Gender as a social construct tends to pretty strongly fall under the umbrella of “this is one of the arbitrary societal rules” that you run across just about everytime you talk with a regular person for me. I like being male, but all the trappings of being male, like muscles, beards, beer, bars, hunting, whatever, are only there because people say they belong there, and not because that is a thing I feel makes sense on its own merits. Essentially, long flowing wedding dresses as daily office wear on men would make just as much sense as a suit and tie does.

However, gender, for me, very specifically has me appreciate what I was born with. I like having a beard, I like having muscles, and I like the traditionally masculine clothes I wear. These things just aren’t really connected to my self-perceived identity as a man. I wear my clothes because they feel right, not because they’re what men wear. I keep my beard because it’s fun to have, not because men have beards.

I think the autism just makes connecting “this societal trend tends to read as male or female” to “this is how I feel as a man/woman/other” a lot harder for us than it is for most people. The only reason I even learned about what being trans feels and looks like is because of the people in my life who are trans. If they had instead transitioned and just said nothing beyond “use this name and pronoun”, I don’t know how much I would have actually noticed about it. I had siblings penciling mustaches on years ago and just kinda went “fashion lmao” and didn’t look any deeper into it. Like, my parents asked me specifically about the mustache, and I brushed it off, because all trends are arbitrary to my eyes; this was just one more thing on a long list of things that don’t have to make sense to be followed as a rule.