I'm Transgender, not Autistic!

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I've known since first grade that I was transgender but in the 1970s the cross dressing Klinger was ridiculed for wearing women's clothes. Basically a long running joke that cross dressers were to be mocked.

My wife knew but it never got any farther than wearing women's clothes that looked like men's clothes except for the buttons being on the wrong side. She concluded I had Apergers and suggested I get diagnosis and come to this forum!

When she passed I grew out my hair and began presenting increasingly more feminine.

I discovered the more feminine my appearance the more easily I socialized.
I concluded that trying to look like a guy put me in the uncanny valley between the two genders.

I have little difficulty socializing while presenting female!
I live in an extremely blue state where there are laws protecting gender equality.
More importantly my friends and neighbors are very acceptingl
More than accepting, as they love my flowering plants!
Last night a neighbor asked why I grew so many. Turns out that he also likes to go to Wickford Rhode Island!

I have a lot of autistic traits, enough that I've been there and done that with situations those on the spectrum have to deal with. I may even have a few Aspie superpowers.

But, given the opportunity to present "the real me" I have little difficulty socializing.
Auto emission testing was suspended during COVID.
When it restarted I was waiting around with half a dozen men.
I brought a book to read. I looked around and picked the alpha male.
We made eye contact and he came over to talk with me!
I spent the time making small talk instead of reading.

Yay! Welcome to girlhood. Thanks for sharing your story!

I hope you continue to grow into your identity safely! ʕ•ᴥ•ʔﾉ♡

Thank you!

https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-gu ... r-identity
There is a link between autism and gender issues.

I think it is important to share our stories to show that many of us do not fit neatly into any of the known boxes!

One can easily search through the many posts I made on this site to see why my wife thought I was autistic.
That opinion was shared by a newly minted doctor doing his internship at a State Mental Health Institution.
He knew both of us for years.

I thought I saw a Unicorn!
Yeah, she's been here for a long time, but she was so good at masking that you didn't notice her.

I've also done the party trick of looking around a hectic crowd of people and making eye contact with a guy who invited me to eat with him at his table. Another example of socializing at a very high level.

That is something autistics find impossible. Pairing off or forming small groups out a big one.
NTs do it effortlessly. The auties are the ones "left over," unable to pair off by themselves.
The Internship, a movie about Google, has a scene where folks form groups.

I wouldn't say impossible.
It's not even a high level social thing IMO -- more like grade schooler stuff.

Also I caution with such statement that all autistics are like that -- after all, many of us do not fit neatly into any of the known boxes!


Otherwise, enjoy the pleasant change.


I myself may even consider the gender related path to get closer to be being myself.

... I just don't think about genders much myself; but I do know that I don't have a real inner gender and that me living as a cisgender woman is just a means to make socializing more predictable and convenient to me than if I had to live as a cisgender man in my culture...

Yet I ain't truly trans nor am cis -- genderless more like; definately autistic though.

I just realized that this movie may be great inspiration for Aspies looking for work!


It is about a bunch of misfits who are thrown together and competing against other teams to win Google jobs.

Yes, I often go a too far in making statements.
But, watch that short movie scene.
Better to be wrong sometimes than to say nothing because saying something would offend someone.
I spent too many years saying nothing because of my social issues. Avoiding conflict. I gotta dive right in.
There are plenty guys on this very forum that are too scared to do anything.
They are stuck at home living in the basement with their Parents.
I'm living in a very nice 3br home with a big secluded back yard and a fabulous flower garden in the front yard.
It took years of practice, but can finally hit a foam balls out of my yard and into the next door neighbor's yard!
For years the ball wouldn't reach the back fence no matter how hard I swung at the ball! Success!
I realized that how far the ball travels is a very effective metric of my golf swing. As well as the secondary metric of which direction it travels. A big part of Google is measuring things. How many people see my ad? How many people actually read it? These are useful things to measure if you want to sell advertisements to businesses.
The mortgage has been paid and I have plenty of investments.
Every six months or so I'll tally up how much my investments are worth.

Last edited by BTDT on 22 May 2024, 7:13 am, edited 3 times in total.

It can be very helpful to separate sexuality from gender.
Far too many people conflate or confuse themselves by assuming there is some link between the two!

We we are talking about just one person, it makes little sense to delve into satistical data like 10% of the population being gay. Or X number being transgender or autistic.

Figure out one. Then figure out the other. Don't assume any links between the two!

I thought I'd start my own thread rather than derail someone else's even more...
If you want to derail mine go right ahead!

I say forget about that thread.

That thread belongs to Haven, looking for validation -- not a feedback or consequence of such belief.


I'll do my best not to derail yours.

But I think what I'll write is somewhat relevant; just not the expected 'Congrats! You're trans! And you're 60?? That must've been quite a journey! And the misdiagnosis? That must've been confusing --' I could but won't because that ain't my style.

I'm sure someone else in this forum can do better.


But I digress -- I can understand somehow because gender based socialization is one of my socialization strategies to make NTs more predictable.

So on how gender is a factor on socializing; nothing surprises me.

And that it's only been recently investigated about neurodivergence.
For now it's recently investigating NDs and gender differences.

But I've yet to find anything about trans NTs who thought they're NDs due to socializing issues.
Or trans allistics who thought they're autistic due to the same socialization issues.

That is what interests me.



As it should! The same can be said with romantic attraction and sexuality.
In fact, the info about this is already out there -- you can google the "genderbread person" in the internet.


I dunno about your geographics and culture, but I bet that even some people after your generation sometimes don't even know about this.

You seem to be new at this.
Your mind must've be blown that you felt this high and could care less about being wrong.

I forgive you because I understand.

... Just where are the autistics here whose focus is LGBT-wise topics in socialization?

Gender culture is not my domain lol.
But splitting between an autistic's social dysphoria from an autistic transgender's social dysphoria is.

Yet -- adding NT and allistic in the dimension; how it's more relatable, which is superficially look the same but for different reasons, etc...

This, I never get to think of. Nor researched at all.

One of the reasons for all the social issues around gender non-binary folks is that a lot of people conflate sexuality, sexual orientation, gender and sex with each other. I can't help but wonder if there would be so much inflammatory rhetoric if people understood the difference. Even things like feminists inventing the term cis-gender to emphasize that trans people aren't really whatever gender they're claiming and describing it as assigned a gender at birth rather than being described as a sex at birth. With some actual awareness of what the differences are, either the terms would change, or people would be a bit less ignorant about what they mean.

That's pretty good. Although there probably should be an axis for kink versus vanilla or some other axis for sexuality. It's one of the reasons why I get a little annoyed by people confusing sexual orientation versus sexuality. They're not the same thing. Being into leather and kink can be a gay thing, but it's also things that straight people do as well. To the extent that the body can do it, all of the other bits might be the same as well.