When I was at bible camp, sometime around age 11, a camp counsellor told us on boys-only night that our bodies were going to start going through changes, changes we might not like. He explained that we were going to start getting a lot of sinful thoughts that we didn’t want. It turned out that this counsellor, like an evangelical Paul Atreides, had the gift of prescience.

Puberty hit me harder than the animated movie “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” hit horse girls in 2002. For the next seven years or so I would experience what I would later learn is called “severe gender dysphoria,” but which I thought of at the time as “the devil tempting me in some very weird ways.” Thanks to the careful guidance of my counsellor, who was obviously referring to gender dysphoria and not to the shame of being horny while evangelical, I understood that this was actually a completely normal and typical experience of puberty.

I am, of course, joking. I doubt that he had even the slightest awareness of gender dysphoria. The “advice” I received didn’t work, and I mostly just suffered until, for some hitherto unknown reason or by the grace of a God I no longer believed in, the dysphoria subsided at around age nineteen.

I still can’t quite piece together why I thought this was normal: it is hard to imagine going through this experience and thinking, “yeah, I bet everyone else my age also feels this way.” My best explanation is that the combination of my autistic black and white thinking, my hyper-literal interpretations of the evangelical Christians around me, and my inability to read non-verbal communication or pick up on social cues led me to this conclusion. It was like a sitcom-esque comedy of errors, except instead of the plot resolving itself when all the misunderstandings are revealed at the end of the episode, I just realized I had far more in common with trans women than I had previously thought.

I think a big reason I never questioned if my experience wasn’t normal was because my counsellor’s sage wisdom ended up being correct. I did in fact go on to experience changes to my body that resulted in many sinful thoughts. I struggled with shame and discomfort. I also did truly feel like the devil was assaulting me and telling me I was not strong enough to weather the storm. His wisdom was also further reinforced by virtually every other talk about sex and gender that I encountered in the evangelical world in the next few years. No one was specific about exactly what it was that they were feeling or why. In most discussions they just vaguely gestured at feelings of “sin” and “shame.” If they did talk about something more specific, they would usually stick to tamer examples that wouldn’t scandalize the audience or tempt them into further sexual sin, then gesture to much more scandalous things by saying, “And that is just the tip of the iceberg: it gets way worse.” My imagination filled in the “way worse” with my own personal experiences, and so I extrapolated that this was a normal experience.

Dysphoria is very weird to try to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it: it is definitely something “you had to be there” for. Like many autistics, I also have very high levels of alexithymia, so decoding my own internal feelings and emotions is often very difficult. It is hard for me, over 10 years after the events, to remember what was depression, what was social anxiety, what was autism, and what was gender dysphoria. I suspect it is a mistake to try to separate these into discrete categories as they are all experienced at the same time and in the same milieu.

My dysphoria was always present at some level, but would often oscillate like a high volatility meme coin. Also like a high volatility meme coin, it would make me sad to watch it given how much I had invested in it. Often I would feel like everything in my life was imploding and I would never get out the mental hell I was living in, and then other times I was mostly fine and would think, “Ah, I’m finally out of the woods,” before it came roaring back a little while later. The easiest corollary that I can draw to what it felt like is the type of body dysmorphia you get with an eating disorder or extreme steroid use, but it isn’t about your body fat percentage or muscle volume. Well, to be fair, it is about your body fat percentage and muscle volume, but it is also about the hair on your head, face, and well, everywhere else, about your voice, your clothes, the way you interact with people, the way they interact with you, and nearly every aspect of your life that gender permeates—which is pretty much all of them. It is also mixed in with a healthy dose of rumination, magnification, black and white thinking, and other relevant cognitive distortions.

