenthusiast

[instantkittenenthusiast]

Back in the early 10s (late 00s?) when LGB had been made more inclusive by adding the T, there was also a push to make the T more inclusive. Suddenly "trans*" was a bad word on tumblr. We'd moved from transsexual to transgender pretty much over night. You no longer had to have dysphoria to be trans. Xeno genders exploded. Everyone identified themselves into LGBT.

I never agreed with this. I think you need to have dysphoria to be trans. Was called truscum back then. Apparently they've changed it to transmedicalist now. Whatever. I went from being a vocal ally to being shunned by people with bunself pronouns.

So I just stepped away from tumblr. Supported my dysphoric transsexual friends offline instead. Called myself "kinda trans" if anyone asked. My dysphoria was pretty much limited to hating being called a woman by people. Strangely, I had no problems with being referred to as a girl.

I started eating SSRI in the early 00s. It made me finally gain weight and develop a more female appearance. I didn't like that much. Eventually my back problems that I had developed by hunching over constantly had turned so bad I had to fix it somehow. There was no other option than straightening up... Suddenly, everyone could see I have breasts. No fun. Bought my first binder after that. Rarely used it, it was too uncomfortable. Sports bras work just as well.

This is how it was for the past ten years or so. I had no contact with the LGBT movement. Was only occasionally bothered by dysphoria. Never saw myself as a woman. Life was still okay.

Then covid-19 happened.

I had stopped eating SSRI a few years before, and suddenly my anxiety levels were spiking. I spent a lot of time online to distract myself. Decided to check in with the pronoun people. See if they still identified as bunself.

I watched a lot of trans videos on YouTube. Found the "you don't have to pass to be trans" people. Um. Okay... Then transbians. Then the "lesbians must be willing to suck girl dick or they're transphobic bigots" people. Oh hell no. Wtf?? I decided right then and there that I wanted to have nothing to do with that thing. If that was what being trans was, I wanted nothing to do with it. Surely there must be a better way of dealing with my dysphoria than calling myself trans.

I started searching around, and found there's actually quite a lot of people who claim they don't have a gender identity. Some called themselves gender critical. I found the reddit community with the same name a few months before it was banned. Read all the "peak trans" stories and realised I had "peaked" already at least ten years ago. Read about how if a man decides he's a woman, his male organs are now considered female by the activists.

I just couldn't agree with any of this. So I decided to stop calling myself trans. I found the detrans community. Realised that the agreed upon term for me would be desisted.

I spent over 25 years thinking of myself as Agender. I no longer do. I just don't think "gender identity" is anything meaningful. Seems to me that it's all gender stereotypes. I never understood why people placed such importance to seemingly arbitrary rules anyway.

I still have dysphoria. I still have problems calling myself a woman. Using the word so many times here is self therapy. I'm not Agender. I'm a gender nonconforming woman who doesn't think "gender" should even exist. Throw it out. Do whatever you want. Wear whatever you want. Don't limit yourself to these "gender" boxes.

I've had dysphoria since I hit puberty, aged 10 or so. I remember being so embarrassed about my breasts. I developed an eating disorder to keep myself from growing. When that didn't stop me from developing, I spent 30 years hunched over. I desperately did not want to be an adult. A woman. It was something threatening to me. It still brings me discomfort when others make sure to acknowledge me as a woman. Probably has something to do with sex. I haven't gotten that far into my processing yet.

I never saw myself as a man either. I always saw gender roles as completely useless. There were things you couldn't do because you were not a man?? Pre-teen me thought that was preposterous. I've always prided myself in learning all sorts of things. I can install a new hard drive in my computer, knit, and paint. Just normal human activities.

Then in the early 90s, I read a magazine article about a woman who had completely neutered herself. She identified as Neutrois, and had removed various body parts to reflect her gender identity. Wow, I thought. This is what I would want to do. Get rid of every female body part. So I could be me.

Trans health care didn't do that though, back then. Actually, I'm not sure they do even now. At one point some 20 years ago, I considered transitioning into a man, but was deterred because there was just no way to surgically create a functioning male organ. Still isn't possible.

Until then, I just thought of myself as Agender. Then, maybe 10 or so years ago, nonbinary people were included in the trans umbrella term. Suddenly I was transgender. Ironically, that's when I started distancing myself from the trans movement.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

I've had dysphoria since I hit puberty, aged 10 or so. I remember being so embarrassed about my breasts. I developed an eating disorder to keep myself from growing. When that didn't stop me from developing, I spent 30 years hunched over. I desperately did not want to be an adult. A woman. It was something threatening to me. It still brings me discomfort when others make sure to acknowledge me as a woman. Probably has something to do with sex. I haven't gotten that far into my processing yet.

