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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

My mother's family is all autistic engineers. I and two of my cousins transitioned as teenagers, so I've had my own theories about this for years.

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I'd love to hear your theories if you'd be willing to share them.

I'm not the OC but many of my friends and peers are trans and I find "agender" to be the most useful descriptor to myself.

One thing I've noted is that once you start to identify the ways in which gender is fundamentally a social construct the link with autistic/neurodivergent folks makes much more sense. Anybody who struggles to instinctively navigate social norms and behaviors will also struggle to instinctively navigate gendered norms and behaviors, simply because the two are inextricable.

That pretty much describes my relationship with gender.

I was undiagnosed as a kid, gender was confusing, different standards were confusing. I just didn't care, among other reasons, I decided to transition.

Very happy, but still have an idea of how I would navigate things different... but that's life, right?

> Anybody who struggles to instinctively navigate social norms and behaviors will also struggle to instinctively navigate gendered norms and behaviors, simply because the two are inextricable.

But if masculine and feminine gender roles are equally difficult to navigate, that doesn't explain why transitioning would help. You'd just be swapping out one difficult gender role with another.

They may be "equally difficult to navigate" in a grand scheme of things, but they're probably not equally difficult for a particular person. Everyone got their own set of traits and interests that may make adhering to a particular gender role easier than the others.

So that would imply that non autistic people may also feel like their brains don't match their bodies, but since they're better at navigating gender roles, they're more likely to just adapt around the dysphoria instead of transitioning?

I think this is exactly right.

> But if masculine and feminine gender roles are equally difficult to navigate

Suicide rates are much higher among males. So maybe this assumption does not hold.

Suicide rates are higher for men, attempted suicide rates are higher for women. Men just tend to use more successful methods in their attempts.

Even within a given category of method of suicide, men are more successful. If you look at countries where gun suicides are pretty much nonexistent, men still "successfully" complete suicide at a rate approximately 10x that of women.

That should be taken as a sign that "suicide attempt" numbers shouldn't be taken at face value as evidence that women have it harder than men.

Maybe a neurotypical boy who is born with predominantly feminine traits gets them overridden by social learning, but without that mechanism they would persist.

Trans people in general were largely ignored by research until the 2010s, so there's very little we do know at this point.

But as for unresearched hunches...

There's lots of jokes in the trans community about how your stereotypical trans girl is on the autism spectrum, with rainbow-colored hair, and into kink, anime, and programming.

I think there's more of a willingness to challenge societal expectations of us in the neurodiverse community, and many of us feel uncomfortable with expectations placed on us around gender roles and sexuality. So I'm curious how much is a causal relationship, and how much of it is a willingness to reject societal expectations that seem irrational. I value my freedom a lot, and the expectations placed on me when I lived as a boy felt stifling and exhausting.

I can only speak to my personal experiences, and I don't believe in policing peoples' decisions to transition, but I have strong memories from as early as five of wanting to be a girl. I was very sensitive as a child. Typical autism-spectrum stuff like sensitivity to sounds, lights, and pain, but also an intense emotional empathy - I was a huge crybaby until my teens, and never felt like I fit in with guys my age or shared many interests with them. So when I found out that transitioning was an option, I pushed hard for it. It's possible that in today's age of greater gender freedoms I wouldn't have had as much reason to transition. But I just don't identify with the male experience at all, and have no desire to see my body masculinize more and more as I age. Also, I can wear so much more colorful and expressive clothes now :)

I think some people transition because they identify very strongly as the other gender, and others (particularly on the autism spectrum) identify outside of the gender binary, so they transition to better express that identity.

Interesting. What you describe about not fitting in etc. is very similar to my experience. Only that I’m a straight male. Could it be that transitioning is not so much about gender but about fitting in? If I could put a name to my angst and the barriers with others, it might be “transgender”. Which could give me a community of similar folks, a measure of acceptance, a handle, on why I’m not like the others. The research describes correlation, but maybe the causality is the other way around with “weird” people finding ways to cope with their being in a particular fashion?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I transitioned before I had met another tg person. When I transitioned I was already apart of a social group. I didn't need to fit in or find my place. When I was a kid I got along with both boys and girls making friends with both.

People do seek out others like themselves, but transgender communities are rare, because transgender people are rare. There are not many of them. When there are hundreds of people gossiping about transgendered people for every transgendered person it's easy for faulty information to be spread. There is a lot of misunderstandings about transgender people.

Interestingly enough in computer nerd communities, tg are more common then females.

