July 08 2025
Maia Poet is a 26 year old independent writer who is has experienced gender dysphoria and is on the autistic spectrum. She writes perceptively and profoundly with the aim of providing insights to help parents, clinicians and caregivers of young people experiencing gender dysphoria better understand what they may be going through.
In July, Maia spoke at the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) about the nature of the overlap between autism and gender dysphoria.
For many young people like me, gender dysphoria is a manifestation of undiagnosed and untreated neurodevelopmental distress—most often autism spectrum disorder.
Trans identification becomes a coping mechanism—another “mask” for an autistic girl to wear. A way to hide her failure to intuit and abide by the complex social-communication rituals expected of females. A way to explain why she doesn’t fit.
Maia argues that both trans activists and gender critical feminists profoundly misunderstand what the phrase “born in the wrong body” means when children and young people say it.
Like all powerful metaphors, “born in the wrong body” resonates because it captures a real, deeply felt experience—one we rarely talk about in our society, despite its ubiquity.
She explains why the diagnosis of gender dysphoria may obscure real needs:
Diagnosing an autistic or ADHD kid with gender dysphoria is diagnosing the symptom—not the cause. And by treating them for gender dysphoria, we risk obscuring their real needs, while hoping that cutting off enough body parts and disrupting enough endocrine systems will fix their autistic disembodiment.
Maia ends with an important question:
But what if, instead of treating dismemberment as the solution to autistic disembodiment — we offered these young people something better? A way to build interoceptive and social-emotional skills so they can feel finally at home in their bodies?
Here is a video of her speech and below is the written version, taken from Maia’s substack with her permission. Maia’s is one of the most important voices on this issue. Her writing is deeply insightful and thought provoking. Please consider subscribing to her substack.
Good morning.
My name is Maia Poet. I’m 26 years old, and from ages 12 to 24, I was convinced I was born in the wrong body.
My story started in 2012, with the iPad I got for my 12th birthday. Algorithms quickly pulled me into hours of content about gender transition procedures—an obsession that would consume the next 12 years of my life.
I no longer believe I was born in the wrong body. For the last two years, I’ve been trying to understand what happened to me—and how I finally came to terms with my biological sex.
Because I was an early adolescent adopter of a transgender identity—and because I share a cognitive profile similar to many young people who present with gender dysphoria—I believe the knowledge I’ve gleaned from my life in transition and detransition may serve as a kind of time capsule for patients you are seeing—or will see—in your practice.
First, I’ll tell you a bit about my story—my more extensive writing is available at the QR code. Then I’ll share why I think a certain subset of Gen Z—especially autistic youth—are particularly vulnerable to this trajectory, and how you as psychiatrists can intervene.
My Story
To understand how I got here, you have to understand how my mind worked as a kid.
In hindsight, I should have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, but like many girls, I was too precocious and verbal to get the diagnosis. Instead, I was a “quirky” child who got along better with adults than with other kids.
I had a lifelong history of intense intellectual obsessions centered around niche medical conditions. As an 8-year-old, I was fixated on acromegaly—rare pituitary tumors that make people grow to extraordinary heights. At 12, I watched gastric bypass surgeries on YouTube. By middle school, studying the DSM became a hobby as I desperately tried to categorize myself and others so I could make sense of a world that felt confusing, overwhelming, and simultaneously fascinating.
Where my peers sought popularity or social acceptance, I craved conceptual frameworks. I intellectualized everything. And after I got that iPad, my niche hyperfixations went into overdrive.
I became obsessed with the gay rights movement, and soon after, the algorithms began feeding me content about trans people. What started as a medical curiosity—just like my others—morphed into a full-blown gender identity crisis. I began watching personal accounts of trans adults—usually a decade older than me—describing how they had always felt different, and how they’d found happiness within a lifelong regimen of injections and scalpels.
Online I was told: “If you’re wondering if you’re trans, you probably are.”
On Ideation:
Many people think the first step toward transition is social transition. But I believe there’s an even more important stage before that: ideation.
This is the silent, internal phase where a young person imagines themselves as the opposite sex—playing out future scenarios, building a mental case file of evidence, and rehearsing the narrative they’ll eventually present to others.
I spent my entire adolescence from age 12 singularly focused on planning my adulthood around gender transition.
I followed internet advice and began to bind my breasts— to prevent them from growing large enough to render myself ineligible for the scar-free mastectomy option later.
As soon as I turned 18 and left for university, I began to socially transition.
By 20, I had moved to the Middle East and was living undercover as a man. Because I’m conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic, and because neither culture has a schema for “trans men,” I easily passed as a teenage boy within Orthodox Jewish and Palestinian Muslim communities.
It wasn’t until I found myself waking up to air raid sirens—realizing I didn’t have enough time to both bind my chest and make it to a bomb shelter—that I began to confront the reality of my own embodiment.
That was the start of what became a long and painful process of reckoning. I realized the singular focus of my life—gender transition and worrying about passing as a man—was something I no longer had energy for. My healthy female body was no longer a pathology to fight—it was my only vehicle for survival.
As real war raged around me, I finally admitted defeat against the war I’d against my own body. And with this last vestige of my adolescent individuation quest laid to rest, I had to assemble the scattered puzzle pieces of what was left of my identity to cope with the traumatic aftermath.
Reflections on Root Causes: Autism and Disembodiment
For many young people like me, gender dysphoria is a manifestation of undiagnosed and untreated neurodevelopmental distress—most often autism spectrum disorder.
Trans identification becomes a coping mechanism—another “mask” for an autistic girl to wear. A way to hide her failure to intuit and abide by the complex social-communication rituals expected of females. A way to explain why she doesn’t fit.
