#tmrw ill maybe try and make a simpler and shorter post after i sleep on it to try and actually talk 2 other autistic womans :!

[cruelsister-moved]

feel like im not allowed to have gender issues or whatever bc im like. gender conforming in that I'm not clearly gender non conforming and im a woman in that I'm clearly not a man but like that's. all there is to it and idk i tend to just mind my own business and respect that i don't really experience gender related distress (i do as in like. being distressed that my experiences are dominated by misogny and its like an inherently for want of a better word dysphoric experience but like the fact that im as much a woman as I am anything else)

and like i think autism impacts my experience of gender SO much and it is both bc i don't seem to really "get" gender the way it seems to mean things for allistic ppl but also like. growing up as an autistic girl is such a gendered experience. my entire childhood was looking over my shoulder wondering why I wasnt like the other girls - even from a young age my feelings of not being quite right were always measured against the other girls as a yardstick, and i built my mask based on trying to copy them.

i didn't feel this intense gender isolation around boys, I was largely indifferent to them and if anything more comfortable around them because I didn't feel the intense expectation that i was supposed to be like them, and the discomfort from feeling like i so obviously wasn't - i wasn't like them either, but it didn't cut the same because I wasn't expected to be.

being an autistic girl felt like being a person in a fursuit in a pack of actual wolves (LOL sorry for the awkward metaphor). like it was obvious what I was supposed to be but it was always artificial and deliberate and obviously performed. my girlhood was a uniform i wore to try and blend in and ultimately it was something i put on and took off while masking, and not something i ever internalised or thought about as part of my own perception of myself.

I'm never going to be able to detach my perspective of my own gender from those experiences, I'm never going to not feel it as an uniform i put on in the dark and get to school and try and figure out if everyone is looking at me funny. i know the whole "im not a man or a woman, I'm me :)" thing is so whatever but i really don't feel gender to be a discernable part of myself.

i love girly stuff and i love being a femme in a butch femme relationship but all of it feels like something very personal to me that doesnt relate to social gendering in any way at all. like being into sports is just a standalone part of you rather than a one half of a binary you sort into. like...im a girl on my own, but i feel completely out of place being a girl in relation to other girls.

bc I don't really perceive gender innately, my experience of gender is all comparative. i see the signs and the marks it leaves , rather than the thing itself as a discrete object. im aware of gender when Im comparing myself to another girl, but I feel nothing alike to her - what I'm really comparing is how we are seen by a 3rd party. do i exude the same signs as she does that mark me as "like her"?. my access to gender is indirect, interpreted through observing its secondary output from others.

ive always been aware of the autisic different understanding of gender thing but I didn't ever properly follow through on all my feelings of discomfort and realise how deeply tied gender & masking was and still is for me and I think like the experience specifically of being an autistic woman creates this very specific gender experience... this is a lot of fumbling to try and put my finger on things but autistic ppl w gender diseases I would love to hear ur thoughts 💜

i think in a lot of this i am just awkwardly trying to explain what masking is like so the tldr of this if u already know is like. for me gender is basically a part of masking which means I do have a concept of my gender but its inseparable from like. observing and mimicking to avoid the consequences of being different and not like smth i understand or internalise or feel is me or whatever?