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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7198 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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They were a couple years into their transition. So my reaction was 1) of course it was Rust lol

You know what being MtF and a Rust enthusiast have in common?

It’s the goddamn autists at it again.

Yeah, I was thinking about the link between autism and transsexuality recently. (I almost prefer to use terms like "spergy" or "spergy personality traits" over "autistic", because I'm somewhat skeptical about the existence of autism as a legitimate diagnostic entity, and at any rate most of the people who call themselves "autistic" don't seem to me to have any serious diagnosable disorder; they just have personality traits that are outside of the norm, that's all. But I'll continue to use "autistic" to mean "people who generally have spergy personality traits, at any degree of severity".)

One thing I noticed from my admittedly limited sample of talking to autistic women is that their speech patterns and thought processes are very close to those of autistic men in many ways; they experience many of the same struggles as well (personal, social, etc). The gap between autistic men and autistic women is noticeably smaller than the gap between normal men and normal women. This got me to thinking that, if an intrinsic part of autism is a decreased desire/ability to express highly differentiated sexual behavior that would be typical of one's birth sex, then both autistic men and autistic women might be more likely to experience a less defined and more fluid sense of gender identity (almost like they got thrown into a "third gender" bucket together) and thus might be more likely to be drawn to transsexualism.

I don't think this is a complete explanation or anything; at the very least there's still something uniquely malebrained about the whole phenomenon of MTFism; but I still felt that it was worth noting.

I don't have strong opinions one way or other about how autistic men / women differ but I do feel very strongly that they're both absolutely massive confounders unless they're separated from the non-autists when it comes to behavioral questions, such as "what makes someone want to transition?"

Well I thought we were in agreement that autistic men were overrepresented among MTFs at least, and therefore it would be pertinent to analyze things from that angle.

There are of course non-autistic transitioners too.

Oh, I didn't mean to imply I disagree. Only that the way people generally approach trans issues is almost intentionally designed to avoid reaching meaningful conclusions because they don't separate autistic vs non-autistic transitioners.

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