Autigender is not valid


TL;DR: The current definition of autigender effectively opens up the possibility of self-identified (!) autism, which is invalid and would have lateral damages upon autistic people.

If we follow the definition of "when one's autism greatly affects one's gender and/or how one experiences gender", the word "autigender" should by definition refers to the group of people whose gender identity is under the effect of autism. The word "transgender", in a technical sense, means "to transition between genders" and refers to the group of people whose gender identity is under the effect of [insert-anything-you-think-is-correct-to-insert-here]; thus autigender shall not be considered a gender but the state of gender being influenced by autism in the same sense that transgender is not considered to be a gender but rather the state of going between gender.

The current (or most progressive, if you will) theory of gender is that one can simply declare that they are of a different gender than they thought they were before; this idea leaks to the concept realm for the word "autigender" because the two terms intrinistically share the same structure, but this time no one has any way to replace autism with other things like how they replace actual gender dysphoria with gender euphoria for transgenderism: autism is an actual illness, you either have it (whether severe or not) or don't have it; thus, to declare yourself to be autigender is the same thing as declaring you're under the effect of autism, and thus implies you're declaring you have autism. It doesn't matter if the word "autigender" actually means "autism as a gender" or not, the implication of self-identified (not even self-diagnosed because that involves actual research and is normally not involved with gender issue) autism is still there.

Let's recap:


This concept came out no later than 2014 on Tumblr. It saddens me that while the teens in Japan (& Greater East Asia) believed they should "tear off the tags on their back", the teens in the Greater West were busy inventing new tags they could stick onto themselves with. To be honest, I sincerely don't care if they come up with 50 or 500 or 114514 genders everyday; but when they decide to incorporate autism into their gender theory as if it's not a serious problem that requires serious treatment instead of whatever "theory" they're cooking, I couldn't help but feel annoyed. Autism is not this cool shiny quirky thing, it's a curse. Look at Christine Chandler. How many of these self-proclaimed "autigender" people would stop labeling themselves that after knowing how fucked up some instances of this illness could become?

Autigender is not valid. Please, for all the suffering autistic people out there, deprecate this word and stop making tags like this. You're not being cool and quirky, you're being pathetic.

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