(Trad. DeepL)
Chloé is a 23-year-old woman who identified as trans at the age of 15. She was diagnosed with autism at the age of 21.
I never really integrated into social groups, in my classes at collège or lycée, I was never like the other girls at the time, liking dresses or make-up, I liked Spider-Man, reading manga and watching horror films, not exactly feminine things. I always felt like an outsider, hanging out on the internet, afraid to talk to other people and keeping to myself because people thought I was 'weird' without me really understanding why, my puberty coming on very late and me still being 'a little girl' at 15.
It was this feeling of being apart that really helped what happened, this feeling of not fitting in that was mistaken for dysphoria, the argument being that if I wasn't like the other girls, it must be because I was a boy in a girl's body, and that the only solution to make me feel better was transition. The notion of gender dysphoria, transsexuality and the LGBT community was totally foreign to me, and it was this group that introduced me to all that, without me asking anyone for anything.
But that was never the case, once I'd started my social and physical transition, cut my hair, dressed as a boy, put a band around my breasts to hide the fact that my breasts were beginning to appear, I felt even worse than before in my own body, something wasn't right, I felt like I was burying my head in the sand about an obvious problem, Scarification became a solution to alleviate this problem, because after this transition, I fitted in even less and had been put in the 'LGBT' box by the others. They certainly supported me, but didn't include me in their group, so I felt bad about my body, more than anything else, and less and less at ease socially.
After cutting ties with this group, the idea of transition became absurd to me, I stopped everything, I started to discover myself again as a woman, and I began to feel good about my body, I was comfortable with the woman I was, but a feeling of unease remained, I still wasn't like the others, I didn't understand their way of thinking or of expressing themselves on certain subjects, of expressing their emotions, I wasn't like them, expressed them in a different way, spoke in a different way, which caused me a lot of headaches with my 'friends' at the time and my boyfriends.
During all that time, the idea of not having been born in the right body never crossed my mind again. It was in 2022, when my mother took me to be diagnosed by an autism specialist, that I understood, that all my questions had been answered, that I was autistic, that if I don't think like other people it's not because I'm weird or an alien, that if I don't express my feelings like other people it's not because I'm stupid or selfish, thinking only of myself and never of others, If I'm not like the other girls or like the norms of the female gender, it's not because I'm a boy in a girl's body, it's because I'm autistic, and if someone had told me this beforehand, I would never have doubted my gender or myself, I would have known and I wouldn't have had this malaise for years. If someone had told me: "You're autistic and not conforming to the female gender norm doesn't mean you're not a woman", I wouldn't have been in and out of hospital for suicide attempts, and I wouldn't have marks on my arm.