Maia Poet spent 12 years of her adolescence and early adulthood believing she had a male brain in a female body, and eventually went on to live in the male social role amongst Orthodox Jews, Palestinian Muslims and secular Israelis for five years. It took living through two wars in the Middle East for Maia to begin the journey of questioning the conclusion she came to as a 12 year old, and eventually to divest from it entirely.

Almost three years later, she is now a public speaker and writer who reflects extensively on Substack about her experiences of transition, desistance and detransition with a focus on exploring the overlap of conditions like ADHD, autism and gender dysphoria at the intersection of research and lived experience. She hopes to bring awareness to the ways in which the systematic overlooking of autistic traits and exper ...