How Undiagnosed Autism led me to Gender Distress

A personal account of gender distress, surgery, trauma, autistic masking and grounding myself in biological sex

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Growing up I felt I wasn't like other girls. I didn't feel like people, I felt alien and wrong and like I could be found out at any moment.

I didn't enjoy the same things as other kids my age, I didn't like the same toys or clothes, I didn't understand or enjoy the games (though I loved Tig and Hide and Seek). And I didn't like to play the imaginative games like House, unless I could just be the pet cat or dog. I knew how to be an animal but I didn't know what to do if I had to be one of the humans.

I only wanted to wear my favourite pants, baggy tshirt and hoody and nothing else, ever. I hated having my hair cut or being forced into 'nice clothes', skirts and dresses. I hated change and pressure.

Over time I consistently came up against others perceptions and internalised them. I was asked why I don't wear pretty dresses and sandals like the other girls? Why don't I do my hair like they do? Why don't I play house and be the mum looking after a baby? Why do I behave silly and run around being naughty?

Girls would call me weird. Boys would tell me I'm not like other girls. They pointed out what I already felt myself: I was different and not like them, not like the girls. Did this mean I wasn't a girl?

In my teens this became more problematic as I navigated puberty and the subsequent changes. Boys and girls differences diverged even more and at a greater speed, leaving me behind.

Girls started giggling and gossiping and I didn't see what was funny or interesting. I became even weirder. Boys started to reject me too even though I'd previously fit in with them and their styles of play. I was suddenly not only not like other girls, but I wasn't like the boys anymore either.

My differences were noticed by everyone and commented on. I felt awkward and self conscious. I was underdeveloped physically, stick thin, pale and goofy. Other girls were blossoming, growing breasts and curvy legs and hips. I looked more like a boy, except for my long hair.

I still had boy mates and felt more at home with them, but they rejected me in the presence of other boys and would turn on me and make fun of my stick thin appearance and spindly legs, telling me to go grow a pair of tits. The laughter that would ensue would tear me to pieces. They'd been the only place I felt I might have friends, yet I could be rejected so quickly and my lack of girlyness spat at me like knives.

The girls would take me in but it wasn't home, they knew it and I knew it. There was something off about me. I didn't fit. I was weird, clumsy and made them embarrassed to be seen with me. I ruined all the conversations by showing my confusion and asking what was so funny all the time. I just didn't get it. They'd all talk about hair, boobs, underwear and clothes, boys and gossip and I just felt awkward and uncomfortable and out of place.

With the boys, they'd talk about football, cars, tits, fanny's and fingering and I felt out of place here too. They'd laugh about how they'd never finger me until I grew tits   whilst rolling on the floor in stitches, me blushing brighter than a poppy. I felt like I was always half in and half out of any group of people. Never fully belonging.

I internalised all of this and it shaped how I viewed others too. I saw girly girls as mindless, vain bimbo's who only cared about appearances. They dressed for the boys, not themselves. The boys lapped it up and elevated the girls that did this, giving an impression of validity to appearances. Creating position and authority to this performance of 'girl'. I'd always been a tomboy but I started to believe I needed to prove I was a girl in order to be accepted, by the girls as well as the boys.

I started to wear make up, and do my hair and wear girl clothes. I looked horrendous in them with my gangly limbs and flat chest, like a prepubescant boy in girls clothing. I didn't match up to the other girls like I'd intended. It did get me more attention though and this felt rewarding as the attention I usually got was ridicule. Girls tried to help me make better clothing choices and told me not to tie my hair so tightly in a bobble and let bits dangle around my face to create feathering. I liked this attention even though I was performing something that I didn't want to do and didn't feel natural.

Boys noticed me more and gave me compliments which brimmed my heart more than any girl ever could. But they'd tear me back down quickly by laughing at my lack of breasts. Girls would tell me how to counteract not having a cleavage by wearing a large pendant necklace to draw attention away from my flat chest.

All these things told me I needed to keep doing more to fit in. It's just around the corner. A little more make up, do your hair like this, wear this but avoid bringing attention to this area where you're lacking. You look great but you'd be better with tits. I was chasing a version of myself that was like a carrot dangling infront of a donkey, keeping it trotting along always hungry and never quite getting there. Just a little bit further!

By the time I was 18, I was thoroughly depressed, felt like an alien to myself as well as everyone else, wearing a mask so heavy I was withered, felt at war in a never ending battle. And it didn't stop there. I decided, was utterly convinced, that all I needed to finally be that elusive version of myself was a boob job. I even had a savings account released to me on my 18th birthday and so that was it, I booked in for plastic surgery to become a girl and finally find the acceptance I'd always wanted.

My family tried to talk me out of it but it was no use. I was 18, they couldn't stop me and they'd just released access to my £4k. At the consultation I was told it's a simple procedure, I'll be in and out in just a matter of hrs with brand new boobs and no complications. This procedure makes so many girls like me happier and more confident and even brings new friends and boyfriends along with it. No regrets. I paid on the dot and was booked in for just a few weeks time.