Yeah, not fitting in is probably pretty common among introverted programmer types. But for me, feeling like I identified more as a girl was really what pulled me in that direction.

It had nothing to do with fitting in for me. It felt more like I already was a girl, but my body grew into the wrong direction. I just had to transition otherwise I didn't feel like myself, and now I do.

> ...and the expectations placed on me when I lived as a boy felt stifling and exhausting

I don't find that as extremely as you've given it here, but I do know what you mean and I'm a bog-standard cis male. But I never fitted in, never understood the blokey stuff - or maybe I did, but blokes take their nature (which are different from women, no doubt) and then push it to extremes[0] (you like to go out? Great! We must drink whether you like it or not! Maybe you like footy? OK, let's get extreme and tribal about it! But that brightly coloured thing you're wearing makes you look like a poof by the way).

I never fitted in and it can wear you down. As a straight guy I find the company of gays quite fine because they are more accepting.

edit: [0] this seems more prevalent in younger males. As we age, we become less so and more thoughtful, and therefore tolerant.

>I just don't identify with the male experience at all

this is a big part of it imo, your stereotypical effeminate depressed autist has virtually no connection to traditional cultural overtures of masculinity except in the body they inhabit and it's very easy to reach a point where it feels like that body is working against you.

> also an intense emotional empathy

I've read people saying this before, but DSM-5 299.00 (F84.0) for ASD suggests the complete opposite. So where do you get this description as a trait for ASD?

Is it not seen as societally acceptable in the States to wear colorful clothes as a male teenager/adolescent? I know I grew up in the ‘90s (in Europe) and as a kid I knew I liked colorful shirts (red, yellow) well into my mid-teens, I didn’t see them as male or non-male. The only comment I received about the color of a thing I own happened relatively recently (I’m almost 40 now), as one of my aunts remarked that my car is “girlish” because of its color (red). I found that strange and an interesting sociological input, but nothing more.

> Is it not seen as societally acceptable in the States to wear colorful clothes as a male teenager/adolescent?

Anecdote: I visited the US last year and happened to be invited by a friend to a climbing gym in the bay area. Said friend wore a shirt that was pink/purple. I was there for two hours or so.

In this time he got two comments about the color, jokingly painting a picture of him as being gay.

In New York City you can literally wear anything and no one will say a word or acknowledge your existence as a human being.

But I also knew a boy from rural Texas who was regularly harassed and beaten growing up because he wore athletic clothes (Adidas track suits) instead of cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats.

I grew up in the 90s in rural Texas and never owned western attire and was just fine. Your friend is overstating the role of clothing in his experience I suspect.

He was college age by the 90s. I’m fairly confident you grew up in different towns, also.

It is a big country, which is the point of the retelling. (Not intending to throw shade on Texas)

Anecdotally speaking, not just in their teens. (Certain coastal pockets excluded).

I once overheard an American (M, 30s) visiting Europe commenting on European men wearing coloured trousers (red, orange, turquoise, etc).

You’ll also find colours of outdoor clothing in the US to be more muted, or the overly garish ones in fewer numbers.

On that note, men in tights without over-shorts is increasingly common in my parts of Europe. And nobody here gives me shit for wearing pink.

I thought about something like this in a more broader spectrum.

Also completely judgment free, if not even with a little bit of envy.

Do you know people who have strong hobbies? Like not just building sometimes a lego set but having a basement full of it, sorted etc. Only doing this for a long time as well.

Or people who dress very strongly: Punks, Certain Type of homosexual people,Hippies, Antifa, Nazis.

I was and still not sure what my thing is and i have the feeling that i'm going thorugh my life looking a little bit left, a little bit right. Hardcore fetishes don't bother me but don't have an appeal that i would do it. Wearing stuff like artsy stuff is entertaining to look at but i wouldn't put the effort into it.

But what is the difference to those people who get stuck? Yeah thats what i call it basically. Stuck people. They have been Antifa for 20 years. They go to work, don't throw in window but still a little bit alternative. More extreme, more passionate about those kind of things perhaps?

I'm not an expert at all in Transgen etc. and yes i personally from my simplified worldview, i would probably not risk an op if i would feel different. I would perhaps (and of course i don't know that) just sit it out?

When i see Transgen people on hacker events, they created a subculture.

I'm a nerd but i always wanted to play with all the other 'normal' kids and a subculture is effort and perhaps group thinking and group pressure.

And on the other side, they have their crazy cool lego sets, and train models and are experts in a niche. They know exactly what they will do for the rest of their lives. I will continue to look left and right and just continue.

