It's doubly saddening, because she does seem to have actual problems that go beyond mere teenage angst. Now, I might be schizo posting from here, but my hypothesis is that she is mildly autistic and a good deal of her experiences could be explained in that light.
The priors on this being true are pretty high just since feminine/heterosexually-inclined girls are the most autistic sub-population amongst troons. Pediatric gender clinics typically run up >50% ASD/suspected ASD amongst boys and girls, and rates of up to 70% have been reported in girls in Australia.
Moreover, the repeated confusion and uncertainty over her sexual orientation is
extremely common in girls with autism, as is a lack of desire for sexual contact. Girls with autism also have sky-high rates of anxiety disorders, something she certainly seems to suffer from. Beyond mere statistic inference, she constantly says things that are strikingly odd. To get us started, consider this:
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Now, there's nothing unusual about wanting big boobs as a tween, but the way she formulates this
is unusual and it's part of a broader pattern in how she talks about being girl. She constantly talks about feeling a sense of lost identity and just looking at the world around her:
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She writes at other times that she didn't feel she really understood being a woman and instead took it as a sort of "competitive" pursuit, and that it was something she did because she thought it was expected of her. A lot of this seems to have been slightly ret-conned as being linked to her gender dysphoria:
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That word 'masking' is a choice one. She also has written multiple times about feeling 'dissociated', of 'feeling uncomfortable at having a physical form' and not '[feeling] like an actual real human person':
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This pattern of not knowing "who [you] are," of being guided by social mimicry. This here is from a
qualitative study of women with autism:
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Sound familiar? That feeling of exhaustion is one that she has written about as well.
There is also this which is a real "Oh...":
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Hyper-vigilance to touch is
very common in autistic individuals. It also shows how 'gender dysphoria' works to absorb all her struggles and uncertainties; a guiding narrative for her to understand all the things she never could.
There are other little things as well: the slightly stereotyped way she talks about being a programmer, the way her posts often seem to leave out some part of the context or depend on other posts that she could have no expectation that anyone had read. Is that a sign of mild
ToM impairment? She always has 'social anxiety' - practically ubiquitous in girls with autism - which alone might mean nothing, but given everything else I'd beg to differ:
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It is always difficult - and dangerous - to diagnose people via reddit posts and ultimately, only she and those who know her best, can say whether it provides a truer explanation for all that she feels. My firm feeling is that she would greatly benefit from, at the very least, investigating the matter. See an autism specialist, one that is experienced with girls & women with autism because she desperately needs something to help her understand why she is the way she is. And this is not the answer:
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Top surgery might stop you from bruising your ribs, but will it really fix your problems? Will you really be any closer to feeling at home in your body, comfortable in who you are? It can be easy to think you know the answer, but we are all easily fooled most of all by ourselves. When anyone struggles with mental illness, they inevitably come to feel an insatiable longing to have things finally be at an end. It drives people to seek these little nirvanas - "perfect" solutions - that in our dreams will finally get the spider off our backs, and each and every time, we are wrong.
