Characteristics of Autism
Gender specialists first noticed decades ago that a large number of people who seek treatment for gender dysphoria also seemed to have autistic traits. Research on this phenomenon goes back to at least the 1990s, when the first case study of an autistic child with gender dysphoria (then called gender identity disorder) was published. As studies investigating the co-occurrence (or correlation) between gender dysphoria and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have trickled in, there is a growing consensus in the medical community that the two do co-occur at disproportionate rates. This consensus is based on numerous studies reporting that gender-dysphoric youth are more likely to be autistic than would be expected based on autism rates in the general population. (This may also hold true for adults, although the research on adults is sparser.)
This co-occurrence has implications for the treatment of both gender dysphoria and autism in young people, and hints at a connection between the biological causes of both transgender identity and ASD.
Gender dysphoria is the feeling of incongruence between the sex assigned at birth and the gender a person identifies with. Many people who experience gender dysphoria identify as transgender. Some trans people fit into the gender binary (in the case of trans men and trans women), while others identify as gender nonconforming or nonbinary (meaning they fall somewhere between or outside the man-woman divide).
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