I’ve experimented with many different ways of explaining it, and the best way that I’ve found is to imagine if one day you woke up and someone had tattooed something obscene and embarrassing on your face. You now need to go through your whole life with this face tattoo: makeup might be able to blur it, and you might be able to grow out your bangs or wear a mask or a hat to partially hide it, but that wouldn’t fully cover it. This tattoo should not be there, and every time you look in the mirror you are reminded it is there and you have to deal with a cascade of thoughts about perceiving yourself, being perceived by others, and perceiving yourself as perceived by others. You stare at knives in your kitchen, wondering just how painful it would be to carve it out of your flesh and how mad your parents would be when they inevitably found the bathroom covered in blood and their son with a chunk of his face carved out. This is an imperfect metaphor: there are a lot of aspects of gender dysphoria that I can’t seem to analogize, but this is the closest approximation I can convey to the average person.

You probably would not have been able to tell I had gender dysphoria when I was a teenager. I showed no signs of gender dysphoria as a child and was by all accounts a very typical boy. Typical is probably the wrong term: what I mean is that I wasn’t gender non-conforming. Despite being a very weird kid who knew far more about the Nazi Battleship Bismark than any seven-year-old should, I did not show any of the typical signs of gender dysphoria or distress that some dysphoric boys show at a very early age. The only sign that I think I ever showed (or at least the only one I am consciously aware of) was a long-held fascination with swapping gender in video games. I would do this thing where I would make a male and a female character: I would play on the male character normally, and would save the female character for special occasions like when I was sad and needed to be cheered up. I also played a lot of the MMORPG RuneScape as a child, and there was a character called the makeover mage who could swap your gender for 3000gp, and the idea of a magical wizard who could change your gender for money was something that I thought about a lot and was the subject of many daydreams. I didn’t want to actively change my gender at this point—I just thought the idea of it being possible was neat.

I didn’t really have any feelings of distress or discomfort as a boy: like many autistic boys, my severe gender dysphoria and distress began with puberty. The onset was at first very gradual but its presence quickly became undeniable as it started to linger, surge through, and permeate most of my daily thoughts. Things started to change for me at around age twelve, and by age thirteen it became so strong and pronounced that I couldn’t deny it. In order to deal with it, I began playing a very stupid game of cat and mouse, attempting to outmanoeuvre my own mental illness through a series of ill-fated strategies. This was about as effective as you would expect gender dysphoria treatment to be if it was created by a misinformed evangelical preteen boy with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome.

My dysphoria manifested in a lot of ways. Some, in retrospect, I find quite funny, and some far less funny and mostly just sad. During this phase of life, I developed a lot of maladaptive coping mechanisms and habits that I still suffer with and have to manage. For example, I developed an eating disorder at age fourteen that I still have to manage to this day. I did things like begging my parents to allow me to get cosmetic surgery to remove moles from my face, thinking that the problems I had with my face were because of the small moles I had and that if I could get rid of them it would solve those problems. (This solved nothing other than having fewer facial moles.) For a few years I exclusively wore military surplus and buzzed my hair, hoping that I could starve out the feelings in a protracted war of mental attrition. I had some pretty monumental freak-outs when I was accused of “being a girl” by my coaches. These meltdowns were not motivated by the fact that I was being called a girl, but thinking that somehow they had discovered me and I needed to deny it really hard and wildly overcompensate. I started self-harming. I developed depression and very bad social anxiety. I hated when people saw me shirtless and used any excuse to not go swimming until I went to sports camps with the Air Cadets and did so many push-ups that I started developing decent-sized pectorals. Then I did 120 push-ups a day, five days a week, in order to keep my chest development.

Throughout this time I also had a strong, lingering, and ever present fascination with women. I don’t mean in a sexual way, but in the way that you might be fascinated with beetles, a book series, or movies by a particular director. To be fair it was also in a sexual way because I was a mostly heterosexual male teenager, but I think it is crucial to mention there was a much larger non-sexual component to the fascination. I liked women’s fashion, jewellery, and aesthetics and spent a huge amount of time on the internet learning about it. I knew this was very weird for me to be interested in, especially given that my other autistic special interest was WWII and so I hid it as best I could. At the time when most boys were worried about their parents finding them looking up internet porn, I was far more concerned with my mom finding out that I was discussing dresses, accessories, and silhouettes on historical fashion forums. I soon realized that I could actually channel this interest into men’s fashion, and so after the whole wearing mil surp plan failed, I stopped buzzing my hair and wearing camo and got really into men’s wear. I started wearing dress shirts, cuff-links, sweater vests, blazers, and basically tried everything in my power to look like a 1920’s English professor. Getting really into men’s fashion and being something of a fancy lad actually did make feelings of dysphoria lessen ever so slightly and that felt very good, so I leaned into it.