I would love to understand more what type of shades are out there and why.

> and into kink, anime, and programming.

The anime one is an interesting example, because I've seen the perspective in the anime community is that trans people are also disproportionately common there, similar to your mention that anime is an interest that is disproportionately common among trans communities.

The common brightly coloured hair seems to come from the fact that society is not fully accepting of trans people and depending on the level of that in your social circles, it may feel like you need to break a taboo just to be yourself, so other social expectations (like modest hair colours) are also downgraded in importance.

>other social expectations (like modest hair colours) are also downgraded in importance

The old school "goth" style, well that was breaking the social clothing/makeup etc conventions. Rebelling against the norms. But there would be a group of 5 people doing the exact same thing, rebelling in the same way, and bonding together over it.

I'm not sure to what extent it generalises to the above, but just a thing that was commonly observable

not op, but i think that western gender roles are a scam. i'm not suggesting that there aren't differences between biological sexes, but gender != sex and the false idea that there are only two ways to express your gender is quite limiting.

And eastern gender roles aren't? Is there something I don't know?

'Western' in this context presumably means the binary model of man/woman dominant in the West (e.g., Europe, North America) and gradually exported to be the default worldwide (via colonisation and later cultural exports).

There have been, and are, exceptions to this model in what might broadly be called 'the East'. Think of the Hijra on the Indian subcontinent, or the Kathoey (Ladyboys) in Thailand.

Thanks. Still I think to call binary genders western is a bit revisionist at best. It has been the most dominant model worldwide for a really long time.

Being from India, I'd like to point out that these groups of people you are talking about actually reinforce a gender binary rather than muddling it. Hijra are men who take on all the societal roles of women. They aren't "non-binary" or some "third" gender at all. They espouse and exude femininity, and in India there are two modes of being in society: feminine and masculine. Hijra do not add a third way of being that is separate from both masculinity and femininity.

I'd also argue that their existence is not a proof that Indians have different ideas about gender than Westerners. They are a marginalized people because most of Indian society thinks it is odd / unfortunate / a disorder to be a man and yet want to be socially a woman.

It isn't Western to have two gender roles in society. Men and women are different in lots of ways and it's valuable to society to reinforce differences between the two for the sake of procreation.

Making a claim about the culture one is familiar with does not exclude that the same might be true in other cultures.

Not OP, but I fancy this rough theory:

According to armchair psychologists and a joke, the answer to every psychological question is 'your mother'.

If you look at ways to deal with conflicts [1], it could be that being transgender is a form of dealing with inner conflicts.

Being autistic means that there is some distortion (no judgement intended) in the relationship to other people. The distortion most likely originates from the first relationship, i.e. the relationship to the mother. Since there is a need for a fulfilled relationship, it will be fulfilled by one way or another. If e.g. the mother is absent, then the mind looks for another way to fulfil it.

One way for fulfilment is becoming the desired object itself. So, to bring it to a point: Autism can origin from an absent mother. One way to replace the need for a mother is becoming a female object for others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism

I think you're overthinking it :) Trans people I know just feel wrong in their bodies. It looks wrong, it feels wrong. There seems no need to suppose it was right at first then got distorted by relationship problems to the point you want your male genitals removed (I know a tgirl who is waiting for that).

You’re not allowed to say it, apparently, but there is/was evidence that it can be acquired: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/brown-university-cri...

The paper that article references was discredited for being bad science, not because of any kind of agenda. They collected their 'data' by surveying parents on online forums - most of them explicitly anti-trans / 'gender critical' - instead of from transgender youth or medical professionals.

To expand on this a bit, the paper can be found at [0] and a notice of republication can be found at [1].

The study's "Methods" section reads in part:

> For this descriptive, exploratory study, recruitment information with a link to a 90-question survey, consisting of multiple-choice, Likert-type and open-ended questions was placed on three websites where parents had reported sudden or rapid onsets of gender dysphoria occurring in their teen or young adult children. The study’s eligibility criteria included parental response that their child had a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria and parental indication that their child’s gender dysphoria began during or after puberty. To maximize the chances of finding cases meeting eligibility criteria, the three websites (4thwavenow, transgender trend, and youthtranscriticalprofessionals) were selected for targeted recruitment. Website moderators and potential participants were encouraged to share the recruitment information and link to the survey with any individuals or communities that they thought might include eligible participants to expand the reach of the project through snowball sampling techniques.

