Autism & Not Fitting In

When I started to identify as trans, all of these little things suddenly made sense in my head. It was because I had been a boy inside all along!

Feeling ‘not like the other girls’ (and not in the quirky, internalised misogyny, pick-me kind of way) is quite common in autistic girls and women. Being autistic in general can make you feel like you don’t fit in - like you’re different to everyone around you. I didn’t ‘feel’ like a girl, because the girls around me seemed so alien to me. I couldn’t relate to them at all.

In my early teens, I used to see the girls in my school as though they were odd sheep. They all wore the same clothes, had the same hairstyle, carried the same bags (always Jane Norman. Why was it always Jane Norman? I still don't get!) I found this behaviour so strange and confusing. But of course, to my undiagnosed autistic brain, they were the weird ones, because I couldn’t understand them.

But by my mid-to-late teens, I started to come to the realisation that it was me that was the ‘weird’ one. I was constantly reminded by society, by my peers, and even by my mother that I wasn’t a ‘normal’ girl. It is not difficult to see how easy it would be for a girl like me to latch onto gender ideology, convincing myself that the reason that I was so rubbish at being a girl was because I was supposed to have been born a boy.