It’s broadly true that autism has been found to be more common among trans people, which some researchers and autistic advocates have speculated may be due to differences in social cognition. “Autistic people take in and process social information in a somewhat different way than neurotypical folks,” John Strang, director of the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told KQED in 2023. “And because autistic people may be less moored and less yoked to social expectations, this means that they also might be less yoked to social gender roles.”
But U.K. media outlets have for years painted a much more malevolent picture of what that connection might mean. Newspapers, including The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, and The Times have pushed narratives that NHS gender clinic doctors rushed autistic youth into medically transitioning, and that school teachers and other trans youth “tricked” and “groomed” other autistic children into identifying as trans. Conservative-leaning outlets in other countries, like Canada’s National Post, have also promoted the narrative that autistic children are being pressured into transitioning because they are believed to be easily influenced, sometimes referencing the debunked “social contagion” hypothesis that claims young people identify as trans in order to fit in or gain popularity with their peers.
In the U.S., many of these views are embodied by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has falsely called puberty blockers “repurposed castration drugs” and speculated that “sexual confusion [and] gender confusion” in young people is influenced by “endocrine disruptors,” like the herbicide atrazine, in drinking water. After being confirmed to lead HHS this year, Kennedy issued a directive to federal agencies stating that a person’s “biological sex” should be determined solely based on whether their body has the “biological function to produce eggs or sperm.” Earlier this month, Kennedy went on a bizarre rant condemning autism during a CDC briefing, falsely saying that autism is a “preventable disease,” that autistic people will “never pay taxes” or “write poetry,” and that autism “destroys our greatest resource, which is our children.” In a separate address, Kennedy also vowed to find “what has caused the autism epidemic” by September this year.
How the NHS would manage the proposed autism screening process remains unclear. As of 2024, the NHS wait time for pediatric autism assessments was over two years, and an adult woman was reportedly told in March this year that she would need to wait 16 to 18 years for a diagnosis. In 2023, a revamped NHS system for autism and ADHD assessments reportedly rejected 85% of all applicants. And young people who do receive an autism diagnosis are sometimes exposed to unique bureaucratic harms as a result: 17-year-old Damien Dalmayne told Sky News in March that he was unable to access mental health therapy for depression through the NHS after being diagnosed with autism, because his “urgent” referral was redirected to a local “Children with Disabilities Team” — which was unable to help. Dalmayne said he was eventually forced to pay for private therapy out of pocket by using his disability benefits.
“The proposal to test trans kids for autism smacks of the politics of RFK Junior,” said the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats, a body of the U.K.’s Lib Dems political party, in a statement on Bluesky on Monday. “It pathologises two groups that deserve protection by the NHS (trans kids and autistic ones) in an attempt to remove their bodily autonomy. We should all see this for what it is: something that has no place in the U.K.”
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