Autism and Gender

This was originally written for #TransgenderDayOfVisibility and is about the intersection of autism and gender diversity. It was posted as a Twitter thread, but I’ve tried to get the kinks out!

Firstly, if you talk to pretty much anyone in either community, you’re likely to find that actually yeah, we’re all well aware that there’s a huge overlap of transgender identities and being autistic.

Actually, if you talk to the anti-trans lot, they’ll start yelling about how young autistic girls are being ‘peer pressured’ into thinking they’re trans men, so it’s not exactly news outside our communities either!

But! In 2020 a study was published that made it more real.

In 2020 the largest study that had ever been undertaken into the intersection of the autistic and transgender communities was published. The investigation used “…five independently recruited cross-sectional datasets consisting of 641,860 individuals…”

Yes you read that number right. 641,860 individuals.

The study covered many topics, but came, ultimately, to the conclusion that “[p]eople who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are three to six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender people…”

And “[a]utistic people are more likely than neurotypical people to be gender diverse … gender-diverse people are more likely to have autism than are cisgender people.”

It’s right there in that study of 641,860 individuals, that if you’re autistic, you’re more likely to also be trans, than if you’re not autistic!

Anyway, there are a number of reasons posited for why this might be, including hormonal changes during pregnancy — but NOT including social contagion or peer pressure, funnily enough — but the one the researchers and I both tend to lean to is a defining trait of autism itself:

Autistic’s just don’t care much about the prevailing social norms of wherever they happen to grow up.

And that lack of adherence to expected social norms, is what some suggest allows the autistic individual to contemplate their own gender more freely. Leading to more autistics actually thinking about and expressing their true gender than neurotypicals.

As Dr Wenn Lawson has said: “The non-autistic world is governed by social and traditional expectations, but we [autistics] may not notice these or fail to see them as important. This frees us up to connect more readily with our true gender.”

One of the concerns brought up in both communities is the tendency to have an incongruent gender identity dismissed by clinicians and even family and friends when it is expressed by an autistic person. Given the high rates of depression and anxiety in both communities, especially because women and girls (and trans boys and men), and non-white people often already face disbelief of or misdiagnosis of their autism, this further dismissal of gender incongruence is troubling.

It’s even worse when the anti-trans groups get in on it and start trying to push the ROGD thing. Parents pushing ROGD can cause their kids even more harm than growing up in the current climate alone does.

If you haven’t heard of it, ROGD is the pseudoscientific theory ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ that in reality is ‘my kid hid it from me until they couldn’t anymore’ or ‘my kid learned what being trans is and won’t let me gaslight them anymore’ etc.

It comes down, in both communities, to believing and respecting a person when they tell you who they are!

Basically, if your kid is autistic, there is a higher than average chance that they may also be transgender. So you need to be prepared for that. And instead of falling for the anti-trans nonsense and making their lives worse?

Believe them. Believe your kid when they tell you who they are. They likely already have a lot to deal with, don’t become yet another obstacle to their happiness.

As Dr Wenn Lawson says “[t]he key message here is one of “listen and act or the opportunity for that person to live a connected and meaningful life might be totally and permanently lost.””

Now! I will link the study for you to read if you like! It’s interesting and illuminating reading — but it comes with a caveat. I’ve read it, and I think it has some flaws — mostly in that I’m pretty sure there was a lot of researcher bias involved in the creation of the empathy section.

Empathy is something many researchers still believe autistic people don’t have. They’re wrong! We know they’re wrong. We know, for instance, that autistics can actually have HYPER empathy. We’re as varied and diverse in this as we are in anything else you care to mention.

So, give it a read, but keep in mind that some of the language used to talk about us is not favourable, and that they really failed on the empathy part.

Largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender diversity.

H