Another very important aspect of the dysphoria, one that I think often goes under-discussed, was my inability to adjust to the new expectations for gendered socialization that were foisted on me when puberty hit. Gendered relationships all of a sudden became exponentially more complicated: any expression of tenderness or interest in your male friend became “gay,” and any prolonged contact with a girl your age would be seen as a sign of romantic interest. I mostly had male friends, and while I often wasn’t romantically interested in them, I was interested in developing a much deeper closeness and platonic intimacy common in female friendship, which I quickly learned was not acceptable between male friends. It also became clear to me that this level of intimacy with a girl my age was also completely off limits outside the context of a romantic relationship. I felt really sad about this, because to quote DJ Crazy Times in his hit song Planet of the Bass, “Life, it never die, women are my favourite guy,” and to this day, the vast majority of my friends are women (autistic women to be more specific, but I think they still probably count). It quickly became apparent to me that both of these problems would no longer be an issue if I was either gay—which to evangelical teenage Jon was akin to apostasy—or a girl, which created a very noticeable pull factor.

I also had this sense, especially as I physically grew very tall and started to develop muscle (I’m 6’7’’, 200cm), that I was all of a sudden forced into the category of being a perceived threat. I was no longer just another person in a sea of other people; I was, to at least half of them, dangerous, and I didn’t have the social skills, social awareness, or charm to convince them that I wasn’t. These rapid changes in how people perceived me, and my inability to navigate these new social contexts, probably did more than anything else to exacerbate the dysphoria, and thinking about it would send me into very long spirals of dread where I would wish that I had simply been born in the opposite sex so I didn’t have to navigate these challenges. I now understand as an adult man that this was very much a “grass is always greener on the other side” situation and it would not have made my social relationships easier, but teenage Jon had a very different impression.

There is a meme in the online trans community called “The Button.” The question is basically, “If you could press a button and it would permanently change you to the opposite sex, would you press it?” For this roughly seven year stretch of my life I would have been an unhesitating, “yes, absolutely,” with no second thoughts. It is really hard to express just how bad this period of my internal mental life was without devolving into a pity party about my former teenage angst but I can assure you that it was not fun. Overall my experience of puberty and being a teenager in general was that of being a mouse in a glue trap wondering if I should gnaw off my own arm to get out of it. While I don’t remember everything about my teenage years, I remember that I would have done almost anything at the time to get the feelings to stop. I hadn’t heard of gender dysphoria at that time and didn’t know trans women were even a thing.

For some reason, just like how it started, the dysphoria slowly started to subside and sometime around age 19 it stopped. I should clarify: it didn’t ever fully go away, it just reduced to a level where I could handle it and where I no longer felt distressed and actively dysphoric. It will still occasionally flare up—usually cycling in with depression and bog-standard body dysmorphia where I start obsessing about body fat percentages and have to re-manage my eating disorder—but in the last 13 years it has never gotten to a point where I feel like it is unmanageable or unbearable.

I could guess and speculate, but ultimately I don’t know why it stopped, only that it did stop. If I had to speculate, I would point out that a lot of very significant changes happened in my life and any number of these combinations of things could have contributed. I don’t think it is worth listing these things, mostly because I know a lot of trans women and dysphoric autistics who are going to read it like a “how to fix your dysphoria” list, and believe me it is not that. I have no idea if any or all of these pretty significant life changes did anything. I know many people who were also going through severe gender dysphoria who did almost exactly the same things as I did whose dysphoria just got 10x worse. I also just don’t know if all or any of these factors contributed: maybe none of them did, I really just don’t know and can’t play back the experiment to eliminate variables. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to guess If you held a gun to the head of someone I cared about and forced me to guess, I think the most parsimonious explanation is that I’ve always had and still live with a low level of tolerable gender dysphoria caused by autism and puberty hyper-charged it. When puberty ended, the baseline levels of dysphoria just dropped back down to a more normal and tolerable level. From that point on I held a don’t shake the net mentality to gender dysphoria where I strictly avoided any things that might trigger more dysphoria. I maintained this for a few years until I finally felt able to reflect on it without worrying that I would awaken the dysphoria monster.