I never saw myself as a man either. I always saw gender roles as completely useless. There were things you couldn't do because you were not a man?? Pre-teen me thought that was preposterous. I've always prided myself in learning all sorts of things. I can install a new hard drive in my computer, knit, and paint. Just normal human activities.

Then in the early 90s, I read a magazine article about a woman who had completely neutered herself. She identified as Neutrois, and had removed various body parts to reflect her gender identity. Wow, I thought. This is what I would want to do. Get rid of every female body part. So I could be me.

Trans health care didn't do that though, back then. Actually, I'm not sure they do even now. At one point some 20 years ago, I considered transitioning into a man, but was deterred because there was just no way to surgically create a functioning male organ. Still isn't possible.

Until then, I just thought of myself as Agender. Then, maybe 10 or so years ago, nonbinary people were included in the trans umbrella term. Suddenly I was transgender. Ironically, that's when I started distancing myself from the trans movement.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

It's deeply ironic to me that being nonbinary is turning into a trendy thing among female celebrities the year after I stop thinking of myself as Agender.

A couple of years ago I would've been thrilled to see it, now I'm just tired. It's not liberation from stifling gender roles. It's a trap.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

Detransition Awareness

Detrans people rarely get support and their issues are often swept under the rug.

I believe this is because if detrans people are listened to, we would find out that dysphoria is not cured by gender affirmation surgeries and hormones. Its clear that there has been little or no attempt to research other ways dysphoria can be managed and young dysphoric people are pushed to spend thousands of dollars on the medical industry.

its clear that medical transition often comes with more physical health issues than not and there is evidence that transitioning doesnt help with dysphoria.

its so rare to find surveys and research on the detrans experience and I think this one really shuts down many myths about why people detrans.

trans activists claim that detrans people do it because they are discriminated against when they transitioned and lack of social support but according to detrans people this comes dead last in the reasons for detrans.

instead further exploration into why they are dysphoric and realisation that the transition doesnt magically cure dysphoria was a major reason for detransitioning.

Read the full study here

[instantkittenenthusiast]

The transgender community and liberal feminists CAUSED my dysphoria.

I’ve always been gender non-conforming. My home was a very blasé one—no one really bothered me about it. My mom would occasionally encourage me to wear make-up and dresses, but I resisted, and she dropped it. Never once did I question whether or not I was a girl.

I went to college, and apparently, gender was not related to biology—it was a “feeling.” And I ran with the liberal crowd, and knew many transgender people, and they all said the same.

I became confused. My trans woman friend was super feminine, so in touch with her “womanhood,” but I could not relate to her experience at all. If being a woman is a “feeling,” then surely this feeling would have to be universal—but I didn’t feel it. But I couldn’t deny that this feeling existed—after all, that would be to deny someone’s “true lived experience,” right? So I couldn’t be a woman. But I didn’t feel like a man, either.

I considered that I might be agender. Yes, that would explain why I’d never felt comfortable with the idea of what a woman was—it was because I wasn’t one at all! And my demeanor, my eccentricities, my lack of femininity but also not extreme masculinity all must have meant that I was neither a man nor a woman.

And I became extremely estranged from my body. I avoided the mirror across from the shower when I stepped out because the body I saw was so foreign. Did that body really reflect anything about who I was? I started to bind my chest. I wanted to be an amorphous blob, essentially. I wanted to be so androgynous that nobody could tell what my sex was when they looked at me, so they would have no preconceived notions about who I was—to be perceived by others as female made me shudder. Female pronouns felt like shards of glass.

It was only when I discovered that I was lesbian that everything started to fit into place. No, I wasn’t agender—I was butch. And I started to love my body, and connect with my body, in a way that I never had. Growing up I’d always been estranged from it to some extent, likely because it was giving me signals that I was homosexual and I was subconsciously telling it to shut up. And then, in believing I couldn’t be a woman because I did not experience some intangible, unnameable (read: feminine) feeling, I had been cut off from my womanhood altogether.

But I LOVE being a woman. I didn’t hate being seen as a woman—I hated when MEN saw me as (their idea of) a woman, with the way they would sexualize and disrespect me because of it. I didn’t hate female pronouns—I hated when MEN used them, with a tone that dripped with misogyny. Gender dysphoria does not come from within—it comes from without. It comes from your sense of self clashing with what society presumes of you based on your genitalia. Your genitalia is not the problem—society is.

