I’ve already posted elsewhere in this thread, but this just makes me so angry. Such a disproportionate number of trans-identifying people are young and on the spectrum. They get swept up in all of this and people on the Internet radicalize them.

For those who may not know, one of the hallmarks of ASD is a serious body/mind disconnect, along with accompanying motor skills issues. Pair that with social isolation and a strong tendency toward restrictive interests, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

These people are “egging” socially isolated teenagers by telling them that there is a perfectly reasonable, and curable, explanation for all of their difficulties. Here, if you just do this, everything will be fine! People won’t reject you anymore and you won’t feel like you’re stumbling around dealing with sensory overload in your clumsy body anymore!

With the boys, it becomes a porn thing to do with their restricted interest in anime. For the girls, it’s that they’ve been told all their life that the reason they’re on the spectrum is that they have an “extreme male brain,” and they feel this will solve that.

But then of course, after they go through all these painful treatments, everything’s still the same. Why? Because they’re effing autistic, that’s why. There’s no easy way out, it’s just a fact of life medical condition. But by then, they’re brainwashed and there’s also a sunk cost fallacy going on where they’ve had all these procedures and changed their names and everything. So they get super defensive about it (because they know deep down by now that this wasn’t the magical cure they were sold) and become the most insufferable TRAs on the Internet.

It just makes me so pissed off. I’m lucky I didn’t fall victim to this as a younger woman on the spectrum. Thank you for providing all these links, they’re very informative.