I tried my first joke about it at age 21 while sitting in a ditch during army training. A bunch of the guys in my platoon were joking about puberty and I created the longest awkward silence I can ever remember creating by asking, “Isn’t it weird how puberty makes you want to be a girl?” The silence was broken with the—in retrospect very justified—question, “Jon, what the fuck are you talking about?” I, like a skilled and adept autist wise in the ways of people skills, managed to play it off as another one of my classic absurdist jokes. I definitely did not make my squad mates ask, “Hey, what is wrong with that guy, is he gay?” for the next few days until one of them eventually asked me directly and then seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when I said, “No, but I do have Asperger’s.”

My first real exposure to the trans community was through memes and jokes about neo-pronouns and sexually identifying as an attack helicopter sometimes in 2013-2014. When I first saw the memes, I thought it was a bizarre internet trend with no actual sincerity behind it. The idea of self-identifying your way into womanhood seemed to me to be either cheating or delusional depending on the day that you asked me. It was one of those, “You can’t just decide on a whim you are a woman, that would be absurd, that would mean I could have been a woman. No one believes this, right? … Right, guys? Hey, wait, come back here I have questions!” situations. It wasn’t until later in 2014, when I decided I would start my hobby as a citizen scientist and ethnographer studying online autistic sub-communities, that I truly encountered trans people in earnest on their own terms.

I honestly can’t describe how weird it felt reading their long posts about gender, dysphoria, and transition for the first time. I had gone from convincing myself that this was a completely normal thing to experience, to the horrifying revelation that this was not normal and I was a weird freak, to finding a group of people who were writing as if they had access to my own internal monologues at 16. I remember when I finally built up the courage to engage them and wrote my first supportive comment on a post,thinking I was being helpful, saying, “Don’t worry, I felt exactly this way when I was your age. It gets better. I’m in my 20’s now and I’m fine with no dysphoria.” When I explained later on in the comment thread about how I didn’t transition and just waited it out and eventually stopped feeling that way—much to my own personal confusion—I was piled on and mass blocked.

I continued to watch these communities develop over the years with a mix of fascination, a deep sense of camaraderie and solidarity, and utter bafflement. In particular, the group of people that I found most similar to me were autistic trans women and autistic AFAB non-binary people. It was surreal to see them create new listicles like, “Here are ten signs that you are a trans woman,” and go on to describe within near pinpoint accuracy everything that was going on inside my seventeen-year-old brain. The only difference between what they were saying and my experience was that my feelings were transient and stopped shortly after puberty whereas they were describing a permanent phenomenon that never ends unless you transition. I reached out to many of these people in DMs and comments: many of them became friends and have remained friends to this day. For a long time they were the only people that I could talk to who could relate to and help me make sense of my life. Many of them assumed that I was a repressed trans woman no matter how many times I tried to explain that I wasn’t.

I had to deal with this assumption so many times that at one point I created an FAQ Google Doc that I would send them whenever the topic was broached. The gist of the document was that I was not repressing anything at the moment, that I was absolutely repressing it in my teenage years, that if I was repressing something I would be honest about it, and that by most reasonable metrics I was content being a weird autistic man. It was one of those classic “my ‘I’m not trans, just autistic’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” situations. It did lead to some funny and then increasingly annoying cases where a group of my internet friends tried to intervention me on a voice call, I was sent many long messages explaining to me that I needed to transition, I got sent hundreds of posts and articles about what being trans was and how you didn’t need dysphoria to be trans, and I very regularly had to give detailed accounting to people about how I was a man, perfectly content that I was a man and despite my very severe gender dysphoria as a teen no longer had any interest in being trans.

