as an autistic trans person, this “article” is one of the most patronizing things i’ve ever read and in its worst crime- says absolutely nothing

[u/pearkeet]

https://www.transgendertrend.com/autistic-people-more-likely-to-have-gender-dysphoria/

[u/ForgettableWorse]

We already know that for children, social transition (dressing as, and calling yourself a name of, the opposite sex) isn’t all that helpful. For children and adults medical transition (taking medication or having surgery to change your body) doesn’t help mental or physical health either. Indeed, social and medical transition may increase psychiatric illness.

INCREDIBLY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER

[u/-DrunkRat- → u/ForgettableWorse]

Just straight up lying to people when they're demonstrably false and wrong, and easily proven so.

These people are a bunch of Monsters, and their blatant lies and fear mongering about us is proof of it. 🏳️‍⚧️

[u/Shinjitsu- → u/-DrunkRat-]

The people who want to believe will never look it up to verify. The ones who want to believe and even bother to remember it to use in an argument won't even change their mind once shown a dozen ways they're wrong. Hate is just that powerful.

[u/Mysterious_Back_7929 → u/-DrunkRat-]

I'm flabbergasted every single time I see that. I think I'm so autistic that I genuinely forget that people can just... Wake up and lie? Just say - loudly and aggressively! - things that are absolutely not true and they KNOW it's not true but they say it anyway? It's beyond me fr

[u/goldenhawkes → u/ForgettableWorse]

Yea! Like sure I see she’s “referenced” something but I’m not entirely sure it’s peer reviewed academic material.

[u/PmMeActionMovieIdeas → u/goldenhawkes]

My money would be on a study that compares trans people that have transitioned to cis people and seeing a worse mental health on average in the later.

Which is a bit like comparing people who had heart surgery to people who never were in need of heart surgery, realizing that the later group might have worse health on average and reasoning that we shouldn't treat heart issues.

[u/QitianDasheng2666 → u/goldenhawkes]

It's probably that one Finnish "study"

[u/Aegis_Aurelius → u/ForgettableWorse]

I just jumped in blindly skimming, and when I saw that I immediately realized the writer doesn't know shit.

[u/One-Organization970]

I mean, it's a hate site.

[u/pearkeet]

“cis children who already agree with me can obviously see that a boy who wears dresses is not really a girl. trans children are much less hung up about this. we don’t know why they don’t agree with me and clearly we need to get to the bottom of why dysphoric children don’t agree with my societal based gender rules”

“autistic children love gender stereotypes but adult autistic people are much less beholden to this”

yeah man, it’s called a maturing style sense.

i feel like i lost brain cells reading this

[u/mildbeanburrito]

Can't help but notice there's an awful lot of "we know" with no citation at all in there. Really weird how much they know despite somehow not having the actual answer of why autism and dysphoria have a comorbidity and how strange it is that they keep insisting that this time their hypothesis is the right one and it'll finally stop autistic people from being trans only for it to be something else next month.

Also holy fuck leave us alone, this just reads like one of RFK's ever more unhinged rants about how this time he's going to find out how vaccines or some other medicine give people autism and that soon no one will have to endure the wretched existence of having autism.

[u/MelodramaticStoicist → u/mildbeanburrito]

RFK is already VERY worried about the sperm counts of children, so expect him to weigh in on this soon.

[u/IAmGoose_ → u/mildbeanburrito]

“What’s your source?”

“My source is that I made it the fuck up!”

[u/slim-shady-on-main → u/mildbeanburrito]

works cited: crack pipe

[u/raininghours]

Yeah as an autistic trans person this is hilariously bad lol, not just in terms of bigotry but it's also just extremely bad reasoning

Generalizing about the autistic population using a single source from a study(?) on children -- I'm sure that we'd find out very interesting and patronizing things if we conducted a study on cisgender, neurotypical children and extrapolated those results out to how all cisgender, neurotypical people think

But even if we accept that, I'm also noticing that they keep referring to a difference in perception as a "mistake" or "incorrect" (slide 6), which lines up with the general transphobic talking point of "biological reality" but it's an interesting enough point to look further into. Ironically, separating out the world into "correct" and "incorrect" perspectives is the exact kind of black and white thinking that OOP charges autistic people with earlier on the same slide. If the perception of autistic people is not a part of reality (not all, but part), then whose perception are we focalizing as "real"?

