I blew my chance to inform Naomi Klein about this series critiquing Doppelganger, her book about the Mirror World of Naomi Wolf, whom she calls her doppelganger. Wolf calls Klein her Nemesis. Klein was speaking at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley, but I misremembered it as this weekend, so missed her. Unlikely to get close enough anyways. After calling Zionism the False Idol, she probably has more bodyguards than Wolf, who married hers.
Never say Never, unless that’s a double negative. My lone wolf takedown of “vaccine experts”, began with the CDC trained “medical ethicist” in my hyperlocal community paper, as Disney Measles Mania besieged parents right to refuse mandatory vaccinations for their school child. A blitzkrieg that wiped out religious and philosophical exemptions with CA SB 277 in 2015. Unlike Eula Biss’s whimsical “research” into “loose associations” for On Immunity, began a deep dive into the dusty corners of the internet to pull up facts, like barbed hooks in a debate.
From a tiny fringe of parents then, “vaccine hesitancy” is now endemic among one in five parents. “Public Health” experts are panicked, scrambling on their ramparts. Vaccines Causing Autism is the endless enemy they pour boiling oil over. Scalding medical dissenters. Parents who say their normally progressing infant rapidly regressed into severe autism following inoculations are gasovened.
Klein preheats fellow parents of autistic children she heard this from, and stories circulating on the internet that their “baby was fine until routine immunization.” She attributes their delusion to a “deep grieving period, mourning fantasies of their child they would grow old with, so can’t really see the child they have.”
Autistic spokespeople of whatever gender are among the most vociferous VCA Deniers. Eric Garcia with We’re Not Broken, adds to Klein’s sniping, blaming “autism fearmongering. People who cut their teeth promoting conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods about autism.” (It’s about vaccines, not autism.)
Klein compares them to “parents of trans kids who often need a little time to grieve, before they can fully accept their child’s gender identity.” Synchronistically, NPR’s entertainment review of an autistic dating reality show, interviewed a “gender expert”, autistic podcaster, offended by the lack of diversity in their characters. Not for nonverbal representation, nonbinary.
Tuck Woodstock: “Many, many autistic people are trans. Many, many, many trans people are autistic. And it sucks that so many trans people are autistic is used as a way to gatekeep trans people from accessing [“gender affirming”] care because trans people are not allowed to access [insurance reimburse] transition care because they are autistic.”
Klein’s son may join this legion, although his transition will be more difficult. Sharkskin suits? There’s a doppelganger spectrum of “autistic” spokespeople claiming to represent all neurodiverse netizens. Demanding adaptive inclusion for their “not disabilities” of feeling socially awkward with small talk, noise sensitive, and hyperfocused on arcane details. Without “masking. ” No they’re not “antimaskers”, they were complete Covidiots about them. Masking means changing “their natural behavior to conform to social pressures.”
Like autism after 1990, Gender dysphoria rates increased algorithmically after 2010 from below one in a thousand, several times higher in boys. In the past decade the sex ratio of diagnosis flipped to more girls. So it’s not genetic. For autism the correlation was barrages of childhood vaccines when given immunity from lawsuits in 1988, for trans teens it was smart phone/social media saturation bombing.
Gen Z tweens and teens with no sign of this as children are being diagnosed in social clusters, among online friends. * Their use of “mental health” providers for depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation is six times higher than binary teens. Thus to “save their lives”, they’re steered into chemical castration before puberty, or surgical afterwards.
Their parents and those who transition back (medically injured) blame social media as the major source of encouragement. Autistic trans podcasters are cheerleaders for mass psychosis. Klein quotes Aaden Friday, “autistic and non-binary, able to blog and push back against parents who force their child to become social by overpowering them to watch some Sesame Street Live show in a cavernous auditorium. ‘We need to be truly loved- not abused, do not need to be cured, respected, listened to, loved for an extraordinary gift.’”
They’ve created a schism in the spectrum with their solipsistic solutions. “Parents of autistic children or adults who have almost no language, exhibit severe learning difficulties, suffer gastrointestinal pain or epilepsy, lash out against themselves or others, adopt the medical model calling for prevention and cure of these serious impairments. Those who support neurodiversity see such language as a threat to autistic people’s existence, no different than eugenics.”
These Little Professors abandoned “Asperger’s” because he was a Nazi eugenicist sparing only his favorites from the gas, and pulled the Iron Dome of “autism” over their arc with no rainbow connecting them. Wired magazine editor, Steve Silberman’ 2015 book, Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity provided cover.
NPR also interviewed him on their Shots (image of a syringe) “health care” show. Silberman wouldn’t “classify high and low functioning autism” even on a spectrum, but was less venomous towards VCA parents. “While people tend to stereotype ‘anti-vaxxers’ as low information people, in fact, the people who believe that were often highly informed and read papers obsessively.”
They just hadn’t been “explained” enough on expanding definitons. Now there’s no excuse with autistic spokespeople, trans, cis or in between ‘splaining us.
*The Anxious Generation: How the. Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathon Haidt, Penguin Press, 2024