I'm an autistic trans woman in her early thirties, also with ADHD. Trying to transition in my teens, I kept being told by parents and even NHS gender clinicians that it was my dyspraxia making me confused even though there was no evidence for this. #WeAreNotConfused

As a teen in the early 00s, I wrote to autistic organisations and they told me that there was no evidence to suggest being autistic made someone trans. These letters didn't do any good with my parents, my school, the clinic that gaslit me with the heinous Desistance Therapy.

It's been a decade and a half since then and we've come a long way in so many respects - support and education means far more trans and gnc (gender non-conforming) teens are around than when I was that age and felt like a rare Pokemon to be lauded or gawked at. But this lingers.

It's just so saddening that the techniques clumsily used against me back then have become entrenched, refined, passed between parents and people with power over trans/gnc kids in the same way as the scare stories that vaccines cause autism, with the same faux concern.

That concern that "they" are trying to turn your child into something else.

It's so harmful and now it's in JK Rowling's lengthy manifesto of concern trolling and I am deeply concerned how more widespread this might become even after it was a regular feature in Sunday newspapers

Let's be clear: the concept how young autistic people are being manipulated into thinking they're trans, having their identities hijacked by outside forces, is abhorrent. It's prejudice mixed with prejudice, it's prejudice squared, and it does real damage under cover of 'concern'

It works by mixing the following two prejudices:

1) trans people are not who they say they are. (pretty much every transphobic argument, no matter how reasonably coached, boils down to this)

2) autistic people do not know who they are because autism destroys identity

If I put it like that, I'd hope it'd be obvious how dangerous and misguided the 'trans autism panic' is.

But I've continuously found even in adulthood the assumption that autism weakens identity, that it removes agency.

Terrible orgs like Autism Speaks make full use of this idea to constantly speak for autistic people and not allow autistic people to speak in our words. If you accept the idea that autism destroys agency, how could we, if anything we say must be put there from somewhere else?

And so enter the idea of a predatory trans agenda ('gender ideology', they call it, to make it sound like it exists) to turn all your kids trans for idek reasons. We're not out to turn everyone trans, do they think we're the Borg or something? We don't even get the cool nanotech.

Trans adults do vouch for trans kids a lot because many of us *were* those trans kids. I recall how much pain and trauma I went through and want anyone in the same position as I was to avoid that, to have a happier, easier life, filled with more love. I don't want to eat brains.

Speaking generally, autistic people tend to really look into stuff. We have special interests that we will obsess about, it's one of the great things about being autistic, like superpowers of knowledge. Ask me about Eurovision sometime and I'll never stop. We do the research.

I don't know what makes anyone trans. None of us do, to be honest. We use 'woman trapped in a man's body' and other such clumsy formulations mostly to try and describe what it feels like to cis people who do not experience dysphoria, an attempt at aiding understanding, not a fact

Autistic people do the research. Autistic people facing dysphoria will want to know what the hell is going on and will look into it. Gender becomes a special interest by necessity for many of us, as we try to find some way to understand what is wrong, and fix it, to carry on.

I've sometimes seen it said that rather than autism weakening own identity, autism instead permits obsession of identity, turning ourselves into our special interests, diving into our selves to learn like a research student granted access to a remote and valuable library.

And then we're told we're wrong. Our agency is stripped away by people who have never really had to think about this stuff, who believe that trans people are deluded, lying, or both. No matter of self-actualisation will convince those who made their minds up from the Sunday Times

It's no coincidence that "autistic kids are being tricked into transness" claim is so often used against trans boys, and gnc kids raised as girls, as it was in JKR's hate manifesto. It works by presenting femaleness as under threat. That they're 'silly little girls'. Robs agency.

The idea that trans women exist out of predatory reasons, men muscling in into women's space out of perverse sexual desire, or else a macho (lol) wish to crush feminism. While trans men are either the tricked or the traitors, denied agency, rendered victims of the gender agenda.

Which is why "many autistic girls are having their autism taken advantage of to convince them they're trans and cut their breasts off" is such a devastating rhetorical technique, it plays off so many different prejudices, and wraps it up in an idea of self-mutilation that isn't.

It's sadly becoming increasingly common to see this presented as a 'reasonable' argument. Whereby trans autistic people of all ages and genders responding, defending themselves, is paradoxically taken as further proof of a lack of agency. It's insidious and it needs to be stopped

I'm certainly not the only one to have noticed.

Ellen Murray has a fantastic video here going into the same problem and just how demeaning it actually is. https://twitter.com/ellenfromnowon/status/1270831014227607552

Speaking personally, as I began this thread, it is just so frustrating and sad to see the same things used against me all those years ago, used to deny my agency in terms of both identity and my very body, now being shared to millions under the guise of 'reasonable concerns'.

Please listen, and please try to understand.

Autistic people are not hollow voids.
Autistic people know themselves.
Believe them.

Trans men are men.
Trans women are women.
Nonbinary people are nonbinary.
Believe them.

And transphobia and ableism are hate.
Reject them.