In my opinion and experience, transsexualism and Asperger syndrome are relational issues, and that is the way it has made sense to me; in that aspergers mostly involves the relationship one has to others, while trans is more about one’s relationship to one’s self… it is in the projection or presentation of that self where conflict with others may occur (passing, and the politics around that issue).

I have had a conversation once wth Tony Attwood on the subject of the incidence of trans-aspies and his thoughts on us, and I am not in agreeance with a lot of his views, though they do make some sense to a degree (which I will not go into).

Thank you everyone for your contributions and specially to our kind host, it does make me feel better to hear from people in similar situations. I found this blog by googling “Aspergers Gender Dysphoria”, too.

While I feel very well described by the term “Male Lesbian” myself, I have the following doubts about the legitimacy of the concept which I would like to share:

1. The main feature of my sexuality is that it is not functional, ie. I can’t express it, because I lack the necessary social skills. Do lesbians have this problem? I may well be wrong but, the way I perceive lesbians, they don’t -they can get on with their personal lives reasonably well. This is a very fundamental difference between lesbians and male lesbians, since lesbians apparently still need to be equipped with and deploy social skills, and therefore if we male lesbians were transgendered we would remain just as lonely and miserable as we are now, only looking physically like females. So our problem isn’t at all being in the wrong body type -it is just lacking the ability to manage the mating/courtship process effectively.

2. How do lesbians cope with being solicited for sex by males pretty much all the time? Because I know I would hate every second of it, men disgust me profoundly. Another reason why it might be inaccurate to call us “male lesbians” -we would actually loathe living in a woman’s body, as lesbians do.

3. Is it even possible to be a male lesbian? Having a heterosexual orientation, we logically should just be able to strike up relationships with females, and indeed be in a better position to achieve this than lesbians are. Could it be that our feeling of “wanting to be lesbians” is a mirage? What we really want is, simply being able to get girls! But looking like a woman wouldn’t do the trick!

4. More critically. I believe women just have a quantitatively much lower sexual drive than men. Simple as that. And that IS the problem. Heterosexual NT men adapt to it and learn coping strategies, because they have the flexibility required, and we Aspies don’t. We have _wrongly_ concluded that women enjoy the same pleasure that we would enjoy if we held their superior selecting & decision making position. It is true that females have a higher biological status than males. But women will not USE their privileges quite so much as we male Aspies would if we were in their shoes, because they don’t need to. Women find a lot less men so strongly attractive that they would have intercourse with them, than men find women likewise. Bluntly, the average woman perhaps would feel motivated to have sex with 10% of men, whereas the average man does feel motivated to have sex with 60% of the women he sees or more. In other words, if we “Male Lesbians” were magically transformed into lesbians, we would also find that our sexual drives had become dramatically reduced.

5. Most crucially of all. Even when a woman does feel turned on and aroused by one particular man, that is not enough for her to give the Go Ahead. She needs a more substantial basis for that -some important shared interest; a conscious “good reason” that will win her over. Without it, she can’t do it, even though she feels like it.

My conclusion is that Aspergers males just want women for sex -a very “extremely male” behaviour, indeed. But, unless you belong in the top 1% good looking men (and those who do will not be in this forum), this approach is very destructive and totally useless. Aspie men therefore make perfect prostitute clients. I am sure I am not alone in rejecting prostitution, however. Hence the problem. The solution might be to focus on building RELATIONSHIPS with women, as different from just “chatting them up”, and note the word _building_, which suggests thought, foundations, effort and time.

PS I agree that as an Aspie I am gender and age blind. AS has been described as mind blindness, more generally. I think calling us “gender and age blind” is a euphemism. The reality is that we have a hard time understanding complex situations, and dealing with a very different opposite gender and a wide range of ages is certainly a complex situation.

CascadeOther: i’m *amazed* both by how much we have in common, and how many differences… there were sentences in your long comment where i thought “wow, are you me?” and then stuff that was totally opposite (like the sexuality in early childhood stuff)… would LOVE to have a conversation with you…

you might be interested in some of the posts in the “gender” category on my blog?

http://books.google.com/books?id=–ZN-_Tw8z8C&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=intersex+autism&source=web&ots=snLo2NAvit&sig=LLjlU1cc5IwIzWVoX9o_UfkSMbI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=9&ct=result#PPA86,M1

Feel free to email me or anything if you want to discuss things.

Hugs!

I guess I’m probably heterosexual from my internal (transsexual) perspective, in regards to actually having sex, but I’m doubtful that I can find a man who will be as nice as most women are, and I find most men to be boring- they seem to waste too much time on sport and are so coarse.

Ideally, a realy realy nice soft guy would be just right.

I have been diagnosed with several neuro-atypical disorders: ADHD, OCD, social phobia, possible mild ASD & possible mild Dyslexia, and as expected Gender identity disorder/Gender Dysphoria.

I often wonder about all of these and whether they are linked.. it sure makes sense to me if all of these can be present in one person.

A while ago I asked this question “Any Transexuals with OCD or ADHD?” on the Yahoo Answers forum which had interesting responses:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080128021821AATgbUN