I've been thinking about how closely the experience of growing up autistic parallels the experience of growing up trans, to the extent that it's often hard to distinguish which experiences are caused by transness and which by autism, or if it even makes sense to make that distinction. In particular in reference to how socialisation operates.
The way people often talk about (gendered) socialisation, it almost feels like they think kids are just told "boys should be assertive, girls should be meek", but obviously it doesn't quite work like that. From a very young age, you are getting rewarded for behaviours that align with your gender, and punished for behaviours that don't, in the eyes of your caregivers. A 3-year-old girl who shouts a lot, for example, will typically be scolded for this behaviour more than a 3-year-old boy who does the same thing. These kinds of little behavioural nudges from your caregivers happen every single day, and by the time you are old enough to start school, naturally result in a cohort of boys who are louder than girls on average (that doesn't, of course, mean that every boy is louder than every girl, its just an average, and there are many things other than gender that also influence how you are treated by caregivers at this age).
In an environment like school, socialisation becomes much more complicated. The rewards and punishments are no longer just direct feedback from your caregivers in the form of scolding etc, but there is now a social hierarchy which is created and enforced by your peers, and rewards and punishments take the form of moving up and down this hierarchy. A girl who is considered too loud and assertive by her peers might experience a lowering in her social standing, a boy who acts the same way might experience a rise in his. A huge part of childhood and adolescence revolves around managing your position in this social hierarchy by choosing the correct behaviours to perform, and so much of the work of the patriarchy is actually done by children to each other in the form of creating and reinforcing this hierarchy.
This is where autism comes into play. For me at least, one of the key features of autism is resistance to social pressure. How this manifested for me was that, at school, I did not give a fuck about my position in the social hierarchy. I was barely aware that it existed. I knew that some kids were popular and others weren't, but I think I thought that popularity was just a trait you had, like tallness. As a lonely kid I was always interested in making friends, but I thought friends could be acquired by giving them things, like food or money or books. This never really worked, and the reason it didn't work was that kids above me in the social hierarchy cared far more about their position in the hierarchy than they did about anything else, and befriending me would jeapordise that. My total lack of awareness of the existence of this hierarchy was actually really unusual, and it was the cause of a lot of social mistakes I made in my childhood (e.g. telling a guy at the top of the hierarchy that someone else near the top had insulted him behind his back. My much lower position relative to the other two meant it was more socially beneficial for both of them to call me a liar and punish me, rather that risk their own social positions by having a feud with each other).
The reason this is relevant to transness, is that while other kids were deliberately behaving in gendered ways in order to elevate their own social position, I was paying zero attention to the rules of gender, and I was just behaving however I wanted. I would receive rewards for certain behaviours and punishments for others but often I wasn't even aware I had received them. For example, if I was annoyed with a teacher who was being unfair to me and told them to "shut up", and if that teacher happened to be female, then that would be regarded as me correctly performing manhood by establishing dominance over a woman, and I might be rewarded by popular kids patting me on the back after class and inviting me to sit with them at lunch. But I was not even aware this was a reward, and would just go and eat lunch alone as usual. The genderedness of my action in this case was not part of my thought process at all, I would've done (and did) the same thing to a male teacher if they had been unfair to me, and I would have been (and was) punished rather than rewarded that time.
So I think it's fair to say that, even if I had the opportunity to undergo a gendered socialisation, my autism made me unaware that I was supposed to. It's like everyone else went to a meeting where they were told "There is this thing called a social hierarchy, you want to get to the top, you can achieve that by behaving in ways that align with your gender," and my invitation to that meeting got lost in the mail. So while they were all scrambling to get to the top of the heap, I was unaware of the heap and was off looking for bugs or something.
Now, I'm aware that this does nothing to explain my transfemininity specifically, rather it just explains how one can come out of childhood and adolescence without a socially-enforced bias towards any particular gender presentation or gendered behaviours. The way I think transfemininity manifested in me was in the fact that the behaviours I chose to perform without any reference to the social rewards or punishments I would receive for doing so happened to be, on average, those that are gendered female in our culture. So even though I could've been loud, I happened to be quiet. Even though I could have been assertive, I happened to be meek. Even though I could have enjoyed violence and joined in with kids throwing rocks at squirrels in the schoolyard while the teachers laughed and said "boys will be boys", instead I cried and later buried the dead and had a funeral for them by myself. Of course, the fact that I neutrally behaved in a manner much more befitting of a girl meant that I was being socially punished much more often than I was being socially rewarded, but as I've said those punishments and rewards were often ones that I wasnt even aware I was receiving, and so they didn't influence my behaviour (of course sometimes the punishments were physical, and then I was aware of them, but these were generally punishments for things like "having a sarcastic comeback to an insult from a popular guy", and what I internalised from that was "remember that if you make sarcastic comebacks to this specific guy you will get beaten", rather than inferring the existence of a whole social hierarchy that determined who I was and wasn't allowed to be sarcastic to.)
I don't think it makes sense to say I was "female socialised", even though I came into adulthood with a personality and behaviours similar to the average severely-traumatised autistic cis woman. It just happened that those were the behaviours my brain has always wanted me to perform, and my total lack of concern that other people strongly disapproved of me behaving that way meant that I never felt any pressure to change that. I think "female unsocialised" is a more accurate, if facetious, way of putting it.
I think what I have described as "having neutral behaviour patterns that happen to be gendered female" is probably my attempt to refer to the same thing that Julia Serano calls a "subconscious sex" consisting of "intrinsic inclinations" to behave in a certain way. I have often struggled to relate to the general idea of an "internal sense of gender", which is unfortunate given how central the idea is to transgender studies, but by framing it as having a certain set of behaviours that I just happen to neutrally want to do, and those just happen on average to be those that are gendered female in our culture, I find it fully relatable.
In a way, I think being autistic is what allowed me to be trans. I had something like a "subconscious sex" that was predominantly female, and my autism meant that I was very resistant to any attempts to make me behave differently from that. I cannot imagine how it must be for allistic trans people (or autistic trans people whose autism manifests differently to mine), going through childhood with that permanent tension between a subconscious sex that wants you to behave one way, and full awareness of the severely negative social consequences for doing so. By being pretty much immune to social pressure, I was totally unaware that that tension existed at all. I don't wish to undersell how traumatic my own childhood was: I was severely punished for my failure to be a man, and autism itself has a whole host of other effects that made life nearly impossible for me. But although I still had to pay the severe social cost that came with being my authentic self, I am grateful to have been barely aware that I was actually paying that cost all along.
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