MULTIPLE COMORBIDITIES, A SINGLE DIAGNOSIS
(Résumé en français : le fils de la narratrice, autiste fonctionnel, a vécu de nombreuses difficultés, y compris avec ses enseignants, à cause de sa dyspraxie et de son trouble du traitement sensoriel. Il s’est fait des amis avec qui il a adopté la vision du monde d’Andrew Tate. Après un changement d’école, son nouveau cercle d’amis en questionnement de genre. Sa nouvelle identité trans lui a procuré en ligne une forme de soutien comprenant des conseils pour obtenir des hormones, y compris le chantage au suicide. Il a été en contact avec des pédophiles en ligne, à qui il a donné des images de lui-même. Toutes ces circonstances ont été balayées du revers de la main par sa thérapeute pressée de l’« affirmer ». Son identité trans provient de son besoin d’appartenance : il a besoin non pas d’une transition, mais d’aide pour son autisme.)
My son who has high functioning autism was given extreme grief in school by teachers who did not understand or accept his autism or the comorbid conditions of dyspraxia and sensory processing disorder from which he also suffers. In my experience autism is as much a reason for being ostracized by society as being trans and I would even argue that it is more so. It has been our experience that neighbours and friends stopped interacting with us as our son starting behaving outside the norm—which is to say, talking excessively, being over sensitive to sounds and textures, and having difficulty regulating emotions. He has no friends in the neighbourhood although there are plenty of children. We were also given no more than lip service as support from schools and the medical system. There was no money, we were told. No understanding either as there were battles with teachers to get them to understand the disability and not punish it.
Teachers were especially critical and sometimes cruel. On his first day of kindergarten my son was eager and joyous. On the last, he said he wanted to burn the whole school down. This was kindergarten! It didn’t get better in grade one by the end of which he had no motivation and was made to feel a lot of shame. There was never any questioning of gender through all.
With a change to a private alternative school mainly comprising of neurodiverse kids, he healed a bit and made friends. Things looked promising, but high school threw him back into the shark pool. He made friends who bought into the worldview of Andrew Tate and so did he. He switched schools a few times due to lack of accommodation or particularly harsh treatment from a teacher. He fell in with a gender questioning peer group and switched to a small alternative school. There, his progressive teachers were highly supportive, encouraged him to wear dresses, lavished him with praise for doing so, and seemed to cut him a lot of slack for being “trans”, while up until that point, being autistic was giving him scorn for being “lazy”, or disruptive.
Let me here clarify further the nature of my son’s interest in trans identification—which can be summarized as obsessed with surface. I have asked him several times what pronouns he’d like me to use and he said he doesn’t care (which is why I continue with “he/him”). Through our frank discussions he has told me he has no interest in identifying as female or changing his name. He likes his genitals. He does not want breasts. He says he’s happy with his body. He claims there is a way of taking estrogen without developing breasts and that taking hormones is no different than getting a tattoo or working out at the gym. It’s just fun body modification. And he fully intends to take hormones, as several of his friends already do. He can’t or won’t tell me what he wants to get out of estrogen. As he is 18, there is nothing and nobody standing in his way.
I had snooped into my son’s social media accounts (because he was in contact with online pedophiles during the pandemic—another story) and saw exchanges with online contacts who advised him what he needed to say to acquire hormones. They discussed threatening suicide as a strategy. What I did not see was any discussion about feelings of being in the wrong body or feeling female or out of alignment with the body.
There is talk among young people about experiencing “gender euphoria” which is the short term high many experience shortly after medically transitioning (and what the short term positive outcome studies cite as successes, whereas longterm studies show far less positive outcomes). I suspect that this is what my son is seeking. He has experimented with drugs and this is another type of high.
My son has lifelong extreme anxiety stemming from social anxiety due to autism. He has difficulties with basic functions and we fear he may not be able to be a self-sufficient adult despite his superior intellect. The statistics for autism are grim too: high unemployment (77% autistic Canadian adults are unemployed) and homelessness. He needs professional psychological help for his poor self esteem, and help with social strategies. But an affirming therapist would completely ignore his life history and focus solely on encouraging him to medically transition as a solution to all his troubles. This is in fact what has happened. My concerns regarding autism, past trauma, and even the encounters with online pedophiles were dismissed out of hand by his affirming therapist. Bizarrely, none of it mattered according to her—and the pedophile incidents were framed as a manifestation of his suppressed inner trans. As all therapists are now obligated to affirm (which is to say, ask no questions) it is now difficult to find one that will help with the core issues. And since the affirming therapist has basically affirmed that he should transition, my son has no interest in talking to anyone else.
Please understand and appreciate that medically transitioning is not going to help my son feel any better about himself—he will still have social anxiety due to poor social skills. It is not outrageous to think that he might have started to wear dresses in order to finally feel praised and accepted somewhere after a lifetime of being on the outside. If you doubt me—when I asked him why he sent porn images of himself to pedophiles he said it was because they said nice things to him and it made him feel good. This is my son: someone who freely gives away intimate images of his body to get a compliment or falls in with Andrew Tate to belong to a group. It is not unreasonable to think that his current identification with trans also comes from wanting to belong.
Medical transitioning is not going to help him be functional in society or be a self-sufficient adult but is going to add lifelong health issues such as a compromised endocrine system and brain functioning, on top of his autism and other challenges. What distresses me further is that my advocating for my son is seen by some as being transphobic when at the very least, his complicated history should give room for concern and investigation instead of blind affirmation. Why haven’t the schools, medical system, and even society tried to understand, support, and accept autism as much as they do trans. There was no public money for interventions that could have helped with his social skills, but plenty to give him cross-sex hormones on demand. Where was all this support when my son got his autism diagnosis?