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Am I really the only one who sees an obvious link?
It's autism. Being on the autism spectrum is massively more common among people who are trans (particularly MTF in modern world). Likewise not understanding social cues and being generally weird exposes one to all sorts of issues (and then there's the combination of autism spectrum running in families and how that may affect the previous generation or two's behavior towards future victims...).
Also this being Aella's survey, it almost certainly has a massive self selection bias for people on the spectrum so that's a huge confounding factor.
The thing I don't understand about the autism/trans link is that in my mind autism is partly characterised by the kind of rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by things like having different kinds food on their plate touching, or a familiar TV show getting a new theme tune. But, somehow, they can overlook the incredibly simple, intuitive and natural definition of man vs woman. If anything I'd expect autists to be stubbornly sceptical of transgenderism's manipulation of the categories.
Never formally diagnosed so can't speak for proper autists, but sufficiently weird and isolated that I can throw my tuppence worth in here.
Back at puberty, I was very ignorant (these were the days before easily accessible information was everywhere and society was nowhere near as openly sex-soaked as now) and so it took me by surprise when my body started changing in ways I did not want! did not like! had not agreed to! So straight away that hits the "rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by change and unexpected, unexplained divergence from a familiar and accustomed situation/routine" buttons.
Second, suddenly all these limitations started popping up via my mother, mostly but not solely: "you can't do this thing you used to do before anymore now/you have to do that thing" and the only explanation, so far as I got one, was "well now you're a girl". But.... wasn't I a girl before? Why did these changes of "becoming a young woman" mean now all these new things I could not/had to do?
Third, I was never a 'girly girl' so never fit very well (physically or mentally, in what I was interested in) into the categories of "girls are like this". Take all those things on board and I was very much at times feeling "Gosh, it would be so much easier if I were a boy".
I grew out of that, eventually, but I can see how if nowadays there is the push for "kids can be trans! transgender is a thing that exists! make sure kids know all about all the options and don't restrict them to two sexes and one sexuality!" information and treatment, somebody who feels the way I did might conclude (because again, being on the spectrum, you go by your intelligence as your main strength and that is how you make decisions and once you convince yourself this is the right solution it's nearly impossible to budge) that they were indeed 'not the right gender'. Particularly for MtF getting the messaging that "wow, women have it so much easier in today's society, we are all forced to agree Women Are Wonderful, everything is set up for them".
If your body already feels alien to you, not really 'you' (that's your brain and your mind and your intelligence), and Science Has The Answer, then why not change to an easier model with clear(er) definitions that you can fit, simply by dressing this way, growing out your hair, wearing makeup, and taking medication to change the vehicle you have been saddled with? If you're already acting/masking to fit 'normie' perceptions, what's a bit more acting along with that?
"Girls become women" isn't hidden knowledge that autistic people are expected to infer from inexplicable social cues. It's not something arbitrary like code-switching how one should greet their betters vs their equals and how to discern which is which. Every child can see a world of little girls and little boys, and adult men and adult women, and the distinguishing factor between those groups is their age. QED.
Maybe it happens sooner than you were expecting, or would have preferred, and maybe it's attended by seemingly arbitrary and unfamiliar social expectations being placed on you, but a notion that you could escape the discomfort by becoming the opposite sex ought to be less plausible and less preferable than an alternative notion that you could somehow remain a child indefinitely.
When you are told "you can't do this because you are a girl", it is not unreasonable to think "so if I were a boy, I could do this? maybe things would be easier if I were a boy!"
See all the comments on here about how easy women have it in modern society which is set up to cater to their every whim. Someone any bit malleable might well think "so I can live my entire life on easy mode just by being a girl, and I'll get everything I want handed to me on a plate?"
It's normal to the point of triteness to think "if only things were different". It's the malleable aspect that rings false. It would make sense if they rejected gender as one more in the list of unintuitive things that society says you should conform to "just, like, because, okay?!". It seems highly uncharacteristic to whole heartedly accept an idea that a simple biological binary can be overruled if what to them is normally unintuitive society says that same binary is, you know, like, contingent on subjectivity.
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Just because you've developed rituals doesn't mean that they're correct or useful rituals, or even comprehensible to anyone else. Doesn't even have to be a full autism thing, the Smile Like You Mean It problem's well-enough known there to be diagnostically useful.
Sure, but autistic people being sympathetic to transgenderism is like if autistic people were the ones supporting fake smiles, or for replacing fake smiles with faker snarls. In comparison a non-binary or gender eliminationist stance would make sense.
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Transition is a natural extension of a rigid view of gender. "Men are strong and tough and physical and confident, I'm not any of those things, I must not be a man."
Autists are uncomfortable with grey areas that everyone understands intuitively, like that it is feminine to like makeup but that not liking makeup doesn't make one not a woman.
