Research indicates that individuals with ASD are more likely to experience gender dysphoria, and vice versa.
Sorry, op. I’m locking this thread, the discussion is getting too ugly for individualized moderation.
Fuck. My autistic self has enough problems already and recently I get all gender-questioning while hugging my Blåhaj (still comfortably cis by day though). Seeing articles that imply I am “at risk” of being queer does not help: I don’t want to go through the phase of finding out and potentially having to tackle the choices and processes involved before I sort out my ADHD-like symptoms. Trans folk REALLY is brave to have picked the fight against all the social norms. Should I unsubscribe from 196 to hopefully reduce the temptation to find out? Yes, I’m a bit of a coward.
RCCX!
The entire cluster (ADHD/Hypermobility/Autoimmune/MCAS/etc) is theorised to originate there.
What repoir does the wiki have? It seems well written enough, but I don’t trust these kinds of things unless a person with something to lose backs them.
That guy bothers me, I don’t think medical professionals should cultivate personality cults. Then again I don’t really think politicians should either, and that’s basically the definition of politics.
There was an interesting NatGeo article recently about something similar - the links between hypermobility, GI issues, long COVID and long COVID-like illnesses like MECFS, MCAS, etc. The links you provided are really fascinating and suggest maybe even a larger clustering of symptoms unified in a single genetic process.
Gender isn’t real anyway so 🤷🏻♀️
Gender is real, it’s just a human construct. But that doesn’t make it any less real than, say, Italian is real despite it being a human construct.
The idea of gender is just stupid and has to go, regardless if people consider it real or not, it’s a social construct that must go
Well that’s what Trump is trying to do so.
I guess you and the fascist are getting your wish.
Seriously though, gender is older than Homo sapiens. It’s about division of reproductive labor and the classes that humans form around that
The gender binary needs to go. Gender inequality needs to go. But people are going to have gender as long as we have class distinctions and we are a long way from outgrowing that.
oof
Italian’s a dressing, dude. I have some in my fridge.
Salad dressing is also a human construct.
In nature salad just prances around naked!
I firmly believe that ohio is just a hole
I’ve read about this. Yes, it’s truly notable how correlated both are.
One explanation I read that makes sense is that autistic people are generally less concerned about social definitions. Since we already are “weird” to the allistic society, we tend to consider things like gender in a different way:
“If society doesn’t have a way to explain how my mind works, how can it define my gender correctly? Maybe, its gender definition doesn’t apply to me”
So you start thinking that, indeed, maybe the society that can’t define your mind if not as “wrong”, can’t define your gender either. And turns out that you feel comfortable in something that, similar to how they explain your brain, is “weird” for them too.
This is a good way to describe the way moral reasoning works for a lot nd people succinctly. Now I will describe it much less succinctly lmao
There are possibly neurological bases for this as well
Mirror neuron system, for example, is thought to be a key factor in development of empathy and moral understanding. This is this system of neurons that give a shared neural activation in response to stimuli, eg we see someone in pain and it activates regions that activate when we experience pain directly
However, people with autism tend to have less active mirror neurons or differently organized system of mirror neurons (still somewhat poorly understood). This is one of the theorized mechanisms behind challenges with socialization and empathization in autism.
However people with autism can obviously still socialize and become empathic, right? I have spoken to many people with autism who if anything feel they are too empathetic.
One of the hypotheses here is that because of the above neurological difference there is a compensatory strategy. Essentially that instead of being able to naturally adapt neurologically people with autism create empathization, social and moral understanding, etc through higher level cognition. Analytical and cognitive based approaches. Trial and error, assessment and reflection, etc rather than instinctive and emotionally driven responses.
Thus far more thought is given to concepts and ideas that the general public simply does not consider. What is gender? What is a social construct? What is the point of social pragmatic language? What is the point of “business appropriate attire”? what is the point?
We recognize that many of these questions are simply tradition enforced by hierarchy balanced against us and can quickly fall apart with basic logic. We dissect these questions and potentially start to reach a state of postconventional moral development (read Kohlberg for more about this).
The thing about this is that you start to recognize a morality that supersedes the need for social order and start to maintain a personal sense of ethics and morality that is not dictated by external factors but empathization. You’re more likely to support civil disobedience now and also more likely to violate social norms but that’s because many social norms don’t make sense. Not surprisingly many adults don’t move to post conventional morality; they stay at a conventional morality in support of maintaining social order. Their morality is mostly dictated from external factors like law and religion.
Now to be clear this doesn’t mean that January 6 trump people have post conventional morality because they were practicing civil disobedience. Their violence was to arguably to protect social norms and to push to a society with extremely rigid social norms and they arguably have the moral development of a child (punishment and obedience stage, literally the first one, classic fascist shit). Where they stand in terms of moral development is an interesting debate but that’s a different post altogether
There’s a lot more to this like medial prefrontal cortex differences, temporo-parietal junction, VTA, reward system activation, etc. the neuroscience here is super interesting and of course it’s important to stress that people with autism approach moral reasoning differently and not that they can’t do it because if you don’t stress that dumb people associate autism with sociopathy and think all autistic people are elon musk