Being on the autism spectrum left me perpetually misunderstood and unequipped to identify or express my wants, needs, and feelings in my own words. Instead, I relied on echolalia as a child and on ideological scripts in adolescence and early adulthood—just like many others on the spectrum do.
The Phrase That Defined My Life: “Born in the Wrong Body”
For the next few minutes, I want to focus on the phrase that defined my identity, my body image, and my life trajectory for more than a decade: “Born in the wrong body.”
Both trans activists and gender critical activists fundamentally misunderstand what this phrase means when children and young people say it.
Yes, the phrase makes no objective sense if taken literally. We are after all, born into our bodies, with no other experience of embodiment to compare it to. But when you look at the phrase not as a nefarious lie or as a clinical mandate, but as a metaphor for disembodiment, the meaning becomes clearer.
Like all powerful metaphors, “born in the wrong body” resonates because it captures a real, deeply felt experience—one we rarely talk about in our society, despite its ubiquity.
What we’re really describing when we say “born in the wrong body” is disembodiment.
And there are many reasons a young person might feel disembodied—especially in today’s avatar-driven, digital, body as “skin-suit” internet age.
That phrase gets collapsed into a psychiatric diagnosis—gender dysphoria—and further translated, socially and medically, into a transgender identity.
Any hope of understanding why so many young people come to believe they were born in the wrong body requires us to first look at who these young people are—and what their shared experiences might reveal.
Disembodiment and Autism
For many autistic individuals, disembodiment is their homeostasis. It is physical, sensory, and formative.
From early childhood, I never remember experiencing my mind and my body as a cohesive self. I was born prematurely and dealt with lifelong neurodevelopmental issues—early toe-walking treated with leg braces, learning to tie my shoes and swallow liquids properly at 14. I saw my mind as who I was—and my body as a disobedient, unpredictable machine whose only job was to keep me alive so I could spend all day in the world of my own ideas.
Disembodiment is the feeling of being disconnected from your body—confused by it, betrayed by it, alienated from it.
In contrast, embodiment means your sensory experiences, physical movements, emotions, and internal states feel like they belong to the same person.
When systems like proprioception, interoception, sensory processing, and emotional regulation are dysregulated—as they often are in neurodivergent individuals with autistic spectrum and ADHD traits—disembodiment becomes the default.
Puberty: When Discomfort Becomes Crisis
Then came the biopsychosocial shifts of puberty.
Suddenly, your body begins to change rapidly in ways you can’t understand.
If you’re a girl, you now face the sensory hell of growing breasts, body hair, and excruciating menstrual periods. You must adopt new hygiene rituals that require direct contact with razors, shaving cream, shifting sanitary pads, bras with straps that no adjustment will make comfortable.
I had a lot of discomfort with my female body and gendered expectations—far beyond the level of discomfort that could be written off as “all girls feel this way.” Logically speaking, it was obvious that wasn’t true for me.
But transition didn’t fix the problem.
Binding my breasts soothed my sensory processing issues in a limited way, through compression that soothed my nervous system.
But it didn’t resolve the fundamental mind-body disconnection I thought it would.
If anything, a decade of binding only reinforced the belief that my body and I were separate entities at war.
And of course, it left me with irreversible deformities to my breasts and rib cage and nerve pain that hasn’t reversed itself. So not worth it.
Gender Dysphoria: Diagnosing the Symptom, Not the Cause
That’s not to say gender dysphoria is an inaccurate diagnosis for kids like the one I was.
But I believe gender dysphoria, in this population, is far more likely a symptom of distress from untreated, misunderstood neurodivergence.
Diagnosing an autistic or ADHD kid with gender dysphoria is diagnosing the symptom—not the cause. And by treating them for gender dysphoria, we risk obscuring their real needs, while hoping that cutting off enough body parts and disrupting enough endocrine systems will fix their autistic disembodiment.
Why Autistic Kids Are Vulnerable to the Trans Narrative
For autistic kids like me—kids with highly systematizing minds—the promise of an explanatory framework is irresistible.
“Born in the wrong body” was the first narrative that offered a coherent explanation for my internal chaos. It organized my complex confusion. It gave my alienation a name—and in a culture that treats names as cures, that felt like salvation.
The trans narrative gave me a script when I didn’t have the interoceptive capacity to identify and name my own distress in my own words. It gave me steps to follow. It let me turn an amorphous, chronic, indescribable distress into something with a label and a plan.
And once autistic kids adopt a belief system, we dig in with intense intellectual commitment. The same analytical brain that built my case file for why I was trans is the same brain that, years later, deconstructed it.
But not every autistic kid will get that far.
What Clinicians Can Do
This is why kids like the one I was need adults—especially clinicians like you—who can recognize this pattern early and intervene at the level of ideation, before autistic adolescent confusion calcifies into identity.
The feeling of incongruence is real, and it is distressing.
But what if the incongruence isn’t about gender—and is instead a mismatch between high IQ, low EQ, and poor social intuition?
The feeling of disembodiment is real, and it is distressing.
But what if, instead of treating dismemberment as the solution to autistic disembodiment— We offered these young people something better? A way to build interoceptive and social-emotional skills so they can feel finally at home in their bodies?
Thank you.
I am a 26 year old independent writer who puts her heart, soul and hundreds of hours into this Substack to provide insights to parents, clinicians and caregivers of young people experiencing gender dysphoria.
If you find my work helpful, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.
I offer parent coaching sessions to help parents of trans-identifying young people come up with an individualized plan to best navigate this time with their kids. If this is of interest, please DM me: