Thread by @xiancommie

#Autigender. Having a gender that is so heavily influenced by autism that one’s gender and autism cannot be unlinked.

The discovery of this word has propelled me down an introspective rabbit hole. 🧵

#ProbablyNeurodivergent #neurodiverse #autism #gender

I’m 99% certain I’m autistic, minus 1% for no official Dx yet.

I’m used to feeling like humanity is something I observe, but don’t always share. So when others describe what I’ve long experienced but never had in common, it feels like a revelation.

Descriptions of autigender make perfect, relatable sense to me. Most of what I’ve read so far are feelings I’ve had my whole life. I’ll try to explain.

I was assigned male at birth and never felt a need to dispute the assignment. But it came with requirements I would categorically refuse. I never could grasp any justification for saying boys should this and girls should that.

I can see why primates would organize bodies according to reproductive ability, but I can’t understand the rationale behind gendering, well, anything.

I remember a moment when I was 10 or 11 where I was upset someone had made fun of me for saying or doing something boys shouldn’t. I wished I was a girl. I took it back when I thought about the bullshit girls endure for being girls.

In other words, my desire to be male was a calculation based on the roles into which I saw people corralled, not any sense of personal identity.

(Also interesting that I understood my privilege so early, despite not having the vocabulary.)

Gender loyalty never made sense to me. Why do so many people think there’s something special about being a boy or a girl? How could it possibly be intrinsic to who they are? Not to say it isn’t, but I don’t relate or even understand.

If my body suddenly switched reproductive characteristics, I would be shocked and confused how such a thing happened, but it wouldn’t feel incongruent with my sense of self.

I can mentally grasp the concept of one’s body not matching their self-image, but for myself I’ve never felt like the two were related in the first place. I like my facial features, but I imagine I could have an entirely different body and still feel like myself.

Most gendered group events confuse me.

A pastor’s wife thought I was joking when I asked to attend the women’s Bible study. When she realized I was sincere, I could see the request bothered her. I didn’t understand why.

Several people have tried at length to explain to me why women and men sometimes need a “girls night” or “guys night”. I still literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

I’ve come to realize why women would feel safer in woman only spaces. Beyond that, I’ve never understood the need. Likewise, the only reason I could see why men wouldn’t want women around is because they want to act like douchebags without consequence.

I haaate church men’s groups. Cramming religious concepts into car, sports, and hunting metaphors is absolutely weird and makes me extremely uncomfortable. Why would I want to be a spiritual He-Man? Can’t I just be a spiritual person?

Hyper-masculinity freaks me out the same way it might scare a 10 year-old to see their parents drunk for the first time. This is clearly an experience they chose, but it's confusing and grotesque to me.

It got increasingly painful over the years to hear from adults and peers what men are, what men are like, what boys grow up into. My revulsion turned into anger the more I protested "I am not that! I will not be that!" I still bristle at the comments adults make around children.

I saw a lot of people start to behave like their stereotype, probably because that's what was expected of them.

I leaned hard into the idea that gender must be an essential human trait because it helped justify my dad's misogyny.

Whether discussed in prescriptive terms like "Biblical manhood" or esoteric musing on the divine masculine and feminine, it seemed to me most humans consider gender sacred, so it's probably a thing that exists, even though I cannot perceive it for myself.

Gender strikes me as a nebulous blur of overlapping characteristics. There's no list of definitions and rules for "masculine" and "feminine". Everyone else seems to intuit it automatically while I have to learn by observing others.

That's where it's easy for me to understand gender as a performance: I don't naturally comprehend or exhibit normal modes of communication like casual conversation or social cues. It's a skill I have to learn on purpose. EVERY type of social interaction is a performance!

When I was a teenager, I felt the true ideal was androgyny. Why not have the best of both worlds? I wished I could afford the types of costumes I wanted to wear.

Men's fashion is boring. It all looks the same to me. That's also what makes it easy to copy as my own.

I like the concept of fashion as an art form, but still don't grasp how the clothes I wear somehow express my personality. Is this something others naturally feel and understand? It seems easier to express ideas. I think this explains my love for statement T-shirts.

I still don't know if gender is a thing that actually exists, or if it's a game we've all been tricked into playing.

If gender is something you experience as an innate part of who you are, I believe you, but I have no clue what that feels like.

I consider myself a man because when I was born a doctor observed one or more of my sex characteristics and decided I was boy. If this definition of male is outdated, incorrect, or incomplete, I have no basis on which to determine my gender.

I don't know what this means or says about me. I've had these thoughts my whole life, but it never occurred to me they would have some themes worth sorting out.

I welcome good faith input and sources.

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