#transx discourse

[sophieinwonderland]

Alright, y'know what? I'll bite. You cannot be transautistic. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that not only causes behavioral issues but also other physical setbacks, including digestive issues, sleep disturbances and sensitivity to stimuli. There are specific differences in an autistic brain that vary from neurotypical brains that you will never, ever achieve, no matter how hard you try. I don't know why you would want to live with a disorder that actively makes it so you have to puppet-show yourself through social situations because NTs don't understand that autistic people struggle with picking up on social cues and with masking because if they even try to be themselves, they're shunned. Autism, especially the higher needs you get, is very difficult to live with. You cannot transition into a neurodevelopmental disorder you do not have for whatever reason. Whether it's for the 'aesthetic', because you 'feel' autistic, you already have 'physical' autism or whatever. All the reasons why someone might 'identify' as transautistic are null and void. You can either be autistic or you can be not autistic. By identifying as 'transautistic', you are actively harming people who actually have autism by: - invalidating their experience as autistic by making it seem like it's pleasant to have/an aesthetic - invalidating their experience by showing you do NOT take it seriously - invalidating their experience by allowing bigoted neurotypicals to accuse actually autistic people of faking it or being 'transautistic' and therefore pushing their progress back on research and receiving help and support for their condition

I'm sorry if the reason you're 'identifying' as 'transautistic' is because of some kind of trauma. I get it. But you cannot be 'transautistic'. It is inherently harmful to actual autistic people. If you're experiencing atypical dysphoria, that's different and worthy of receiving help for. We support people with atypical dysphoria. We do not support the faking or romanticization of autism.

This is beside the point, but aren't a lot of those physical issues you listed things that are just caused by normal stress? The digestive issue, sleep disturbances, etc?

Anyway, to your point...

I don't know why you would want to live with a disorder that actively makes it so you have to puppet-show yourself through social situations because NTs don't understand that autistic people struggle with picking up on social cues and with masking because if they even try to be themselves, they're shunned.

I don't know why people with BIID would want to remove their limbs.

That doesn't make these feelings any less real though.

There's a mistake I think people make a lot where they assume that the brain and its wants and desires inherently have to be rational. The truth is that human beings are rarely rational actors.

Personally, I agree that ASD is neurodevelopmental disorder and that you can't actually transition into having it in the same way you can transition to a new gender.

At the same time, I feel like the alleged harm is largely overblown.

- invalidating their experience as autistic by making it seem like it's pleasant to have/an aesthetic - invalidating their experience by showing you do NOT take it seriously

This comes down to the mentality of the individual.

Look, we're autistic. Our autism causes us a lot of problems in life.

But it also gives us a unique perspective of the world, and we wouldn't be who we are if we weren't autistic. While there are some things about ourselves that I wish we could change, I don't wish we weren't autistic.

Putting aside that dysphoria is often not something people choose to experience, I personally wouldn't have an issue with with neurotypicals who looked at the pros and cons, and wanted to be autistic like us. I think that would be pretty cool.

Feeling invalidated by this is a personal matter.

This is also the same exact logic I've seen used by TERFs, transmeds and sysmeds alike to try to argue that it's bad to want to be a woman/transgender/plural.

"You want to be like us but haven't experienced the pain we did so it makes us feel bad."

And I mean, this sort of emotion is valid in its own way... but that doesn't make it rational.

And to me, it feels more like self-inflicted harm, where a person's own outlook is what's actually responsible for the distress, rather than the actions of others.

- invalidating their experience by allowing bigoted neurotypicals to accuse actually autistic people of faking it or being 'transautistic' and therefore pushing their progress back on research and receiving help and support for their condition

As someone who regularly stalks r/fakedisordercringe to screenshot and use them as content on my blog, I've never seen them actually fakeclaim people by calling them transautistic.

I don't think this is a thing that actually happens.

If someone is going to accuse you of faking, you're far more likely to get accused Munchausen's.

Which, by the way, has been happening for a LONG time.

I just don't see an uptick in fakeclaiming of disorders related to transabled people

...

And since I mentioned TERFs, they also have been making similar arguments. They've suggested respecting the identities of transwomen would somehow setback feminism, but this hasn't happened.

