How Gender Ideology Became the New Script for Autistic Girls
By Maia Poet
Ten years ago, many parents were coerced into consenting to gender treatments on behalf of their minor children after hearing the infamous line: “Would you rather have a dead kid or a trans kid?” At that time, most parents had little access to balanced information, and fear often guided their decisions. Today, however, far more parents have become immune to this messaging because our discourse has shifted. Parents now know exponentially more than mine did in 2012, when at the age of 12 I came out to them as transgender.
We now know that gender confusion often resolves with puberty, and that gender medicine is underpinned by no high-quality evidence attesting to its efficacy as a treatment for gender dysphoria in either children or adults. We also know that the youth who find themselves in gender clinics are psychologically and psychiatrically complex, and that gender dysphoria is hardly (if ever) their only diagnosis.
Conditions like ADHD and Autism come up often in our contemporary cultural discussions about gender-questioning youth. But, startlingly few voices have asked why so many gender dysphoric kids show ADHD and Autism traits. Because I was one of those kids, I have endless thoughts about the nature of this connection. For the sake of this article, I’ll focus on a broad overview of what predisposed me to experiencing a mind/body disconnect before puberty—one that later manifested as sex-based distress. Though I cannot project my experiences onto everyone with similar traits, I’ve noticed repeating patterns with Gen Z neurodivergent girls adopting transgender identities. Some of these patterns are so consistent, that I often find myself coming to the conclusion that girls with social-communication difficulties or autistic traits often face a crisis when they reach adolescence. These days, that autistic adolescent crisis appears to be overwhelmingly refracted through the lens of “being trans,” though there’s also a phenomenon of girls being treated for anorexia nervosa having elevated autistic traits.
Unfortunately, regardless of how this crisis manifests– because girls are rarely diagnosed with autism as youngsters, their parents don’t know to anticipate these unique challenges and to prepare for them ahead of time. Many parents I’ve spoken with may only understand their daughter’s quirkiness as potentially being autism when a trans identity enters the picture and complicates everything.
In my estimation, much of what is called “gender dysphoria” in clinics is better understood as the clash between unusually high intellectual ability and lagging social, emotional, and sensory processing development. The incongruence these kids feel is real; but it isn’t a metaphysical one, between their sex and their “gender.” It’s an incongruence between their high IQs and their noticeable social-communication/ developmental delays.
Within our status quo, neurodivergent children—especially twice-exceptional girls (those with both giftedness and disability)—are left to flounder. The reason we are talking about the trans issue so intensely is that a large number of gifted, neurodivergent girls with profound sensory difficulties and unaddressed social and emotional deficits were missed by professionals early on.
These girls are so bright that their intellectual strengths allow them to mask their deficits, which remain unrecognized and unaddressed during critical years of development. They may silently struggle for years in school and on the playground without anyone—sometimes even themselves—realizing how much. Then puberty hits. Within a couple of years, they begin appearing in unprecedented numbers at gender clinics, demanding testosterone injections and double mastectomies.
This incongruence makes youth like me especially vulnerable to gender ideology, largely because of how far we get without serious deficits ever being meaningfully addressed. People like me struggle with sensory processing—interoception (making sense of bodily cues) and proprioception (making sense of where our bodies are in relation to the world)—which distorts how we experience our bodies from the very beginning. Extra sensitivities make our bodies feel overwhelming and unpredictable from our earliest memories.
Autism often brings alexithymia (difficulty articulating emotional states). On one hand, we may feel constant confusion about what our bodies need, struggle with coordination that makes sports difficult (or even balance a challenge), and wrestle with intense physical and emotional sensations we cannot name. On the other hand, we face equal confusion about the social world—friendship, belonging, later romantic relationships—and wonder why these normal things seem so effortless for others but not for us. The gap leaves many of us internalizing shame and failure.
When we cannot express ourselves in ways others easily understand, and our caregivers cannot meet our needs, we fall back on borrowed language. As young children who are building the foundation of linguistic expression, this takes the form of echolalia. Later, at least in my experience, if the ability to produce spontaneous language does not develop properly properly, this communication mechanism evolves into using more complex pre-fabricated scripts we use to communicate needs, desires, and feelings.
Gender ideology has become one such script for many of today’s autistic young people trying to make sense of themselves and their place in the world as they enter adolescence.
As a child, I relied on echolalia for everything from basic requests to complex sentiments I couldn’t yet generate myself. The scripts I used came from among the hundreds of pages of picture books I memorized before I could read, and from Soviet cartoons, which I translated into English and repeated in various social settings. That’s probably in retrospect why my obvious gestalt language processing was missed by the clinicians who followed me closely during my initial years for developmental delays associated with my premature birth.
As I grew older, the scripts changed. I stopped quoting picture books, but I didn’t stop borrowing language. When puberty hit, bringing an increasingly complex social landscape, new sensory hells, crushes I misinterpreted as stroke symptoms, and an acute awareness of how different I was, I set off on a long quest for answers. Instead of children’s books, I lifted phrases from transgender forums. When it came to expressing my deepest adolescent confusion, I found a script that seemed to capture it perfectly: “I feel like I was born in the wrong body.”
The words shifted with age, but the process was the same: I reached for borrowed language to express sentiments I couldn’t yet generate on my own.
So what led me there? It wasn’t as simple as “too much time online” or “latching onto a trend.” Back in 2011–2012, when I first began seriously questioning my gender, this trend hadn’t yet pervaded Gen Z. By that time, I had already lived a lifetime of complex experiences which put me at odds with my body and with the world around me.
As a premature child with a mix of neurodevelopmental glitches, I was shuttled between medical appointments and a rigorous schedule of tutoring and extracurriculars. I had both precociousness and delays, plus some physical disabilities, long before I entered school. (I’ve written about those in more detail here and here, as doing so in this article would easily double its length).
