Born On The Wrong Planet: The Natural Dysphoria Of The Neurodivergent Child

A review of 'Fairy Child: A Memoir' by Forest van Slyke

Forest van Slyke did not have rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD, as a youth. It happened in her late 20s, during a burst of ideational romantic interest in a woman. “Hazel” surely disliked Forest discussing her as a pseudonymous love interest on TikTok. Forest writes that “the hardest lesson I had to learn was that even if you know why there’s a miscommunication, it doesn’t mean the other person is interested in solving it.”

Her crush followed a breakup. “Transitioning was on my mind constantly after breaking up with Charlie”, she writes. Dysphoria was the expression of a sexual neurosis she had built up over years. “I didn’t know how to have sex with Charlie without pretending to be someone else”, she says. This too was secondary to her essential problem, autism. Forest had always felt unfit for the world, alien, a fairy child living uncomfortably in human society. She inhabited the margins, gave up trying to succeed, lived on the streets, went on the dole, prostituted herself.

“I didn’t understand it then,” she writes of a doctor who refused to recognize her obvious autism, “but I would later learn that allistic people — or non autistic people — are more interested in hierarchy than the truth.” Nothing is more offensive to the autist than an untruth. Nothing is more socially offensive to everyone else than the child who calls out, ‘the emperor is naked’. Contrary to the folktale, in the real world, parents will silence the child for social approval.

Autistic children thus learn to wear a mask, perform the role of a human, and suffer impostor syndrome in the process. No wonder autism is over-represented in the young people pursuing ‘gender transition’. Girls who do not feel right with the world become women who struggle to fit the world. ‘Gender medicine’ has offered them false ways to fit their flesh to the shape of the world.