While disabilities aren't genders and comparing them too closely can be dangerous, I think what history shows us is that a lot of these sorts of arguments tend to be more fearmongering than anything else.

Just as trans rights didn't setback feminism, neither will a small group of transautistics online somehow setback research into ASD or support for autistic people.

Regardless of people's opinion on whether transautism is valid, I think it's important for ASD advocates to keep attention on real issues that face the autistic community instead of a small niche group on the internet with little to no power or impact in the real world.

[high-theyre-frendough]

What is a trans-id or trans-x because google only tells me about identity documents

Basically "trans-id" and "trans-x" are people who identify as trans but instead of gender the input other random variables to identify as. Most commonly this is used for various mental and physical disabilities such as self-identifying as being autistic (to clarify, not self diagnosis through research, this is referring to just identifying as wanting to be autistic) or wishing to use a wheelchair without needing one (these types are largely called "transabled"). There is also "transrace" which is another subset of people who "identify" as a different skin tone which is considered racist. There's "transage" which is usually pedophiles claiming to identify as being younger (also minors who have been groomed that claim to identify as being older). Note that this is entirely separate from the concept of age regression. There's also "coining" blogs for various "trans-x identities" which get increasingly offensive the more you get into it. Some examples of trans-x identities I've encountered range from "wanting to have to wear glasses" to "wishing they had a miscarriage that was really really" to "identifying as trans-nazi, not actually being a nazi, just identifying as one." While I acknowledge that these may be more "extreme" examples, it's not as if the basic premise of these communities and terms weren't already offensive.

I don't want people identifying with trans-x or related bullshit interacting with me. They often try and co-op language used by and for trans people to try and justify wanting to be oppressed. Gender is not interchangeable with disability or age or race or whatever. Pretending that it is shows a severe lack of understanding for what any of these terms mean (something that is self evident when reading some of the garbage these people spout). The whole community is just racist, ableist, sexist, and transphobic. I want nothing to do with them. It's mostly somewhat privileged terminally online kids who need to educate themselves, but I'm not interested in wasting my breath on such people.

[queermetalgremlin]

Am i the only one who just... Doesn't get TransX discourse?

Like, both the pro- and anti- side spew so much bullshit i seriously start to spiral.

Am i the wrong one? Am i just an idiot who doesn't get the very obvious truth (that i can't see)?

Hold on, lemme elaborate:

I don't get Chronosian people who hate on Transage, when they mean very similar things. Is it 'cause Transage is also used by pro-contact pedophiles? If so, i get why you'd be wary of the term, but making a blanket statement about ALL Transage folks, when most of them identify as such solely due to term preference, is really hypocritical; HOWEVER some people equate mental perception to bodily age, and that can lead to disastrous consequences.

I can't comment on Transrace since i'm white, but as far as i've seen it seems harmless, as well as being mostly bodily POC folks coping with racial trauma and atypical dysphoria in a weird way; HOWEVER I don't know how transnationality works, since afaik you can't change the place you're born from.

As for Transabled, everyone is ready to support people with BIID until their disorder gets so bad they need to get amputated for their own good, huh? Everyone likes to pretend they're the most radically inclusive people on Earth until mental disorders aren't "UwU cute smol bean" anymore; HOWEVER, some people actively romanticize the disability they feel like they should have, thus hurting the people who bodily have it, and as far as i've heard, there are some people who don't even feel like they should have it and are just doing it for fun, which is wrong, but i have no proof of these people existing so i digress.

Transnazis and similar scum can fuck off into the sunset and never come back again.

[sophieinwonderland]

Something that occurred to us about transautism that had been brewing for a while: late diagnosis.

So like, we understand cis gender to be a matter of identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth, and trans gender to not identify that way. And we also understand that trans people are the gender they identify with right?

If we're applying that same understanding of what "trans" means, doesn't it stand to reason that "tramsautistic" would look pretty identical to late diagnosis?

Yes of course the narrative that all trans folks were born their gender and always knew is a harmful one. Gender can change unlike neuro developmental neurotypes. But that narrative is true for some trans folks. Hell it's true for a lot of trans folks.