This isn’t to say that I related to everything. Like all online communities filled with people going through a very rough time, there was an enormous amount of galaxy-brained takes and ideas that were developed with the same sort of data-informed rigour as the famous “This was once revealed to me in a dream” footnote. The autistic people in the online trans community were often the source of some of the most profound and insightful reflections on gender and the experiences of people with dysphoria and also the most out there vibes based analysis that I’ve ever encountered. A lot of people in these communities were also teenagers who were clearly going through it, so I try not to hold it against them.

Reading the experiences of trans people often gave me a set of very mixed feelings. There was both a recognition that people were putting words to my own experiences and that I was thankfully no longer feeling anything like that. The closest I can come to approximating it is as survivor’s guilt. It was genuinely difficult reading the experiences of these people who were still going through what I had left behind. I knew all about the absurdly high suicide rates and attempts and then over the years I lost several online friends to suicide. I was well aware of the self-harm statistics, the loathing and self-hatred, and the unending reams of miserable and depressing horror stories of dysphoria and transition. It honestly felt like I got on the last chopper out of gender ‘Nam.

I often hear people on the anti-trans side say things like, “If I was a teen now, they would have trans’d me,” or something to that effect. I always find these statements suspect because I think I am also in that category. I could very easily imagine a scenario where, had I been raised in a different context and time, I might have thought that transition was the only viable option out of my teenage misery. The sentiment behind these posts always seem to be something like, “Those evil doctors and teachers would have forcibly made me transition by infecting me with the woke mind virus,” but when I look back at it I think, “Yeah, I mean that seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do if you felt the way that I did.” I don’t know how you could go through having gender dysphoria and respond to others with it with something other than sympathy and solidarity. I ask myself all the time what I would do if the dysphoria didn’t stop. If I had to keep living in a dysphoric state I genuinely don’t know what I would have done but transition would absolutely not have been off the table if I thought it would work. Although I know that some of these people are sincere, to me it strains credulity to hear people say that they oppose gender medicine because they were dysphoric as a teenager. I’m not sure how someone could experience what I experienced and then decide that you should not give people every possible option to get out of it. The only argument that makes sense is to say, “It turns out transition wouldn’t have been necessary for me, and would have been a mistake if I took that route because eventually I figured it out,” which is true, and that is undeniably the case for me, but I think this argument ends with the simple question, “Okay but what if it didn’t work itself out? What if you were like this forever?”

With all of that being said, I say I have mixed feelings because I am personally very glad I didn’t encounter the trans community in my teens. I’m glad transition was not offered to me at a young age. I’m glad I misinterpreted advice from a 16-year-old camp counsellor to just white knuckle through it all. I am immensely thankful that no solutions were offered to me and that I didn’t go to an affirming therapist or doctor. I am very happy with how my life turned out—well, as happy as I could be considering all the other stuff. Mostly, I’m glad I’m not trans because I have a lot of friends who are and their lives are infinitely more complicated and difficult than my own. I am very glad I don’t have to live with gender transition because right now I’m a happily married man with at least one child.

On the other hand, in my autism research I interview a lot of autistic trans women who describe a teenage and early adulthood experience that is nearly identical to my own. These women are happy to have transitioned and so there is a chance that I could have transitioned and, like them, stayed happy with my choice. I’ve also spoken to quite a few trans women who have essentially said that if they had waited out their dysphoria like I did, they might have very well not transitioned and been happy with that choice. The reality is that neither of us actually knows what we would have done if we could wind back the clock: hindsight is 20/20 and none of us have the ability to run this counterfactual. The problem with dysphoria is you never know if it is going to stop, you don’t know what will happen if you transition, and you don’t know if it will actually solve all of the problems that you are having. I simply don’t know what would have happened if I had transitioned and my trans friends with similar experiences to mine don’t know what would have happened if they didn’t transition.

