Episode 25 - Maia Poet - Autism and Gender Dysphoria Part 1

Maia Poet spent 12 years of her adolescence and early adulthood believing she had a male brain in a female body, and eventually went on to live in the male social role amongst Orthodox Jews, Palestinian Muslims and secular Israelis for five years. It took living through two wars in the Middle East for Maia to begin the journey of questioning the conclusion she came to as a 12 year old, and eventually to divest from it entirely. Almost three years later, she is now a public speaker and writer who reflects extensively on Substack about her experiences of transition, desistance and detransition with a focus on exploring the overlap of conditions like ADHD, autism and gender dysphoria at the intersection of research and lived experience. She hopes to bring awareness to the ways in which the systematic overlooking of autistic traits and experiences in girls early in life, leaves them uniquely unequipped to navigate the psycho-social and sensory challenges of puberty, and therefore more vulnerable to developing conditions like sex or gender dysphoria and eating disorders around adolescence. Maia sits down with Laura and Yvette about the impact of autism and neurodiversity on the experience of living with gender dysphoria. Her perspective is imformed by her own experience of growing up autistic before it was commonly recognized in natal females, her relationship to her body and how she developed gender dysphoria, and how she came to live in a male role as an adolescent and young adult in Israel