Except trans people act far more like their birth gender than their adopted gender. Autogynephilic trans women in particular usually led a ridiculously masculine life before transitioning (e.g. Bruce Jenner), and even trans women who are not good at sports and confidence still display typical male interests (programming, anime, porn, etc.).
Autogynephilic trans women are different from autistic trans women, and they present differently.
Yes, because they are fundamentally/originally autistic men. The autism both causes them to have autistic interests (programming, anime, porn, etc.), while also inducing or precipitating feeling of gender dysphoria, due to the aforementioned rigid thinking.
There's also the issue that in the interests of diversity, male interests with any status to them get portrayed as female interests. Programming is probably the biggest example of that (see Tron: Ares with a female programmer/CEO). So someone who programs and who can't sus out that the media is lying won't think "I have a male interest".
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I think there are plausibly several links: I've heard a fair number of anecdotes that FTM is associated with or similar to eating disorders in girls, which are also linked with sexual abuse. Not always, I'm sure, but the mechanic of "I don't want to be womanly and attractive (to abusers)" and body dysmorphia makes sense in a horrible way, and modern times offer new ways to limit your secondary sexual characteristics.
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typo correction is actually
btw.
...
I do think autism is very plausible as a root cause for the legit-trans people (as opposed to they/them attention seekers). I've had enough personal experience with autists and trans people to see the pattern. However, I'm not convinced it's the only root cause, or even the most root-y of the root causes. Given base rates, I suspect most of those non-cis respondents are nonbinary and non-autistic, rather than trans, and yet they still show the same patter re: reporting. I think "anxiety and depression" still functions better as the base-level causes, because I think it's when autism causes those things that it puts autists at risk, and that people with anxiety and depression but no autism have a similar risk profile to anxious depressed autists (while happy autists have a similar risk profile to happy regular people.)
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I'm quite convinced that a lot (discalaimer: not all) of those spectrum-y people, especially the FtMs, female asexuals, and non-attention-whore they/thems, are just kinda trusting and gullible and were groomed into the identity by the LGBTQXY recruitment drive, independent of any molestation.
Even the from-an-early age trans stuff makes me slightly doubtful, just because I once knew someone dumb who thought her 18-month-old might be trans because he didn't like wearing pants.
The problem is the way any expression of gender non-conformity gets lovebombed, when it should be neither encouraged nor discouraged.
'Scuse you, that is a Scientifically Validated method of identifying trans infants! An Expert Agrees!
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It seems impossible to imagine being groomed into any identity other than the default. Despite the feelings of the anti's out there the level of social pressure to be normal is fucking wild.
I'm not LGBT, I'm probably not even Q other than by the thinnest margin (I don't really care about my gender particularly and I don't seem to be as pathologically obsessed with getting my dick wet as the average guy) and even that is too much.
Let the level of push back/path dependent pressure to course correct the 0.5 rads I've deviated be designated as X: X < beating my woman with a closed fist BUT X > gently correcting with an open hand (This is a humorous exaggeration, please get off my back).
Shit is crazy, you have to experience it to believe it and you can only experience it by being authentically weird in some way; eg by being autistic. I'm just glad I wasn't born with a fragile ego or a limp spine, that shit could fuck you up easy if you let it/were susceptible.
I wonder how much of the pressure to conform one way or another really depends on your bubble. In a trad Cath or almost any red tribe group I've been exposed to or a part of, you're going to get pretty open social hostility. On the flip side, LGBT subcultures by definition involve make being LGBT, or whatever subset of it that particular group is of, the normal. Progressive groups IME tend to give a lot of social support verbally and signaling wise to LGBT people, but I'm unsure what the total experience of an LGBT person would be in there. I have a wife and kid now, but in college I had an addiction to gay porn that due to drunk hijinks was known by many, and some progressive friend groups tried to recruit me into their groups when previously they were uninterested. I imagine which bubbles you are exposed to, and we are all exposed to more than one, decides how much pressure you have to conform to cisheteronormativity (to use the academic phrase).
I'm less referring to personal pressure which is brownian, and more society in general.
Eg, even the most flagrant of the homos are out here fighting for ... the right to participate in the institution of marriage? Who could have predicted?
Anyone paying attention. The culture says that you are not a complete human without the picket fence and the kids, etc etc.
I think that's why the rejectionist tendency among all people is getting stronger over time; it's coming from the same place. The flaming LGBTQ types and the Incels and the Transhumanists and the fuentisimos and the revanchist communists are all reacting to social pressure to conform to a certain image or life path that for various reasons only has enough room for x = population % 10001 and everyone else can eat shit and die.
