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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Autism has extremely high overlap within the LGBT community:

Current research indicates that autistic people have higher rates of LGBT identities and feelings than the general population.[1][2][3] A variety of explanations for this have been proposed, such as prenatal hormonal exposure, which has been linked with both sexual orientation, gender dysphoria and autism. Alternatively, autistic people may be less reliant on social norms and thus are more open about their orientation or gender identity. A narrative review published in 2016 stated that while various hypotheses have been proposed for an association between autism and gender dysphoria, they lack strong evidence.[4]

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_LGBT_identities

Given the extremely strong overlap between autism and the entirety of the QUILTBAG grouping, I would expect that autism would be the next on the list after or alongside late-stage transgender rights campaigning.

That is from Wikipedia which is by default unreliable on social topics (and the cited sources seem no better at first glance, though I don't have access to the full contents) so I can't help but wonder: how much of that apparent connection is just due to the fact that wokeists like to LARP as both LGBTQ+ and autistic?

Is there any study that doesn't just rely on self-identification, and explicitly acknowledges the difference between “I'm a male who has had penetrative sex with multiple other males” and “I identify as pansexual online because heterosexuals aren't cool anymore and to be fair I do occasionally jerk off to femboy porn though all my crushes are on girls”? And the difference between nonverbal autists and people who claim to have Aspergers after scoring 17/20 on a test they found on tumblr?

Overall I suspect that the most prominent members of the LGBTQ+ community are only mildly autistic at best, if for no other reason than that it's still a social community.

In any case, I think it's a mistake to assume that the woke are natural allies to autists. Look at how much criticism an organization like Autism Speaks gets from the woke left for (very sensibly imo) saying it would be nice if autism could be cured. To the woke, the idea that autistic people might struggle in social situations is an unfair prejudice that ”neurotypicals” hold about autistic people.

And I think this tendency towards self-identification as fashion among the woke leads to less understanding, because it creates a false impression of how debilitating these conditions can be.

You say it's unfair that the police arrest you because you didn't realize the woman you met on the bus was deeply uncomfortable while you were talking at length about your favorite anime? Well, that sounds like a load of crap. My friend Ayden is a transman who suffers from self-diagnosed autism, dyslexia and OCD, and yet shhe has never been arrested for something like that, so it sounds to me like you are using your autism as an excuse for your toxic male behavior.