(different anon) The 'wanting to be desired' thing is at the core of lots of Gender Stuff imo and I wish people were more honest about it. Like, I'm AGP, and do people think it's a coincidence that the stereotypical AGP dude is ugly as fuck? If it was about being a woman we'd just be trans. It's about being seen as desirable. Being a hyperidealized cute girl is just the quickest path to that.
Maybe not even being seen as desirable in itself so much as having your expressions of desire rewarded. The Scorpia thing.
Like, especially in this scene, we acknowledge that trans identification often seems comorbid with autism. Now part of the personality change was suddenly developing a sense of intuitive empathy, the ability to feel other people’s feelings.
And looking back at my life before that, in the ‘00s I might have been diagnosed with autism (childhood neurodivergence conceptualization in the '90s was focused instead on ADD/ADHD, autism still had a Rain Man savant reputation, and I was masking it by consciously compensating \u2013 recall I got so good at inferring mental state from outward appearance that I could figure secrets people had never told another soul by how they timed the pauses in their speech)
And in middle school when students were suddenly pairing off in relationships I was like “how does that happen?” and looked to the successes and I was like “ah, they boldly touch girls and assert themselves” but that did not prove as rewarding for me and I was like “what, do they pick up some kind of silent signal telling them what to do when so girls will want it?” And reporting from the other side now, yes, yes we do.
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