Featured Stories Manifested My Dream Man After Countless Heartbreaks. I had come across The Secret in my teenage years but it was not until last year that I began to.

Last May, Dr. Kathleen Levinstein, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, wrote a about her autistic daughter, a teenaged girl who became convinced that she was really a man trapped inside a woman’s body.

With encouragement from transgender activists at the local organization of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), the vulnerable young woman took sex-altering hormones and cut off her breasts. Levinstein now grieves the mutilation of her daughter’s body and the increased psychological confusion her daughter is experiencing as a result of the hormones. She states, “She has been taken advantage of. Healthy organs were amputated. It is a crime not just against women, but particularly against disabled women.

So many of these young women who are ‘transitioning’ are also autistic.” Some contemporary studies have made a connection between gender “dysphoria” and autism. A recent article in uses these studies to push the idea that “transitioning” is a healthy, even necessary, option for those on the spectrum who want it. The author asserts that any effort to discourage such “medical care” to those with special needs is callous. In this way, The Atlantic interweaves natural sympathy for the growing autism awareness movement with transgender ideology. The Atlantic has it backwards. To help and protect individuals on the spectrum, there needs to be greater awareness of transgenderism’s lies and why those on the spectrum could be susceptible to its manipulation. Encouraging sex-change or an alternate gender identity is destructive to individuals with autism or Asperger’s (previously in a separate diagnostic category), only furthering their private pain.

Why would those who are neurobiologically different also come to see themselves as a different biological sex with the rising influence of the transgender movement? Neurologically atypical individuals spend much of their childhood and adolescence quietly struggling with how others misunderstand them and how they understand themselves. It is critical to understand this struggle in order to push back against the encroachment of transgender ideology into the gifted and special needs community. With boys, the struggle may be outwardly noticeable. With young girls, the struggle is often more hidden (and undiagnosed). I can offer some insight into this struggle through my own childhood experience as an undiagnosed girl with Asperger’s. As a child, I flapped my hands and engaged in what it called “stimming.” My particular type of stimming involved opening my mouth wide in a self-stimulatory manner.

My jaw dropped and my hands shook repetitively while my voice sounded as if it was out-of-breath (I wasn’t struggling for breath at all). Most clinicians in the 1970s and 1980s did not even know what “stimming” was.

Autism was not fully on the cultural radar yet and the groundbreaking writings of Hans Asperger had only been recently translated from the original German. I loved stimming and still do. It felt relaxing: a kind of natural, harmless high in the brain that others around me would never know and could not attain. Nonetheless, I learned at a young age to only stimmy in private so as to avoid ridicule. From a young age, I always knew I was different in some way.

Females with Asperger’s often go unrecognized because young girls are better able to “fake it until they make it” in the neurotypical world. They are better at it up to a point. That point is usually adolescence. During adolescence, the stresses of holding all the quirks and idiosyncrasies in check can be too much to bear in the face of increased social expectations. As a result, Asperger’s girls growing up often prefer the company of boys and generally find it far easier to relate with males. As psychiatrist Martin L.

Kutscher writes in The Syndrome Mix, “Many women who have Asperger’s syndrome have described to psychologists and in autobiographies how they sometimes think they have a male rather than a female brain, having a greater understanding and appreciation of the interests, thinking, and humor of boys during their early school years.” Sound familiar? This aspect of their cerebral wiring—the conflict between what they feel, how they perceive the world and how the world perceives them—existed long before the neo-Gnosticism of transgender ideology came into vogue. Their thinking is often highly literal. Their mothers struggle to understand them and they find it easier to relate to their fathers. Due to their unusual traits, they are also prime targets for bullying by “mean girls” during adolescence, further alienating them. I can attest to that from personal experience having ended up with a concussion and blood streaming down my face in middle school.