The online forums surveyed were:

- 4thwavenow, which describes itself as "A community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth"

- transgender trend, whose opening paragraph states "This site is for everyone who is concerned about the social and medical ‘transition’ of children, the introduction of ‘gender identity’ teaching into schools and new policies and legislation based on subjective ideas of ‘gender’ rather than the biological reality of sex."

- youthtranscriticalprofessionals, whose site appears to be defunct at this time.

[0]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I'd pursue a different avenue honestly. Autism as I understand it is a difference in brain development, it is not something you can cause by wanting.

Your same logic has previously been tried on gay men too varying levels of insistence, it hasn't stuck yet.

Autistic people somewhat commonly experience Alexithymia, which is an inability to understand their own feelings. The common example is an autistic person chronically dehydrated because they cannot identify their own sensation of thirst. Emotions are also physical sensations.

I think a much more promising angle is to look at incidence of Alexithymia and gender dysphoria.

One hypothesis is that disbalance of 'gender-related' hormones during fetal development is a factor that can cause not only gender dysphoria but also autism / Asperger's spectrum related issues.

You shouldn’t be allowed to use transitioned unless there is literal gene replacement happening.

In HN's context, this and your other posts in the thread constitute flamebait—that is, inflammatory and unsubstantive. You're violating these two guidelines:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Eschew flamebait."

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules, we'd be grateful.

It’s a clear disagreement and not “bait”. But yes, I get it.

Let's discuss.

You see male/female as being genetic therefore effectively unalterable, therefore the label of male/female cannot be changed.

I am comfortable with the idea that if a person wishes to be seen in a particular way that I do so. Actual example: a couple I know were F/F when I first met them. Now one prefers to use a male name and be referred to as 'he'. Took a bit of adjusting to, ok.

Now genetically one thing, but socially speaking another, isn't it just polite to make them feel comfortable? Would you call them 'her' to their face, knowing how it could upset them?

(not parent)

>Would you call them 'her' to their face, knowing how it could upset them?

Maybe, maybe not. What I don't want to do however is keep track of everyones imaginary genders, and face legal repercussions for "misgendering" them.

Here's an interesting search to look through: https://duck.com/?q=illegal+misgendering

When they have become what they want, they quite well look male/female so you don't have to remember anything. Indeed, you'd have to make an effort to get it wrong.

If they are transitioning they're very forgiving of genuine mistakes.

Your links don't support your position - did you read them yourself?

"Good News: Law Penalizing “Misgendering” with Hefty Fine and/or Jail Time being Legally Challenged" (california)

"Misgendering is not a crime and not a hate-crime, no. However, it can be a hate-crime if done in combination with another criminal offence, which suggests that the offender is motivated by a hatred for transgender people." (UK)

"California health care workers who “willfully and repeatedly” decline to use a senior transgender patient's “preferred name or pronouns” could face punishments ranging from a fine to jail time under a newly signed law." (california)

so as you see it's mostly about intent.

I don't think you actually know any TG people.

>Your links don't support your position

My position is that it's stupid, and I was illustrating that there are forces that want to make it illegal. And they have succeeded in some places. The Canadian Bill C16 is one example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Act_to_amend_the_Canadian_H...

>I don't think you actually know any TG people.

And I think you have no basis for making that assumption. You are wrong.

> there are forces that want to make it illegal

Yep, in the context of a hate crime. Not standalone. Seems reasonable.

I don't think you read the link you posted. To quote from it

" Speaking for the [Canadian Bar Association], the President, [...] made explicit the protections for transgender people which were already contained in the prohibition on discrimination based on sexual orientation; and did not pose any risk to freedom of expression"

So it's about discrimination, and freedom of expression is not affected. Further

"Peterson argued that the law would classify the failure to use preferred pronouns of transgender people as hate speech. According to legal experts, including law professors Brenda Cossman of the University of Toronto and Kyle Kirkup of the University of Ottawa, not using preferred pronouns would not meet legal standards for hate speech"

So getting him/her wrong is not hate speech, so... problem?

What I'm getting from you is anger+fear, and what I'm not getting is why treating TGs decently bother you so much.

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Tricky for me to understand that, @DanG. There was zero flaming on my side - that I can see - and not much on his, just an opinion I truly can't understand but think I need to.

He posted honestly, I posted honestly in response factually and no shouting. So I don't get it.

Indeed. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to documenting instances of people being arrested because of the travesty of justice that is Bill C16: check out https://reddit.com/r/ArrestedCanadaBillC16

OMG this might or might not be worse than I could have imagined. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.