Apologies if this is late, but some personal lolcows were sharing this thing around.
(Otherkin retard I got it from
https://mobile.twitter.com/quiznoscoyote/status/1378484821819858950
https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1b2CkIQJUFXu9ryafwC-7pZiIaUyk8-woiawVcRkyAYA/mobilebasic hysterical google doc that starts off with “Becquerel fron Homestuck” detailing his discovery of him being a coyote)
Can anyone tell me what the fuck this passage means?
It basically just means that, because autists have a (strong) tendency to behave in a socially abnormal manner, because they fail to take after those around them therefore they are held to be resistant to "social conditioning."
The second part of the passage is actually from a classic family "why possibly" explanations that pop up in basically every autism-troon paper, if only because it's in every other paper. It also helps that it isn't inherently 'hostile' to an innatist view of gender identity and helps explain away (or at least minimize) what is otherwise a troubling anomaly. For certain academics, this is evidently an important consideration.
Generally there are two variations on it: (a) Autists are more willing to 'explore' gender variation, because they have less awareness of associated norms or (b) because they aren't motivated to obey or care about those norms for either neuro-psychological reasons or because social exclusion/failure decreases motivation.
There's no clear distinction between (a) and (b) type explanations, but depending on the motivations of the authors, they'll be differentially emphasized and intertwined.
I actually have a very similar passage from another book on hand:
Here (a) is more strongly emphasized and seen as driving (b). The author of your passage may have left out anything to do with lack of awareness, because she is herself is an autistic troon (calls herself "genderqueer," but she just looks like a somewhat elderly lesbian) and because she recognizes that it would cut against her argument against Zucker et. al.. [35] in the above is the same
(Walsh, 201
paper cited in your passage. The lead author on the paper is (naturally) an autistic AGP who posts on twitter about being a "lesbian."
But, despite that fact, I think these arguments are partially correct and do mediate part of the autism-troonism connection though not in the way suggested in your passage. There is, of course, no such thing as "true trans" in the first instance, and no innate 'gender identity' or such a thing as a pure, socially unconditioned, authentic self.
Really, what seems to be incredibly important is that autists are liable to form social identities and goals that are uninformed and unmotivated by any actual social interaction, but militated by internal fantasies. These are often incredibly unusual due to autists often having peculiar interests. Additionally, mind-reading (i.e. ToM) deficits which are central in producing autistic social cognition causes substantial impairment in social prospection leading autists to attempt to perform a given identity even when it would be perceived as odd or lead to mockery. They also may not even realize that their behavior is considered odd or that they are being mocked for it. Whether they're self-aware or not, the problem both compounds and is compounded by, social isolation and not sharing interests with others, further driving an autist into fixating more strongly on their fantasy-identity without regard towards reactions their behavior generates or towards forming relationships. It's a kind of 'virtuous' cycle; social failure engenders more social failure.
The classic consequence of this process is this kind of shit:
But, you can view trooning out as just a souped up version of being a euphoric classy gentleman with a big sword. Instead of fantasizing about being a suave intellectual who cuts through the FICTIONS of the Bible like a red-hot katana through butter, you think of yourself as a cute teenage girl, cool edgy dyke, non-binary trans femme sex worker (the more esoteric, the more autistic symptomatology) or whatever.
Extending the metaphor a little, you can view the rejoinder that they are engaging in "autistic resistance to social conditioning" in contrast to the sheeples who display a "higher susceptibility to social conditioning" as being more or less this:
Of course, they are not really any less susceptible to "social conditioning"; just less to likely to react to different forms of "conditioning" (i.e. experiences or knowledge) in the typical way. You can be "conditioned" by having friends or by spending 16 hours a day on reddit/tumblr/twitter/YouTube and anecdotally, autists are much more suspectible to this latter form of "conditioning." It's the same either way, just one of them is more antithetical to living a good life.