The first question I would have is: which society? This isn't a gotcha: it's fair to say that, essentially by the mid 20th century, the US did have a mainstream mono-culture which almost everyone interacted with consisting of big business, the government, mainstream media (not just news but things like Hollywood as well), and probably a few other things too. At the same time, you also had subcultures that had values opposing and/or orthogonal to that dominant culture. The Amish and gayborhoods being some examples. How much the values of the dominant culture dictate your life and community does very much depend on where you elect to wind up.
This is true to a large extent. While the modern mainstream has a more ambivalent relationship to those above groups then pure hostility, it's clear that tons of people were given expectations of what is the good life that, for varying reasons depending on the person, is out of reach for them. What makes this more dire on a personal level is really how much power the monoculture has over your life; if you're Amish, the monoculture has a limit affect on your lived experience but if you're an atomized modern, you're going to swimming against the river every time you wake up without a supportive community. When you have a bunch of people with mutually irreconcilable desires to change the monoculture, and the stakes are high for them since there is no subculture they can retreat to to compensate for any failures in the monoculture, conflict becomes nasty quickly.
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Weird kids can get really emotionally dependent on teachers and other school staff; one guidance councilor obsessed with egg-cracking can do a lot of damage. And I've seen the cloying lovey-doveyness that gets lavished on adult trans people secondhand; the extreme protective emotional reactions when a wokie thinks they spotted a transphobe. I've seen straight girls dating men in dresses because they were told not dating a trans person is transphobic. I know a few weird girls who dabbled in lesbianism or FtM, then left it later and suddenly lost all their friends for being a betrayer.
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The FtM’s are not, by and large, particularly interested in being male. They are interested in being not-female, so I wonder how much of the sexual assault link is driven by them specifically and how much is driven by stable two parent families producing both few assault victims and few gender weirdos.
A further question is how much of that is driven by genetics, ie. the same genes that increase the chance of FtM also decreasing the chance of starting a stable two parent family.
I mean, autism seems to reduce the odds of forming a stable nuclear family.
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Could be just because we've had at least a century or more of dysgenic population policy. We treat genetic capital like an infinite resource. Dysfuctional people dysfunction in many ways all at once. Infant mortality was load bearing, sadly.
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I honestly think there should be some kind of differentiation between trans people and autistic trans people.
Very much so, as I just wrote in another comment.
A cishet couple I know have a fancy multimonitor remote work setup and a large My Little Pony collection in their respective studies which I find funny for fitting stereotypes about men vs women so well. No points for guessing which room is closer to every MtF person I've ever known IRL or online (hint: it's not the one with the MLP collection).
Do you think the pony jar was a female creation? I would be surprised if among adults female MLP fans outnumber men.
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Having been a teenager during the bronie era, I thought you were trying to say that the man had both a multi-monitor setup and a my little pony collection. Also, IMO, multi monitor setups are highly popular in the workplace among both men and women, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me for a woman who works a computer-based job at home to have a multi-monitor setup for productivity.
That said, on the trans question, I’ve met trans women who struck me as masculine in their hobbies, some who struck me as more autistic than anything else, and some who struck me very feminine in a stereotypical sense, like being a reader of romance novels or having strong opinions about makeup in the way only women and guys like James Charles do. If some fraction of gay men are feminine, like gay hairdressers, it doesn’t beggar belief that some trans women would be, too.
Having grown up in a very red part of the US, I’d say that trans women from rural or conservative environments often seem much more invested in femininity than trans women from the coasts, which may speak to the level of dysphoria or femininity a person needs to reach in that kind of environment before taking the social risk of transitioning.
As magicalkittycat says, this type of person is rare, very rare, and my very loose outsider’s impression is that they’re happy to ally with the more flamboyant elements of the trans coalition or the broader the LGBT coalition because of strength in numbers, while privately being more reserved and actually rather conventional, if you get to know them.
Ah. I keep forgetting you people are all still a bunch of kids... (shakes fist at cloud mumbling about lawn)
No, I'm talking about the original 80s MLP. The one with absolutely zero male fanbase at the time, at least around here, but loved by five year old girls who also loved being princesses and dressing in pink.
Yeah, but how many (non-autist) women build a man cave around them and approach them with the same piety and tech enthusiasm as hardcore gamers approach building the ultimate gaming rig?
I'm not disputing the existence of feminine trans women at all. I'm saying that the autistic / hardcore-nerd-male-until-ackshually-I'm-a-women MtF are a different population that should not be grouped with "normal" trans women for any analysis because their behavior and "origin stories" will differ so significantly and result in any data being a complete mess. If anything, the gay men I know have more balanced feminine interests and are pretty much what you'd expect from non-autistic men who don't have to care about fitting masculine stereotypes and couldn't give a damn about whether women find them attractive or not.
Ohh, that era…
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