The point is: my transgender identification was rooted in far more complexity than even my highly competent parents understood. For many girls with similar neurodevelopmental trajectories, parents may not see the connection between their early, persistent struggles and later gender distress—so the gender distress concretized into a trans identity looks like it came “out of nowhere.” No one person’s trans identification origin story is ever as simple as it is made out to be by activists on either side, because simply put, people are incredibly complicated. Especially people whose minds are wired atypically.
By the time I was 12 and in seventh grade, a few years into puberty, I was also facing the new world of middle school social dynamics. Friendship could no longer be attained by simply asking, “Wanna be friends?”
While my female peers obsessed over clothes, Silly Bandz, makeup, and pop culture, I was fascinated by rare pituitary tumors, the human genome, the gay rights movement, and learning disabilities. I couldn’t stand the texture of tight clothes, jeans, long hair touching my neck or the feeling of cosmetics on my face. The more I was encouraged by outsiders to conform, the more I problematized why I couldn’t tolerate things that other girls my age enjoyed. Not only were our interests different, our sources of knowledge were different. They spoke in pop culture references, while I clung to nonfiction related to my exceedingly narrow interests, because I couldn’t track fictional plots. They used sarcasm and backhanded compliments; I took everything literally. Their social functioning baffled me, and for the first time I realized just how different I was from other girls. This realization isn’t unique to those autistic kids whose adolescent confusion manifests as gender questioning. I’ve learned this trajectory is pretty normal.
Because I craved clear answers and frameworks, I searched for explanations on my iPad. I stumbled across trans influencers in 2011–2012 and latched on. When I saw people describing themselves as “born in the wrong body,” it clicked. I had always experienced my body as glitchy, confusing, and unreliable. I had learning disabilities, physical disabilities and giftedness all co-occurring. I related better to boys than to girls, though in all honesty, my peer group has never made sense to me. And then eventually, I realized by talking with one of my male friends, that what I thought were stroke symptoms was actually intense attraction to other girls (with whom I struggled to communicate). No one, aside from trans influencers, had ever articulated such experiences to me before. To my systematizing, diagnostic-criteria-loving mind, this explanation fit perfectly.
What I thought was a rare condition afflicting a select few unlucky people (myself included) soon became the common explanation for a growing number of teenage girls. The experiences I had with my family in 2012 are now playing out across thousands of families throughout the West.
Many parents today describe the language their kids use when “coming out” as trans as canned phrases picked up online. About ten years ago, when this took off among teenagers—just a few years after I did the same thing—many adults knew the internet played a role but didn’t realize their children’s exact wording came from it.
Phrases like “I was born in the wrong body,” “I’ve always felt this way,” and “transition will save my life” proliferated on internet forums, rather than as an original spontaneous form of speech. People who identify as transgender often openly describe ‘not having language for these feelings’ until they found it online. This canned language often makes parents doubt the legitimacy of the claims their child is making, or the feelings they are attempting to express. As a result of misunderstanding the nature of their child’s communication, they may assume their kid is simply a brainwashed cult member and argue with their kids about facts, biology, regret rates and medical harms. I know this because for 12 years of my life, I was there, and because so many kids in trans communities and their families describe this exact exchange. These arguments are almost always fruitless and relationship-destroying for reasons neither side fully grasps when they’re entrenched in them.
In a way, the canned phrases comprising gender ideology function as a more complex adolescent version of childhood echolalia. Arguing with a script a child has chosen to express something real that they don’t yet have words for only makes them feel misunderstood, rejected, and dismissed.
For kids with autistic or ADHD traits, the better approach is for adults to ask themselves: what meaning has my child personally ascribed to these canned phrases? The fix isn’t to argue them out of it, but rather to uncover what the script is trying to communicate. The needs beneath the language are real, even if the child cannot yet explain them in their own words.
My biggest piece of advice to parents and clinicians who care about this population of autistic, ADHD and otherwise ‘neurodivergent’ gender-questioning youth is this:
You will be far better served by becoming experts in your patient’s/ child’s neurodivergence (autism, ADHD, or otherwise) than by memorizing studies or gender-related talking points.
You will be far better served by reading between the lines of your patient’s/ child’s scripted statements, using your knowledge of their neurodevelopmental history, than by debating the script they’ve adopted as if it were original speech. Try to understand what they are attempting to express with ideological language by asking direct questions with no intention of debating them about the feelings they’ve assimilated into talking points.
Understand that your child/ patient may not have the ability to identify or express their emotions using words like “frustration,” “alienation,” or “nervousness”-- even if they have a demonstrably above average IQ. They will need you to model for them, how one can go about using their own words to identify sensations (including emotional ones) and how to express them spontaneously.
You will be far better served by becoming an autism expert than a gender expert.
You will be far better served by setting clear, compassionate boundaries, while reassuring your child that disagreement with a choice is not rejection of them as a person. Use examples from the past if possible to illustrate this point.
You will be far better served by seeing gender distress as a cry for help requiring attention, rather than either as a clinical mandate, or as a personal affront/ parental failure.
If this granular look into the intricacies of neurodivergence and gender identity are of interest to you, I encourage you to subscribe to my Substack to read my analysis at length.
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Excellent and very insightful article! The gender dysphoria/autism connection is so often talked about, but rarely explored in depth. Thank you for writing this.
Very good piece, Maia. Your advice would have helped us a few years ago when our daughter started spouting "the script". Hopefully it will help families who are new to these problems. Our daughter was diagnosed with "social pragmatic communication disorder". I am tempted to share your article with the diagnostician.