Elevated rates of autism in transgender and gender-diverse individuals

it's god of the gaps thinking, people are addicted to drawing clean lines around discrete categories as a vestige of modernism. taxonomy brain. we don't have good ways to say "there are two major clustering points, which most people are roughly close enough to one or the other to call them that, but there's enough overlap and so many dimensions that it makes drawing clean boundaries impossible"

I suspect as gene sequencing gets commoditized and personalized medicine actually becomes practical, we'll find a lot more cases where it makes sense to analyze people on the basis of their individual traits rather than what broad groups we can class them under

Ah, we've switched arguments. Upthread, you stated:

> And for most people, “man” and “male” are synonyms.

If you're now arguing for a distinction between the terms, we're now in agreement.

Regarding what transitioning is. For some people, transition can be entirely social with no medical element. Hormones are not a required part of medical transition. I know at lease one trans person who has had some surgery and no hormones ever, by choice. I also know of two trans people who have had some medical transition but haven’t socially transitioned.

For many trans people, there’s a set of incongruities between how they experience themselves and how they are seen, their bodies, how they’re allowed to present themselves, etc. Things that are actively distressing for one trans person may not bother another one. One way to look at transition is the process addressing the important (to the individual) self-perceived incongruities.

Regarding how many trans people there are and how do I know so many. Everyone I have spoken about is someone that I have met in person. A couple of hundred, at least. A lot of that is involvement in LGBTQ rights, which tends to put me in the presence of people who are social super-connectors. Some of that was a period of being the only out executive at a big company. There was a while where HR would give my contact info to every person who told them of a desire to transition at work.

But the two biggest factors are a) living somewhere that it’s relatively safe to transition and b) being deliberately visible in a lot of ways. Trans people absolutely migrate to places where they can be themselves safely. Trans people pretty much have full legal equality in California (not The same as social equality). So trans people come here. Washington and Oregon come close to legal equality, as does most of the east coast as far south as Virginia. A lot of cities in otherwise hostile states provide protections. Iowa City and a few other towns in Iowa are decent places to be trans. And even without legal protections, some places are islands of relative safety.

So, in my extended community of friends there are several trans people, and not because I sought them out. Just because there are a lot of trans people here. Three people from the 50-odd person Company I worked at in 2008 have subsequently come out as trans (pre-transition for me and the introduction to them was made by a former Wall Street colleague).

Being willing to be publicly identified as trans means cis friends connect me to trans friends, especially those just coming out. Occasionally some of those people become friends.

Closeted trans people are still trans. Many trans people regard themselves as having always been trans, even though they figured it out later in life. Some trans people talk about “before I was trans”. There’s no monolith of experience or language for describing it.

I actually think the number of trans people is closer to 2-3%, but the studies for that have methodological problems (the percentage is much higher, but there’s a failure to distinguish between types of gender non-conformity). I don’t really care, other than the increasing number of people who decide transition being seen as contagion.

There is one thing that’s “contagious”. Seeing a happy trans person changes your world if your trans and you believe trans people are sad and tragic. You can’t unsee that. Almost every trans person I know has some story about how someone they barely knew came to them and told them that seeing them changed their lives.

Transgender people can get HRT, socially transition, and undergo GCS. The people who use the term "transsexual" to describe themselves today are usually doing so to draw a line in the sand between those who are "trenders" and those who are "true trans". This line in the sand can be identifying as a man or woman and not taking anything else seriously (regardless of HRT and GCS status), demanding rigid gender role conformity, or wanting to exclude those who are unable to afford/access HRT and/or GCS from being trans. If you want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, google "truscum" and "transmedicalism".

The term "transgender" is considered the more appropriate term, and the initial push for it was that "transsexual" sounded like it was a sexual orientation. It is only relatively recently that using "transsexual" became a bit of a political stance within the trans community.

> And what makes cis-gender then, except the fact that you are fine to be called he/she?

If you are cisgender, you agree with the sex you were assigned at birth. That does not mean you must agree with or conform to most or all of the cultural expectations foisted upon you due to what you were assigned at birth, just that the sex you were assigned at birth seems right and does not clash with your gender identity.[0]

There is some debate over whether non-binary individuals are transgender, but given that most definitions of transgender revolve around someone's gender identity being at odds with the sex they were assigned at birth, unless they were pronounced non-binary at birth (which does not happen to my knowledge), they are trans. That said, using the transgender label is an individual decision - trans people who "go stealth" (typically involving moving to a new place and abandoning your old friends so nobody would know you are trans and never telling anyone about your past) would not use the label publicly, but it does not make them not-trans. In addition, many non-binary people view themselves as unworthy of the transgender label or do not use it in order to avoid stigma and invasive questions. This is a personal choice and I do not blame people for not wanting to tell others they are trans, whether they identify firmly as male or female, or somewhere in-between.

[0] I want to elaborate on this point - gender identity can really be thought of as the "sex" of your brain. The sexual differentiation of the genitals occurs during the first 2 months of pregnancy, while the sexual differentiation of the brain occurs during the second half of pregnancy. If there are plenty of androgens (testosterone, DHT, etc) in the womb during the first 2 months but few during the second half, you could have a child with masculinized genitals but a feminized brain (a trans woman), and vice-versa for trans men.[1] (I have not found any research related to this and non-binary individuals, unfortunately.) However, an imbalance between these periods does not guarantee a trans child - we do not fully understand the mechanisms at play, but it appears that there is a genetic component,[2] so there is no way to predict if someone will turn out trans or not.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21094885/

[2] http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2010to2014/2013-t...

I'm not trying to claim anything about the science in this particular article because I haven't read it in enough detail but a PI I worked with had this habit of dismissing research based on journal IFs, which was pretty annoying.