When thinking of myself, and looking at myself, as a woman amongst women, I feel totally comfortable. This body that I used to try to hide, I now want to flaunt—not sexually, not in a feminine way, I’m just proud of it and want it to look good—for women. Women aren’t the ones sexually objectifying me or reducing me to a two-dimensional bitch and/or slut. “She” and “her” are music to my ears.

Being a woman is not a “feeling.” Definitionally, I agree that a woman is “an adult human female,” but that doesn’t convey or capture the essence—the essence of this shared womanhood, this shared experience, this shared understanding, that we all have because of how this society has treated us from the moment we were born. If that is ever obscured, it’s because of patriarchy and liberal feminism cutting us off from it. It’s a community, it’s a sisterhood, and I am beyond livid that liberal feminism tried to take that away from me.

When you demand that everyone accept your definition of woman, which you’ve reduced to a “feeling” that no one can name, you’ve erased EVERYTHING about “woman” that has ANY meaning. You erase our history, our community bonds, the medical reality and implications of our anatomy, our sexualities. You trivialize sex-based oppression and female-exclusive sisterly and romantic bonds. You desperately want to be part of this, but you just can’t have it, and in trying to take it, you’re destroying everything you want to access.

Worst of all, you’re cutting women off from their womanhood. Every girl who isn’t enthralled to wear a dress, and who comes in contact with liberal feminism, starts questioning whether or not she really is a woman. And girls start identifying as non-binary or genderqueer, and taking on “they/them” pronouns, which effectively shuts them off from the community they’ve had a right to from birth—and all because you think your femininity makes you a woman.

There’s nothing wrong with who trans people are—stop confusing your personality, that others label as “feminine” or “masculine,” with which sex you think that corresponds to. It’s all a great big lie. Men and women can be “feminine” and “masculine” or anywhere in between, and none of that corresponds to genitalia. Being a woman is a shared life experience that comes from being born with a vagina. That’s really all that can be said of every single woman—we have vaginas and have been treated a certain way because of them. But pointing that out does not reduce womanhood to genitalia—sex is just the prerequisite for this life experience.

Your definition of “woman” excludes and cuts me off from my womanhood. My definition keeps my womanhood intact, but excludes trans women. At the end of the day, we’re always invalidating SOMEONE’S identity. Which one of us do you think should be invalidated?

[instantkittenenthusiast]

"cherry picking"

[instantkittenenthusiast]

I was not ready for this the first time I read it extremely early in my reidentification. It’s an intense read, Gage uses sex based pronouns (with a compassionate explanation for why) for Brandon, & she goes boldly where basically nobody is willing to go anymore. I recommend it to anyone with dysphoria who’s an incest or rape survivor.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

Almost the entire nonbinary & genderfluid movement has been caused by female people’s discomfort with the gender roles and expectations forced onto them. The majority aren’t uncomfortable with being female, they’re uncomfortable with being expected to wear dresses, shave their legs, do their makeup to be sure they look presentable at all times, and act “feminine”.

Femininity can feel like a prison for so many girls. It’s natural to want to break free from it because it’s frustrating and unfair. But we have this whole generation of girls who think they have to reject being female to reject compulsory femininity. That they have to become a boy or something else entirely to escape the confines of femininity.

Femininity is bullshit forced on us girls since birth. It’s forced on us because we’re girls, not innately there due to the fact we’re girls. It’s taught to us. Performing femininity isn’t a natural part of being female. So given this, doesn’t it follow that not performing femininity doesn’t mean you’re not female?

Gender is what’s hurt us. Gender is what’s set these bullshit expectations for us. Why are we playing into the very thing that hurts us to try and escape it?

The only way to reject gender roles/expectations is to reject them while making it clear that you are very sex they were assigned to. Escaping to some other gender to renounce gender expectations isn’t destroying them. They’re still right there. That’s why you felt like you needed to escape in the goddamn first place.

