terfs keep mentioning the % of autistics who are trans/nb and that we're 'brainwashed'
and because i'm an asshole, i decided to look into why so many autistic folks are trans/nb. it's not an inaccurate statement, at least the first half, but terfs lie through their teeth so i decided to get to the scientific root of it.
the answer blew my fucking mind.
the study on gender and autism i found said two very specific things about autistic people: we are more mentally resistant to things like social conditioning and binarism. we like our secret third things, y'know.
an excerpt:
“The finding that non-binary identities are most elevated seems to support hypotheses focussed on autistic resistance to social conditioning, which are consistent with existing evidence of the same effect with respect to self-description of sexual orientation. Perhaps elevated rates of trans identity in autism might result from a rejection of the binary cisgenderist norm, which combined with a below-typical concern for social norms could promote the disclosure of the identity.”
94% of autistics surveyed for that paper identified themselves as non-binary.
other studies have found autistic people have higher levels of critical thinking, and require more evidence to maintain or convert to a belief system (hence why many of us eventually fall away from religion) than allistic people.
which means, at least from my perspective, that:
a) the 'brainwashing' terfs are accusing the trans community of inflicting on autistic folks would likely not even work if they tried.
b) the current binary definition of gender flies directly against embedded autistic modes of thinking to begin with.
you cannot brainwash someone into thinking something they already believe.
As an autistic person with a weird gender this lines up with my personal observation, which is that autistic people are not really prone to follow social norms that don't make sense to them or provide them with any benefits just because.
There is an immense amount of cis allistic anxiety about this, because they like to think adhering to the gender binary is in the same natural-law category as "don't kill someone for pissing you off" or whatever, and it completely isn't, and our collective refusal to play ball makes something in them angry.
The typical allistic reaction to autists behaving unusually is to insist on controlling them, or treat their social "failures" as deficits of parental, workplace, partner, state, societal control. The idea that autistic people are "brainwashed" into being trans and nonbinary is in fact projection by people who want to brainwash autistic people to follow their stupid fucking rules, and are existentially terrified that they can't seem to get it to work
ok I can't summarize the situation because it's really confusing itself, but I'm on a high school theater team and it's /small/, I mean like we're lucky to have a 7 person production. I've been on the team since freshman year and every show I've been in I've had minor roles/side characters who end up off stage for at least 60% of the show (one show where I came on twice. for about 3 or 5 minutes.). we had auditions for a show last fall and I really wanted the role of a character named emma, she fit the casting the director usually does for me (cries & yells a lot). we get to table read and a girl, we'll call vonda, who I don't really like got the role. I was a little upset but went along with it because dropping a show because you didn't get a role you wanted is super shitty!
fast forward a month or so, we're almost done with rehearsals, and me, vonda, & her girlfriend at the time we're chatting about something that related to our director being kinda bad and/or our robotics team not distributing work evenly. whatever it was, I decided to mention that before table read, I wanted vondas role because I get so many minor roles in shows I felt like I wasn't really being given the same opportunity as all the actors who had gotten major roles in the past. vonda started yelling at me for "thinking I was better than her" and telling me I never shut up. I ended up apologizing for insinuating that I thought I could do hee role better, but that's not what I meant by that. she didn't let me finish my apology before telling me I'm a dick. so. am I the asshole?
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