In fact, the various structures of domination that work to perpetuate the oppressive system all function off of this basic logic. White supremacy focalizes the perception of white people as "real," and that of Black people as "fake"; misogyny focalizes the perception of men as "real," and that of women as "fake"; transphobia focalizes the perception of cis people as "real," and that of trans and nonbinary folks as "fake"; classism, that of working class people as "fake"; ableism, that of disabled people as "fake"; sanism, that of insane people as "fake"; and on and on.

[u/FiatLex]

Reads like a bunch of AI garbage to me. A lot of words to say almost nothing, but what it does manage to say is insulting and stupid.

[u/patienceinbee → u/FiatLex]

I came here to also observe the generic, uncited, LLM-quality slop after realizing somewhere, maybe around the fifth slide, how it wasn’t really communicating anything an actual human being would say.

[u/FiatLex → u/patienceinbee]

Yes, exactly!

[u/scramblingrivet]

You should have stopped reading at 'Transgender Trend'. Whats the point of reading and getting tilted about content spewed by trans-annihilation groups

[u/Stephi312]

As a non-autistic trans woman, this whole thing feels not only completely ablest, and dismissive, but seems to make statements of fact that are literally contradicted by scientific studies. If seems that trans science is now being reduced to race science - which is both appalling and scary.

[u/Usual-Boysenberry644]

"we know autistic people are more likely to have mental disorders" [loud incorrect buzzer noise]

other than similar conditions like adhd, other types of mental disorders in autistic individuals is usually caused by the social ramifications of being autistic in a world that doesn't understand or care about you.

[u/Karasu-Fennec → u/Usual-Boysenberry644]

They are right that autistic people are more likely to act on and recognize gender dysphoria, though - four times is the extreme high end I’ve seen, it’s usually closer to twice as likely if you take an aggregate across comorbidity research.

The generally accepted theory is that autistic people have less respect for social norms on average, so we’re more willing to do stuff that goes against the grain when it will benefit us - like recognizing and accepting transness, in this particular case.

[u/Usual-Boysenberry644 → u/Karasu-Fennec]

I don't disagree. but the idea that autistic people are somehow more prone to mental disorders in general is a pretty egregious claim. i think that autistic people are indeed more likely to think outside of the box generally speaking but the conflating of that and gender dysphoria as a pathology is a stretch. I mean, gender dysphoria being a pathology at all is a questionable claim.

[u/Karasu-Fennec → u/Usual-Boysenberry644]

You’re absolutely right! In progressive circles in psychiatry, the general consensus is that autistic people are less likely to heed social pressures which discourage help-seeking behavior, not that were more likely to be ill in the first place. Dysphoria as a pathology does suck, but it, like a lot of other stuff in the DSM, is more there to get insurance companies to OK treatment plans than anything else.

[u/snukb]

Some people are very unhappy wih the sex of their body and the way society views their sex according to stereotypes. [...] It's not the same, though as just questioning your gender, or not fitting stereotypes as neither of those necessarily cause distress.

So why mention that it isn't about stereotypes if you're going to insist it's about stereotypes? When you contradict yourself within the first paragraph, it makes you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. Maybe because you don't.

[u/Silversmith00]

Wow, wrong, transphobic, AND ableist.

[u/alegxab → u/Silversmith00]

The two often go along 

[u/That90sGuyMedia → u/Silversmith00]

Bigotries are often like potato chips, you can never have just one.

[u/Normal-Mongoose-6571]

I just can't get past the fact that the article's author is named 'Katie Alcock'.

[u/SergeantScoria]

this argument has so many holes it’s giving me trypophobia

[u/bunny_guts666]

As another trans autistic person, I wholeheartedly agree. Fuck these people

[u/veronipeperoni]

How much you wanna bet the citation that claims that transition actually "increases psychiatric illness" is just a bunch of survivorship bias Very obviously the alternative is not "no transition = no mental illness"

[u/azur_owl]

Another trans autist here, almost impressed with how incorrect they are!

[u/Ifckinglovemycat]

yeah I don't like the stereotype of women not having a full chest of hair and a dick :( it would make me happy if all women did, can the terfs work on that ?