Gender is a prison. Let’s just bulldoze all the prisons instead of transferring to new ones that might get us slightly better treatment. Destroy gender.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

So, some fun little thought experiments:

➡️ IF a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, and

➡️ IF there is no way to tell if someone is a woman until they tell you how they identify, and

➡️ IF attraction is based on gender not sex, and

➡️ IF men have been oppressing women based on gender not sex this whole time,

➡️ THEN that means womanhood as a gender is somehow immediately identifiable enough in every culture for men to know whom to oppress, but also not discernable until reveal

➡️ AND that means misogyny doesn't effect anyone until they identify as a woman (so female infanticide is a fluke I guess)

➡️ AND that means straight, gay, or lesbian attraction can't start until someone's gender is revealed

➡️ AND that means attraction stops the second someone's gender changes

➡️ AND that means no laws are misogynistic, because it would a) be impossible to enforce laws that effect an unidentifiable group of mysteriously distinct people, and b) any laws about sex-based things (abortion, birth control, maternal leave, title ix) aren't women's issues, they just arbitrarily effect a randomly assorted 51% of the population with nothing in common but some silly chromosomes

➡️ AND that means statistics about genders are worthless, since there is no way to account for changing gender identities (so why bother noting the massively higher murder, assault, and rape stats about males?)

[instantkittenenthusiast]

A woman: So I recently developed ovarian cancer & I could sure use someone to talk to about it

Trancels on Tumblr: Um this is kinda problematic sweetie. Trans women dont have ovaries & ur sure being cissexist when u bring them up. Bringing up the cancer u have in an organ that’s exclusive to females is transphobic & by trying to discuss a womens’ issue youre basically saying you want all trans women to DIE, so uh…

[instantkittenenthusiast]

Unriddling the Sphinx: Autism & the Magnetism of Gender Transition

When people note that “trans children” tend to have autistic traits and that children with an autism diagnosis (particularly natal girls, but also boys) are massively overrepresented in the population that is referred to assessment and treatment for gender dysphoria, many trans people’s (and allies’) response is that it is a kind of dehumanization and denial of agency to claim that autistic people cannot be transgender, do not have the right to seek gender transition, or that they may be vulnerable to being exploited by the transgender healthcare system. Most recently, this claim has come up again with regards to a recent piece by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, where among many other things she notes the enormous increase in child referrals to gender clinics, including a disproportionate number of autistic children, to explain her reticence to endorse the political stances of modern transgender movements.

This is my response as an autistic woman, who was once an autistic child, who is a lesbian with experiences of gender dysphoria and who once wanted to transition to male.

—–

1.

Recognizing our vulnerability to social predation and to cultural systems that we do not understand because they were not made for us is not offensive. As autistic people, it is key to claiming our autonomy as a particular kind of disabled person. We often do not recognize our limitations in reference to greater social systems not because we are “too stupid” (i.e. cognitively or intellectually limited) but because we have different value systems than neurotypical people and hierarchical institutions built for their benefit. Autism is a pervasive developmental disability, and it is a way of being. It is not merely being a “regular person” minus various clinically defined psychological capacities or skills. It is a difference across all domains of life, and as a disability that causes differences in our social and sensory perception it is also a disability that causes differences in what we want and what we care about. Both those who exhibit condescending “concern” for autistic people and those people who naively defend our right to do whatever we see fit miss this component of being autistic. It is not that we are merely vulnerable because we are missing parts of our decision-making or social skills apparatus. It is not that we are merely being unfairly denied what we want to do, and our autism is immaterial, just some excuse for the denial.

It’s that we aren’t recognized as having wants, only “special needs”. It’s that we aren’t given the skills to know what it is that we want, or that it might be different from those around us. It’s that we are never told how to get what we want in safe and healthy ways, or that there is even a potentially safe and healthy way to get it. It’s that we are deemed automatically pathological and empty of internal experiences as autistic people. It’s that we’re not given any help on how to navigate our deep differences from others and how to navigate being deprived of social resources and networking in a way that doesn’t tell us to just cover it up and deal with it. It’s that most people who dedicate their lives to “helping” us do not care about any of these things, merely that we can be trained to act in a way that doesn’t disrupt the lives of neurotypical people. Given this context, it is far more insulting to me to insist that having autonomy renders us somehow invulnerable to exploitation than to correctly perceive that we are in fact an intensely vulnerable people. By nature of our disability, we are always on the margins of social resources and social networks, and exercising our autonomy unfortunately often puts us even further outside social acceptability and social protection rather than somehow shielding us materially from the consequences of living a self-actualized autistic life. Few autistic people are prepared for this when they begin trying to make decisions “true to self” in adolescence.

I believe nearly every autistic person is traumatized from the consequences of living in this world and what others do to us. Clinicians do not usually recognize that autistic children and adults can be traumatized, that there is even anything there to traumatize. (Why else could they feel so comfortable shocking us, shackling us, or feeding us bleach?)

—–

2.

