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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2023
A panellist warned that anti trans politics was weaponising autism and gender identity
In short
At the close of the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, a panellist said autistic people are more likely to be queer and trans, and explained why research into it was met with suspicion.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
The panel had been asked whether autism would look different for someone who identifies as LGBTIQ, and whether it mattered. A panellist at the closing dialogue of the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, in Melbourne on 18 June 2023, said the direct answer began with numbers.
Autistic people, the panellist said, are twice as likely to identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, or another non default sexual orientation, and three times as likely to be transgender, gender diverse or non binary. The panellist did not name a source for the figures. Published research had found an overlap of that kind, measured in various ways. In a 2020 study in Nature Communications, led by Varun Warrier at the University of Cambridge and drawing on more than 600,000 adults across five datasets, transgender and gender diverse adults were between three and six times more likely to report an autism diagnosis than cisgender adults. That measures the overlap from the other direction, and the team did not investigate whether one causes the other. On sexual orientation, a 2021 survey of 2,386 adults, 1,183 of them autistic, published in Autism Research by Weir, Allison and Baron-Cohen, found that autistic people were less likely to report heterosexuality than non autistic people. The panellist’s figure of twice as likely is the panellist’s own.
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Sources the story draws on
- Transgender and gender-diverse individuals are more likely to be autistic and report higher autistic traits (opens in a new tab), University of Cambridge (news release on Warrier and colleagues, Nature Communications)
- The sexual health, orientation, and activity of autistic adolescents and adults (opens in a new tab), Autism Research (E. Weir, C. Allison and S. Baron-Cohen), record on University of Cambridge Neuroscience
- Missouri activists celebrate, worry after Bailey pulls rule limiting gender-affirming care (opens in a new tab), St. Louis Public Radio (Sarah Fentem)
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