POKEMON EVOLVE.

The anime enthusiasts, on the other hand, maybe not so much.  That insight came to Holly Math Nerd when she went to "the queerest place in Vermont" because the library was closed on Sundays, and left her hearing aids in.

I haven’t written much about the aesthetics — the visual and narrative world that forms the wallpaper of online queer identity, and that was covering every surface of this café.

Manga and anime (both types of art used in comics) occupy a particular corner of internet culture that overlaps, to a degree that is not coincidental, with both the trans community and the autistic community. (Props to everyone who just heard Josh Slocum say “Ke-meen-itee!!”)

The aesthetic is distinctive: large eyes, androgynous figures, characters whose gender presentation is fluid or ambiguous by design. The storytelling frequently centers outcasts, people with hidden powers or secret identities, people who are not what they appear to be on the outside.

For a lonely, neurodivergent teenager who has not yet learned how to fit the body or the social role they were handed, this is not just entertainment — it is a mirror that flatters.

She offers an hypothesis that might provoke proper research, that is, if anybody is doing proper research any more.

The porn subset of manga, called hentai, includes entire genres organized around gender transformation and body-swapping fantasies. None of this is cause and effect by itself. But when you put a socially isolated autistic kid, a special interest in a medium saturated with gender-fluid imagery and transformation fantasy, a Discord server full of people who have found their tribe inside that aesthetic, and an ideology that promises a complete reboot of the self — you have assembled something that functions less like a subculture and more like a pipeline.

The detransitioners have been saying this for years. Most of them weren't diagnosed autistic until after they detransitioned, at which point the pattern became legible: the gender identity had been the special interest. The transition had been autistic perseveration made flesh.

The essay, which after that passage pivots to some people-watching that might be interesting in its own right, provokes yet more calls for research, perhaps multiple inquiries into the nature and causes of autism spectrum, a phrase likely thrown around carelessly.  Let us motivate that research with a passage in Sarah Anderson's "The War on Excellence Has Reached Our Classrooms."

I hated school as a child. First, it was boring. My mom had already taught me to read when I entered kindergarten, and I soon found that I already knew most everything else they were teaching us in those first few years. Second, I was lazy. But I had no motivation not to be because I was bored to tears. I wanted to be at home reading, playing, pretending, hanging out with my family, exploring outside, and creating. The only time school work ever interested me was when it was creative, and, let's face it, most of it wasn't.

Third, I was socially awkward. I've always been shy and introverted. Starting my school years as the "smart kid" didn't help me make friends. After a while, it led to bullying that forced me to shrink. I stopped speaking up in class. I learned that I couldn't trust my peers, which diminished my social skills even further. I tried to dumb myself down.

I can't help but wonder how many precocious kids have been put on Ritalin for "attention deficit disorder" or put on the spectrum as "neurodivergent," whatever that means, and, in recent years, how large a subset of those kids subjected to a transition because that was The Thing to Do.