I think because we are not neurotypical we often struggle to understand just why a neurotypical person would feel ok excluding us, or maybe even anyone. Many of us autistic people have little impulse to do such things, and if we do, we rarely have the social power to make someone that we’ve cut out of our lives unemployable, unable to access medical care, food, housing, and so on. But neurotypical institutions are set up, from top to bottom, to create hierarchies of value with extreme material difference between the top and bottom. They are set up to stratify the “worthy” people from “unworthy” people.

Autistic people are almost universally considered “unworthy” in these systems, and to the extent that we can curry favor from them we must consent to our exploitation: to entering into a transaction on neurotypical terms, where we can get some sort of worth through providing a “benefit” to this hierarchical resource system which is not made according to our value system or for us whatsoever. This is common to all marginalized people. But it is often particularly poignant to autistic people, who struggle to find community with any social group of human beings. There is no “elsewhere” for us, there is no “home”. We are stuck, as they say, on the “wrong planet”, and the spaceship was destroyed.

The idea that exercising our autonomy would protect us from this world rather than render us more vulnerable because we are refusing to transact correctly or refusing to provide a benefit is utterly absurd. Our autonomy is perfectly compatible with our continued social ostracization and exploitation. It usually coexists with our continued social ostracization and exploitation.

In social skills classes– or just the wild, wild world– you are not taught how to deal with the fact that everyone will hate you for being you. You are taught to be someone else. You are not taught about your native autonomy. You are taught about how to put your hands here or here, how to choose between actions that are condescendingly and ridiculously normal. You are not taught how to take responsibility in a way you understand, that is harmonious to your own values and others’. You are taught to hold yourself accountable for your abnormality.

So forgive me if I do not believe for one second that impersonal, well-funded medical systems that were built off of medically experimenting on intersex children and adults (the nightmares wreaked by John Money at Johns Hopkins) or psychologically experimenting on behaviorally aberrant children (UCLA, where behaviorist torturer of autistic children Ivan Lovaas tinkered with gender nonconforming children alongside conversion therapist George Rekers) have autistic people’s self-defined well being in mind.

And forgive me if I do not think informed consent clinics have autistic people’s self-defined well-being in mind when they’re more interested in rubber stamping hormones while shielding themselves from legal liability than assisting autistic adolescents and adults, who have an intrinsically different way of understanding gendered social norms, navigate the enormous complexity of how to interface with the single most fundamental social fixation of the neurotypical world as someone who will always and automatically fail.

—–

3.

I do not think most gender clinicians even have the first understanding of what it means to be autistic and what this does in and of itself to your understanding of gender and sexuality. What J.K. Rowling said in her piece– a straightforward accounting of facts– is far, far less insulting to me than what Diane Ehrensaft– one of the premier “experts” in the United States on pediatric transgender cases– published in a peer-reviewed journal on autism. In a 2018 letter to the editor reading remarkably like new-age material on Indigo Children, she writes that she likes to call autistic transgender children “Double Helix Rainbow Kids” and declares us “freed” from the restrictions of gender as “more creative” individuals. This article ends with an anecdote about an eight year old autistic female child with limited language use who begins speaking, making eye contact, and relating more appropriately with clinic staff after she is socially transitioned by her family. Ehrensaft muses, ““Could gender be an alleviator for the stressors of autism?”

She is not the only one to pontificate about the magical changes a gender transition brings on autistic children. Norman Spack (the first clinician in the US to use GnRH agonists on gender dysphoric children as puberty-suppressing drugs) claims in a coauthored, peer-reviewed 2012 paper (insults upon insults, in the Journal of Homosexuality) that in his clinical experience the symptoms of comorbid diagnoses–including "problems with social competence”– “decrease and even disappear” with gender treatment. In the same paper, this passage appears:

Although the question of whether gender dysphoria is simply a symptom of an autism spectrum disorder has been raised by mental health clinicians in the field, we feel it is equally worth questioning the validity of an autism diagnosis among transgender youth, particularly of those diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder. Perhaps the social awkwardness and lack of peer relationships common among GID-Asperger’s patients is a result of a lifetime of feeling isolated and rejected; and maybe the unusual behavior patterns are simply a coping method for dealing with the anxiety and depression created from living in an “alien body,” as one patient described it.

Do autistic trans people– who rightfully protest against mainstream autism organizations focusing on a “cure” for autism rather than respectful accommodations for our differences and medical needs– know that very well-connected, very respected, and very powerful gender doctors are claiming that gender transition cures the symptoms of autism? Do autistic trans people– who rightfully discuss the implications of denying that someone can both be autistic and hold a meaningful gender variant identity– know that it is an active clinical debate as to whether or not their  disability and all its struggles is “just” a result of somehow ending up in the “wrong body”?

