Guest post: Recognising the pattern

Originally a comment by tiggerthewing on When did it begin?

For me, it was recognising the pattern of Cluster B abuse from when it happened in my favourite Asperger’s/autism forum, although I didn’t have a name for it until fellow commenters, here and on Facebook, joined the dots for themselves with regard to transactivism, and so educated me.

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It even happened the same way (Cluster B behaviour seems to go by the book):

Firstly:

Someone points out how unfair it is to expect every member to have a full, official diagnosis of Asperger’s [dysphoria]. They request that self-identifying should be enough.

• Reason 1: Official diagnosis is expensive; and difficult and convoluted to obtain.

• Reason 2: A lot of people are just suspecting that they might be on the spectrum [trans] and a support forum is the best place for them to explore their identity, and it would be mean to deprive fellow autists [possibly dysphoric] people of support just because they hadn’t yet found or couldn’t afford the official channels.

Some commenters argued that this would pave the way for non-autistic [non-dysphoric] abusers to pretend to be Aspie [trans], but were shouted down because “Who on Earth would do that?! No-one is going to pretend to be autistic [trans] just to access accommodations!” (It’s not that autistic people lack a theory of mind; it is that experience has taught us that what we first thought – that everyone thinks the same way that we do – is false, and that we cannot actually know what another person is thinking).

Of course, the cautious people (who might have encountered just such Cluster B abusers in their past) were right, because:

Secondly:

People with Cluster B personality disorders start to infiltrate. They have excellent people-reading skills, and know exactly how to present themselves to get other people to see them the way they want to be seen. They recruit ‘flying monkeys’ in back channels/private messages, and start to pile on the people who have recognised the abusive behaviour, framing the accusations in such a way that it makes it seem that the whistle-blowers are the bad guys.

The autism forum imploded, but the abusers (whilst, no doubt, having huge fun at our expense) failed to get the vehicle that they wanted for influencing wider society in their favour. This is probably because autistics (notoriously) are impossible to organise offline. Despite plenty of war-like rhetoric, the autistic lads were never actually going to get together and storm government offices, demanding whatever it was that the agitators wanted. They also misread the public attitude to autistic people – their sympathy is entirely directed to the poor, martyred ‘autism moms’, and there isn’t an ounce of empathy for autistic people ourselves.

The ‘self-diagnosed’ people simply went back to being camouflaged members of normal society, fading into the woodwork until they discovered a new vulnerable group to be their Trojan Horse. Transsexuals.

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Ophelia and the commenters here helped me to see the pattern; the way she was treated at FtB was the catalyst in my leaving that site for good. Discovering that radical feminism has a much better way to deal with dysphoria than blaming the dysphoric person (i.e. get rid of the sex stereotype boxes, don’t mutilate someone to fit into the other box) was a major influence in my deciding that ‘being trans’ actually isn’t what I am, and the totally illogical, quasi-religious ‘arguments’ of the transactivists cemented my peak trans moment.

TL;DR: Peak trans for me was discovering that transactivists are abusers, and that radical feminism has a better answer to dysphoria than saying “You’re trans.”

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