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A high number of FTMs I've known have at least stated they're autistic. While autism among the female sex is controversial, I suspect they're correct. I have no data for this, but I think the two greatest risk factors for FTM transitioning are 1) autism and 2) PCOS. I have a friend with PCOS who is a huge fan of Abigail Shirer, and believes that a great number of FTM transitioners are women with the same syndrome -- which is caused by abnormally and dangerously high levels of testosterone in women -- who feel like the symptoms of the condition like male-pattern hair growth and irregular periods make them less of a woman and therefore seek to embrace them as part of their "true self."
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
Actual bona-fide gender dysphoria obviously plays its role, although I wonder sometimes if much of it isn't so much active identification with the preferred sex and more a feeling of alienation and incapability to be accepted as a member of their birth sex that emerges into body image issues. That would make it something that social contagion can affect, much as anorexia can take even subtle (or not so subtle) social cues towards physical fitness and thinness and transmute them like a witch into an inability (Edit: originally there was a typo here that was "anability", which is an uncomfortably good phrase to describe the perception problems of anorexia) to accurately perceive the body's actual thinness. Obviously not all cases, but I think transgenderism is a multi-factor phenomenon and this might be one of the factors.
People sometimes conceptualize transitioners as villains or attention-seekers, and sometimes they can be like that, but I strongly believe there's a wellspring of intense suffering that motivates it in many cases, even if we don't have to affirm every decision that someone who is suffering makes or even agree with their interpretation of their experience.
I don't think this is actually the correct reading of AGPs. Is there actually any reason to think that AGPs are more feminine than baseline?
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Yeah, that's part of the reason why I'm only assigning a 1-5% probability of this being true. I could come up with an argument along the lines of, "autistic women do better with men than schizoid women" but that has its own problems.
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