If they do not, they should know that this is how doctors are perceiving the pervasive issues that the children in their care are having: not as the result of a life-long, stigmatized but eminently livable disability, but as the result of a mystical gender failure that can be medically corrected. That essentially, the disability “goes away” so long as outsiders no longer perceive a problem with a child’s conformity to gender norms. That either an autistic girl somehow is transfigured into a non-autistic child through transition, or more likely, an autistic girl’s autistic behavior is unfitting for her as a girl but not for her as a boy. That the “proof” of pediatric transition’s effectiveness and standard of an autistic child’s happiness is how much the child wishes to participate in neurotypical society on neurotypical society’s terms.

I cannot pretend that this isn’t ludicrously disrespectful to autistic people, or that it isn’t a total erasure of our experience as human beings. To these gender doctors, the fact that a girl might see the world in a different way and care about different things and thereby struggle in a world not made for her does not matter whatsoever, except maybe as a tokenistic “journey” she can go on alongside her wonderfully progressive and affirming doctors. What “autism” is for them is a particularly severe and inconvenient social adjustment problem which can be forcibly corrected through body modifications, should an autistic child or adult rightly note that they can’t do gender right and this is causing problems for them. They are more interested– like in a long history of abusive and even deadly “treatments” for autism– in correcting the problem for them than for the autistic person. How convenient for neurotypical people both the gender incongruous behavior and the social noncompliance  goes away once you medically modify a child to look like the other sex.

I cannot be anything but sick that “increased eye contact” is a sign an autistic child needed medical meddling in the intimate process of navigating and negotiation their sexual and gender development. I cannot trust that these doctors aren’t missing enormous parts of their autistic patients’ experiences, if this is what they are so gleeful to report as a positive transformation and their justification for disrupting and surveilling children’s bodies. What do they think of autistic people and those who are gender non-conforming if they are so willing to believe that existing as a person with a stigmatized disability is actually just a misdiagnosis for the pseudoscientific condition of being a man in a woman’s body, or vice versa?

—– 

5.

It takes many, many years and quite a bit of luck and support for most autistic people to fully understand and come to terms with how their autism affects them and sets them apart from both individual neurotypical people and neurotypical society at large. It takes years– often far, far into adulthood, especially for those abused under a medical model or for those who went decades undiagnosed– to understand the differences between social and non-social aspects of this disability.

It takes years to not resort to chalking up all of your own distress and difficulties to being a “retard”.

I have not met an autistic woman yet who did not have extreme difficulty integrating her autistic differences in values with a broader sense of self that includes whatever version of herself she uses to navigate a world in which women’s values are simultaneously invisible (since she has no right to determine them herself) and nitpicked to death (since it is important she complies).

In a world like this why would it not be difficult for autistic people to know when it is they are being fooled or exploited while participating in transgender communities or while seeking transgender health care? Autistic people– especially those who are dependent on caregivers or health systems for basic care, as well as those who depend on the goodwill of their families, employers, or welfare benefit institutions to remain as independent as they can– have to make continual compromises just to maintain enough acceptability to communicate with the outside world nonetheless do things like “make a friend”, “go to the doctor”, “find a job”.

I do not think neurotypical people understand or care that when I speak or write it is always with a similar effort as with a second language. Language– whether it is verbal or nonverbal, with all the extensive symbology of the neurotypical world– does not ever get to be something other than “translation” for me. As someone with an Asperger’s-profile of abilities who has studied the neurotypical world intensely for years, I have the opportunity to translate in a way that allows others to understand me at least some of the time. Many autistic people who are more affected live in the world which gives “autism” its name, where nobody cares to do the translation for us and we are left totally and utterly alone.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (who, perhaps not coincidentally, was likely autistic) was fixated on questions about the meaning of communication. About whether a language of one could make any sense, about what it would mean to speak about something hidden from everyone else or perhaps even ourselves. In a famous passage debated vociferously, he wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”

Many have resolved the question posed by this statement by claiming that for fuck’s sake, a lion is a lion, and has nothing to say.

—–

6.

