Melbourne father-of-three Scott* describes his eldest son John* – a 16-year-old with severe level two autism – as a square peg in a round hole. “He has trouble making friends. He suffers from social anxiety, depression and phobias. He’s emotionally much younger than his years,” says Scott, an IT expert.
John’s overwhelming drive to make friendships led him online, where Scott says he found a community of other autistic children, many of whom were trans identifying. John joined groups and threads on online communities such as Reddit and Discord, and struck up a relationship with an AI-generated gender therapist on CharacterAI.com
“Kids like my boy, [who are] not grounded in their own physicality, are more than happy to consider different genders,” Scott says. “He was 15 when he came to me and said, ‘Dad, I think I’m trans, I think I’m a girl’. There was no indication of this before. It just came out of the blue. His depth of understanding is at the level of memes he’s found online, and he will repeat back to me word for word what he’s read on a website. It’s terrifying.”
Even more terrifying, Scott says, are his son’s physical outbursts. On multiple occasions, while struggling to regulate his emotions, John has attacked his parents. “We’ve had the police in the house three or four times,” Scott says. After John threatened his father with violence while both were on school grounds, a report was made to child protection services, who turned up at their home. What did they want to talk about? “They wanted to discuss our unwillingness to affirm his gender. They left him with brochures of LGBTQA+ youth groups he could contact.
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