I never felt completely sure about it but I couldn't stop myself. I was on a mission to become a version of myself I thought would make me better and I couldn't allow myself to think about it more deeply than that. I was convinced it would solve my problems, bring me female friends who would stop thinking I'm weird, let me be friends with the boys again but without the ridicule. Everything would fall into place. I was chasing a dream of acceptance.

The first year after my boob job brought me lots of attention. I wasn't comfortable having it but it was attention none the less. All the previous comments I used to get vanished. Just like that. I had new compliments, new focus, new friends. It was all fake, just like my boobs.

The attention from males was obviously of a sexual nature and suddenly finding myself the centre of this sexual gaze and motive left me unnerved in myself, like what had I brought onto myself? This isn't what I wanted. 

I wasn't used to it, I was used to rejection and ridicule. Now there was no end in sight when a man set upon me complimenting me, getting closer, buying me another drink. Sure, I had a sudden social circle nowadays and 'friends', but I had not developed socially and was still the poorly functioning, undiagnosed autistic girl underneath it all. I was painfully shy even though I dressed like I wasn't. I was confused by conversations even though I nodded along pretending I understood. I didn't feel like a girl inside even though I'd gone to great lengths to demonstrate I was a real girl. I didn't know how to detour away from what I'd inadvertently created: I'd become the very  stereotype of girl I always disliked. I appeared mindless and vain, a bimbo. I'd become a performance that hid the real me. Cared only about appearances. I dressed to be viewed and to earn my place in a social circle. I was trying to be acceptable to others. But I'd become unacceptable to myself and it endangered me greatly and masked my internal distress. 

Trying to prove I was a girl by utilising gender, the very stereotypical version of female, I covered up my internal identity distress at not fitting in as an autistic girl. I masked. Gender expression was an extension of autistic masking trying to fit in and have my neurological differences hidden under make up and clothes and performance. It cost me so much. It cost me time. It cost me my body. It cost me my relationship with myself. It cost me trauma and reputation. 

The euphoria from the attention after having the surgery lasted less than 2 years. That's all it took to cause a huge shift in how others treated me and see how my temporary gender insanity had led me to do something drastic. The sexual coercion from predatory males who preyed on my naivety and young mind, oh so obvious to an adult eye under all the make up and forced smiles I made trying to be someone. I was so desperate to fit in and appear confident and adult but my underdeveloped brain completely missed the point and inadvertently screamed out that I was lost and gullible and so easily led. I may as well as had a stamp on my forehead that said rape me. 

After the traumas and humiliation and realising everything I'd created was fake, I plummeted, full of regret, hating the body I'd forced upon myself for the trauma it brought and the disconnect it caused me from myself. It carved a cavernous canyon between body and mind, dissociating me from myself and causing self hatred and shame all over again. I wanted to run away from my body, it didn't feel like mine. It felt like it belonged to the men who groaped and abused me. Their large hands squeezing and twisting me into pain fragmenting in my mind endlessly, each time like a shard of glass slicing off more of me. I became body parts that I wanted nothing to do with.

I covered myself in my old baggy clothes, hid my boobs as best as I could, stopped putting on the make up and saw a young girl looking back at me in the mirror who I'd forgotten all about. I'd tried to forget who I was and cover up all the parts of me I hated, the parts that had been rejected again and again as a young growing girl in a scary world without support and without anyone, even myself, knowing I was autistic. She was still there under it all. I cried so hard and felt so much shame about rejecting myself just like I felt others had done. I tried to become what I thought I needed to be to be accepted and all it did was separate me from myself and take me so far down a path I knew I may never recover from.

I started drinking more and more, drugs and smoking. Sometimes I'd be wasted and forget about my body and take my hoody off sweating at a party and people would gawp and exclaim "I didn't know you had tits! You hide them well!" and I'd rush to put my hoody back on and hide what I'd done to my body, nearly passing out from the heat. I was a tomboy again and it felt much more me, but the fake tits really didn't go well with it. They were so not me. They represented everything I hate about being female. Everything I hated about other females. A girl code that I was never part of, even in my brief few years of trying. I internalised misogyny as a way to escape how alien I felt and the trauma that came from trying to 'become a real girl'. What insane spell had I been under? Why didn't I think I was a real girl? You'd think I'd have figured this out at last by rejecting my stereotype performance and new tits and reverting back to being a tomboy. But no, I went the other way and felt even less like a girl than before. I rejected everything about femaleness. I denied I was a girl at all costs. I hid my tits, I hung out with the lads, I called other girls superficial and hated everyone, especially myself.

I spent a lifetime on and off anti depressants, I self medicated with weed, booze and drugs. I chain smoked and genuinely felt like I was one of the lads. I thought they saw me that way too. I learnt to banter and mock, I developed a loud gutteral laugh, I downed pints and burped and punched people as a greeting. This was escapism. To me, being a boy meant that nothing mattered, things were easy and care free and you could drown yourself because that's what guys do. I was so far from female. I didn't exactly think I WAS a boy, but I didn't think of myself as a girl. 