Gender transition appealed to me because it was cloaked in the farcical notion that there was some version of me and my body that could finally speak directly. I never quite understood the whole Adam and Eve story as an autistic child– just don’t eat it!– but if there truly were a serpent’s apple for autistic folks it would consist of this promise: that there was a world where the glass and the fog would dissolve, that we weren’t covered in a repulsive and bumbling slime made of our own desires to understand, that instead of our words and hands glancing off the skin of everyone around us we could do that magic everyone else could and hold someone’s heart in our hands. I was fooled because like many struggling autistic people, I wanted the problem to be me. Because then it was fixable. I would let them take my only body (which was such a sensory drag) to convert me into one of these blessed transponders that normal people were, receiving and sending all these messages like shooting stars blazing through the unimpeded vacuum of space. Without my femaleness and without the Difficulties That Should Not Be Named, I could send whatever message I wanted to whoever I wanted and it would be received, I could be gregarious, important, sexually compelling; my will and autonomy wouldn’t be stifled by 140 pounds of dumpy, itchy flesh with an overbite and slack hands.

When I imagined myself as a man I didn’t imagine myself like most of the childhood boys I managed to ingratiate myself with, who lisped, repeated themselves, and tripped over their own shoes. I imagined myself as a musician who was absolutely magnetic, I imagined myself as a writer with a legacy, I imagined myself telling other guys they were stupid shits and they could fuck off. I imagined being able to hold onto a football without dropping it, being able to smoke weed without getting a migraine, being able to talk without squeaking or letting out a little drool.

I thought I would finally be a human being with no embarrassments and nothing that could get me bullied in the bathroom between class. I thought when I would say “no”, other people would listen. I would enter whatever mystical world it is that Ehrensaft names, made of messages and meanings, where every twist of word and piece of clothing said something, connected by a fine filament back to that Necronomicon filled social symbology. And it would make sense.

I would become a lion, not a house cat. And the lion would speak. And we would understand him.

—–

7.

It is a neurotypical narrative that this is what transition can do for you, because it is what someone else’s transition does for neurotypical people. A gender transition is magical because it decodes the lion. It unriddles the sphinx. The autistic person must be happier now, because the neurotypical person is happier now. (And who has an empathy deficit?)

But if I have learned to be afraid of anything as an autistic person it is not my own neuroticism and fixations, but those of the so-called “normal people”. Forget double helix rainbows: being an autistic person is like your DNA is a converted school bus trundling through the world in spray-painted glory and the whole world has an HOA. I understand why autistic people who see themselves as transgender see “concern” as the busybody stupidity of the neurotypical world. They aren’t wrong. But it exists alongside other mundane and brutal busybody stupidities, such as grant funding, progressive saviorism, and psychiatric god-complexes.

To understand and resist what the neurotypical world communicates to us about our worth is not to protest back to them in their own language. I am an autistic woman and like many other autistic women I am tired of not only making myself more palatable but translating my existence into something intelligible to outsiders, who are both men and the non-autistic. Radical feminists miss one of these; trans activists and allies miss the other. But I am irrevocably othered from both.

When you are autistic you are taught only one symbolic structure. It is not your own, but it is the only medium you will ever have to communicate with any complexity. More sinisterly, it becomes the only medium we have to communicate to ourselves, the only medium we can use to work around the silent and jumbled parts of our bodies and minds. Am I hungry? It is not always obvious. To ask the question I find myself translating, even when alone.

My fantasy about lions and men was that whatever world a lion lived in and whatever he had to say, he did not need to translate, and especially never to himself. When a lion says something he does not stop to ask if he means what he says or who is saying it. When a lion looks into the water hole and sees his own reflection, he does not need to reconcile anything. The lion does not need to speak to understand himself. A lion is made of teeth and blood and claws and the lion just does.

I do not use the symbolism of transgenderism to explain the little gaps and incongruities that are my problems with gender, with my sexed body, with sexuality. It is not only a language born of neurotypical neuroses and regulation, but it is always and forever fundamentally a translation. As an autistic woman I have spent my whole life avoiding these dual facts, through both my time thinking of myself as trans and while trying to understand this whole thing afterwards: I am my body and I am not my body. Because I speak, but I do not understand. Because I understand, but I do not speak.

I will, unavoidably, always have to translate to speak and understand. But my autonomy requires that at bottom I must respect the native communication of my own body and mind. I refuse to use force or coercion to get it to talk, to interrupt its silence, to confabulate stories on its behalf, to speak for it using assumptions it cannot confirm or deny. I have to make peace with the fact that sometimes the blanks of my body or the redacted corners of my mind will say nothing. I have to make peace with the fact that translation is always inaccurate, that something is always beyond that constellation of symbols and words. The autistic body and the autistic mind have their own boundaries, and I refuse to believe that exercising my autonomy requires breaking them.