So why wouldn't the same be true of someone who wasn't assigned autistic at a young age?

We're both trans and late diagnosed. A lot of the experiences with those identity overlap and have parallels.

We didn't "show signs" of being trans in our youth similar to how we "didn't show signs" of being autistic in our youth. We hid the things about us that others rejected and showed hostility towards because, conforming to social pressure, until we looked like a cis allistic singlet. All without ever understanding what we were doing or why, to the point where we look back and struggle to parse out those signs. There's a whole lot of gaslighting (internal and external) that happens for eggs and undiagnosed kids.

Also I can't help but notice a hint of "sex = gender" that slips into arguments against transabled IDs. Like, "you can't change your neurotype like you can change your gender" makes me wonder if that's talking about gender fluidity, or saying that trans folk are valid only because we have HRT and surgeries now. Cause in a lot of ways, you can change your neurotype if we understand neurotypes to be socially constructed like gender. You can get a diagnosis (like you can get a gender marker change). You can unmask (like you can socially transition). You can do treatments and therapy that helps (like you can do things that alleviate gender dysphoria and bring euphoria).

Anyways, I see a lot of parallels between trans in the gender sense and late diagnosis in the autistic sense. Plenty of kids were presumed to be a gender that they weren't. Plenty of kids were presumed to be a neurotype they weren't. When they seek to rectify one we call it transition and the other late diagnosis.

I know this isn't the universal story of trans gender folk or trans abled folk. But the connections between these two dots is too compelling for us not to bring it up.

-Faye

It's an interesting connection between late diagnosis and transitioning.

I don't think this is really how most transabled people use the word though.

Of course, certainly in some cases, this is going to be true where some transautistics can be cis-autistic all along but repress that.

I would say there are probably 3 general categories we could break transautism into.

The first is what you suggest, undiagnosed/late diagnosed cisautism where signs of ASD always existed but aren't recognized until later. And identifying as transautistic can supply security to someone trying to understand their identity.

The second is similar to the first, but where similar symptoms to ASD don't manifest at all until adulthood. In these cases, this might be a sign of another disorder. There's a lot of overlap between symptoms of ASD and schizophrenia for instance. So much so that ASD was at one time considered a childhood form of schizophrenia.

Then the third is what I consider the more stereotypical transautistic cases where an allistic person feels like they should be autistic for some reason, and sometimes may even feel dysphoria for not being autistic.

(This isn't mentioning trans-severity, where someone with Cis-ASD feels it should be worse.)

...

This is a bit of a side tangent, but...

To be honest, I worry a bit for people who fall into the first two categories.

There are legitimate issues with the healthcare system that would dissuade people from seeking mental help. We, ourselves, aren't seeking any treatment and don't feel it's necessary for us.

At the same time, the first step in healing a problem is recognizing it, and I do worry that identifying as having a trans-disorder may discourage someone from taking that first step of recognizing their symptoms are from an actual disorder they can seek treatment for.

This came up a while ago, with a transkleptomania anon who identified that way because they usually only felt the urge to steal things when they were stressed, and were under the false impression that cis-kleptomania required you to always have that urge.

Nothing against them, but I do have a concern that some people who consider themselves to have transdisorders may actually have those disorders and not be seeking treatment because they decided they don't have them.

...

And as I say this, I realize that this sounds a lot like sysmed arguments about how endogenic spaces supposedly discourage systems from realizing they have dissociative disorders. But the difference is that, from what I've seen of endogenic spaces, that's largely not true and many systems realize they have disorders BECAUSE of these spaces. Even in the tulpamancy community, it's common for people who show symptoms of dissociative disorders to be recommended to investigate further when symptoms of a disorder are mentioned.

I guess, one concern I have with the transabled community is that I'm not seeing as much of this.

To be fair, despite being described by one anti-endo as a radqueer God, I'm not actually part of those communities and these conversations could definitely be happening where I'm not looking.

...

Sorry, I kind of derailed there.

Anyway, while I don't think it completely applies to how I tend to see transabled identities used, I do find the comparison between late diagnosis and being transgender to be a fascinating topic.