Because I didn't see myself as a girl and I'd rejected everything female in myself, and because I was a naive, mentally underdeveloped autistic girl, I had no idea that everybody else on the planet still knew I was female. I'd rejected it, why wouldn't everyone else? I thought my male mates were really mates and that they too saw me as one of the lads. Even after my sexual trauma I didn't realise I still needed to protect myself as a female. I thought I was exempt. Being female was just an idea, it wasn't real, none of it was. Now that I'd hidden my breasts, changed my appearance and performance I was no longer a girl in all senses. Because I'd never thought I was a girl in the first place. And my only experience of being a girl WAS a performance. Girl was an identity that I no longer identified with. Boy, was I wrong. 

Drunk, delirious and stupid boy/girl/other/me walked straight into more abuse. My 'mates' took advantage of me again and again. I'd wake up naked in bed with them gobsmacked and humiliated, but only a girl would react like that, so I sucked it up and cracked a joke and pretended I didn't remember anything. I'd already told them that I was asexual so many times and they said they 'got it'. They said they just thought I was a lesbian but maybe in the closet. I'd assured them I was not gay, I had zero sexual interest in men or women and like being by myself. 

If I'd known about non-binary at the time I would have identified as that. It would have gone hand-in-hand with my asexuality. It would have felt like an explanation for me not feeling like a girl or a boy. It would have removed me from my body even more. 

I don't know what caused me to feel asexual, but it's something I felt from my teenage years from not fitting in and not seeming to have the same thoughts and feelings as the boys or girls around me. Add onto that years later sexual trauma, and anti depressants which numb you and can cause sexual dysfunction, plus the utter disconnect I felt with my body in my gender-quest, who knows what caused it. A lot of autistic people feel asexual and I think it comes down, partly, to alexithymia and interoception causing struggles with understanding and identifying emotions and sensations in the body. Put all this together and it's a time bomb for gender dysphoria and identity issues and dysfunction.

Now, in my 30s, I've finally calmed down from the identity distress and I can look back and locate undiagnosed autism in all of it. All my internal distresses were due to me not feeling like I fit in and I had to prove myself in some way. This is what autistic masking does. As an autistic female I desperately wanted to find my place where I belonged and would make me acceptable, and I tried on different identities in this pursuit, gender being the most harmful with the most consequences.

Believing that I wasn't a real girl just because I wasn't a stereotypical girl was harm caused by gender stereotypes and social constructs.

Believing that I was now a girl simply because I started a performance of girlyness was harm caused by gender stereotypes. 

Then, rejecting my performance of girl and thinking that this literally and physically removed my actual biological femaleness was harm caused by a belief in gender ideology before I even knew that such a thing existed.

Not realising I am a girl led me to be abused all over again, in a very female way! That was a horrendous realisation that males could sexually assault me as a female when I didn't play along with the idea of being one. What a head fuck. I don't even know if I've explained this well now in my late 30s. I'm not sure I'll ever fully understand what happened in my mind to cause such dysfunction between my brain and body.

It's taken me until my mid 30s to really understand that I am a biological female. All the distress I went through was gender nonsense based on stereotypes that not only harmed me but harmed how I viewed others, especially other females. For the first time I've felt grounded in reality, and that reality is biological sex. It is female autism, which is also determined by biological sex. I am an autistic female, biologically and neurologically in every cell of my body and brain. It is a coming home to myself after running away in all directions and denialism and nonsense.

I don't want anyone else to go through even a fraction of what I went through. I don't have the answers but I know it's not gender. Gender is a mask that dissociates you from your body and your mind. It can reap havoc on your life and create a fake environment that only lies can grow in.

When I read stories from autistic detransitioners it feels like I'm reading my own story but in an alternate reality. Not a girl who thought she was a boy, but a girl who didn't think she was a girl so had become a girl to prove she was a girl, then pretend she wasn't a girl but realised in a horrendous way that she was a girl all along and that ‘girl’ was not an idea but a reality that I'd always been.

How could this even happen? How can an existence be a mere idea? That is such a  dangerous way of thinking. How can reality become a concept? I'm frightened for the males and females who are going through similar distress and will take it even further than I did in different directions. There are so many ways now to disconnect from yourself, and it's been given a new name 'gender identity' and 'finding you're authentic self'. Every step I took to find my authentic self and find a way to blend in and hide my autistic differences took me further away from my authentic self. Infact, it ruined my authentic self because she was damaged so deeply by the process and the ripple effects that emanated from it that I'll never uncover her because the scar tissue is too thick to penetrate.

Telling people that you can identify out of reality is as dangerous and mindless as telling an autistic person they can just stop being autistic by declaring it and putting on a mask. No one is an identity. We are not social constructs. Ground yourself and love yourself. I can't play along with gender harm because it drove me to insanity and stole over two decades of my life.

I've finally woken up from my insanity, grounded myself in my sex and now the world is telling me there's no such thing as female and that biological reality is a construct and gender identity is real. I've just come out of that rabbit hole thanks, I ain't going back in.