I do not know if J.K. Rowling knows this. I hope you do.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

I'm not trans. I'm just autistic. 

This will take some time to process.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

TL;DR: The trans are coming for goths. Goth men breaking sex stereotypes by growing their hair out and wearing makeup are “oppressing” M2Ts.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

A young alexithymic asks the world: “How do I know whether I am in love with someone?”

The world responds: “You’ll know it when you feel it.”

The alexithymic meticulously examines their feelings towards everyone in their life.

The alexithymic once again questions their sexuality.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

[instantkittenenthusiast]

Why have you become so against transition?

This one is going to be controversial. I’m not against transition in and of itself. I’ve been transitioning for three years. I don’t regret it, and I currently do not plan to detransition. I have decided against all lower surgery, but will seek out peri/key hole top surgery.

I just think that way transition is handled, at least in the US, is not actually helping dysphoric people. I think informed consent is medically irresponsible. Transition alone is not reliably a good treatment for dysphoria. I think part of the problem is we see dysphoria as one thing with one cause, so if you have it you’re automatically trans and will benefit from transition, but it’s not. It’s important people develop coping skills and work through underlying issues that are causing and making dysphoria worse. It’s also important that certain underlying causes are identified and ruled out. Like, transition is actually a pretty drastic treatment, especially when surgery gets involved. It turns someone into a life long patient, and has serious, permanent, and even unknown changes and consequences. It should really be more of a last resort than a first line treatment you can simply make an appt with a doctor and be on hormones a month later.

Like someone who develops sex dysphoria due to a combination of internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and trauma? Transition is not a good treatment for them. Rather than transition, they should see a therapist to work through their internalized prejudices and trauma, and develop coping skills. Transitioning in an attempt to escape oppression will only lead to more suffering via more oppression.

Or someone who “doesn’t feel fully female” because they hate gender roles and can’t conform them perfectly? Transition is not a good treatment for them either. They need to self reflect and understand that gender roles are oppressive, strict, and no one can fully conform to them. That gender roles are so deeply ingrained in our ideas of what it means to be a man and woman, that we see them as something innate to being male or female. That it’s normal to not feel woman enough because of that, and learn to embrace being a gender non conforming woman. She doesn’t need transition to fix her. She doesn’t need to change her body to fit in a box, she needs to learn to say fuck the boxes entirely and that she can be a woman without fitting in them.

Someone who can’t identify why they suffer dysphoria though? Someone who’s tried other, less drastic options? Someone who’s worked through underlying issues and still hasn’t seen a reduction in dysphoria that nets them an acceptable quality of life? Someone who continues to see a counselor, self reflect, and work on coping skills and underlying issues? Someone who can demonstrate they have realistic expectations and don’t see transition as a cure all for all their dysphoria or all their life problems? That’s when I feel transition is acceptable.

I’m just seeing too many people who transition and once the novelty wears off or the dysphoria wears off in one area due to changes, they fixate on something else. Like they get on HRT and get changes and pass, but then their chest dysphoria gets significantly worse. Then they get top surgery and then their genital dysphoria gets significantly worse. This is my speculation about why post op suicide rates are high. People run out of hope, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel to look forward to. They hype it up as the final thing that will fix their dysphoria and make their problems easier to deal with. But then the novelty wears off and… They still have depression, they still have trauma, they still hate their job, they still owe 5 grand on that accident, their car still needs to get fixed, they still need to take the cat to the vet, etc etc.

We tell each other this is normal, but is it really? Should it be? Transition is supposed to make our dysphoria significantly better, not worse or with little change. And overall, I see so many people where their quality of life doesn’t seem much better. Or like I have post op friends who got no psychological aftercare and little psychological care prior tell me their life is so much better now, but then why are you still suicidal all the time? Why are you still so depressed? Why do you still struggle to get work done and take care of yourself? Why do you still talk about how dysphoric you are over not being a “real man/woman”?

I expect to lose followers over this, but it just feels like the way we’re handling dysphoria and transition is just shifting it around for a lot of people, not reducing it. We tell each other that transition is the only way, you can’t work through dysphoria, therapy doesn’t help. I think it doesn’t help because we set ourselves up with that mindset and shut it out. We don’t put real effort into it.

TL;DR - What I’m saying is, transition alone will not fix you. You need to work through your shit and develop coping skills too if you want transition to actually improve your quality of life.

[instantkittenenthusiast]

Instant kitten enthusiast

These automatically generated usernames are cute. I think I’ll keep mine.