If I had not been raised in a conservative evangelical environment in the time that I was, I could very easily see a world in which I transitioned as a teen and stayed a trans woman for life. I very much doubt I would have detransitioned if I bit the bullet and started transition. I find myself caught between feeling compassionate and understanding, knowing what it is like to live with dysphoria, and feeling very happy that no one offered me a solution to my problem because it worked out in the end. Usually when I tell trans people about my experiences they get reflexively defensive, as if I’m suggesting that if they just waited they would be fine, and I have to explain in very carefully nuanced ways that I’m not saying that. I know many people who tried to wait it out and ended up just delaying transition by several years. My point is one that the vast majority of trans people already accept, which is that experiences of gender dysphoria and gender identity are not monolithic, and a group of people exists who experience gender dysphoria as transient.

I wish that I could say that I was the only person who had the experience of teenage dysphoria that went away after puberty ended; it was, after all, a deeply confusing and unpleasant experience. However, having read the writings of over 26,000 autistics, interviewed over 600, had drawn-out conversations in DMs and discord with probably well over a thousand, and surveyed thousands more, I have come to see the deeply discomforting reality that my experience is actually not an uncommon autistic experience.

I should clarify that my data is not representative of the general population, so my numbers should not be taken as indicating anything outside of this very niche group. The vast majority of my data is taken from autistic people who are almost all under the age of 35, are overwhelmingly Christian or ex-Christian, and mostly live in the Anglosphere. The people I find also tend to be extremely online and deeply involved in online communities. From surveying, interviewing, and having conversations with these autistic people, I estimate that around one of every three autistics experiences gender dysphoria (as defined by DSM-V). Of those that experience gender dysphoria, around half have transient gender dysphoria that ends sometime in their late teens to early twenties. Ratios of gender dysphoria are roughly 3:1 (this ratio is uncorrected, and so are all the ratios to come) which means they are close to even with a slight female bias if you account for a roughly 3.5:1 male-to-female ratio in autism. Most of these people are now more or less fine with being aligned with their birth sex and don’t have an active desire to transition. Around 10% of this cohort are desisters, meaning that they went through social transition but eventually reverted to their original gender identity. This number increases to 17% when looking at cohorts under the age of 25. Gender ratios for desisters are roughly 6:1 female-to-male. 2% of the cohort are detransitioners, meaning they were at a minimum taking cross-sex hormones for at least 6 months. The sex ratios in my data set for detransitioners are around 10:1 female-to-male.

For the remaining half of the autistics that experience gender dysphoria it is more or less permanent. “Permanent” may not be the most accurate term because dysphoria will typically drop to tolerable levels post-transition—it here means something like, “would feel dysphoric if having to present as their birth sex.” In my data set, binary trans women outnumber trans men by a ratio of 5:1. There is roughly an even ratio of non-binary and binary trans people. Within the non-binary category AFABs (Assigned Female At Birth) outnumber AMABs (Assigned Male At Birth) at a ratio of 6:1. Of those with permanent dysphoria, the majority end up transitioning or attempting transition either medical, social, or both. Most autistics in my dataset that do go through medical transition do not end up regretting it. Some very obviously do go on to regret it, but the reasons for regret are quite complicated and go far beyond the scope of this already long essay.

Nearly half of the non-dysphoric autistics that I talk to still have a complicated relationship with their gender. Most of my long-form interviews with autistic people reveal an extremely complicated relationship with gender, even if it isn’t necessarily gender dysphoria.

Throughout my research of online autistic communities I’ve found that there were a lot of people like me and we all just independently decided to pretend this wasn’t something that we all went through and it was all cool the entire time. A lot of the people that I interview and talk to will tell me that I am the first person or one of very few people who they have shared their experience with. I wanted to write this simply as a way of letting people know that if you experienced this you are not alone.

I’ve talked about these experiences on my podcast in a few places, and people have sent me emails asking, “I have dysphoria, what should I do?” and I have no idea. For some people transition is obviously the right choice, for some of us it obviously isn’t, and for some of us it could potentially go either way. For some of us, we take the terrible advice given to us by evangelical bible camp counsellors and it works out by sheer coincidence. I don’t know what else to tell you.

I had dysphoria and now I don’t.