Tony Attwood is one of the world’s leading experts on autism (especially Aspergers, as it once was). He has angered TRAs and autistic adults alike by saying:
“Once they’ve changed gender, they still have autism and when (gender) transition doesn’t solve their problems they think, Oh no, that was the only option I had, what’s the point of life?,”
I’d love to read the article but it’s paywalled:
www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/gender-change-is-no-fix-for-autism/news-story/3b1f6b896bdee58f9be871d477caf3f0
What Attwood says makes perfect sense to me and I’m glad he’s saying it. I think I’m autistic, so I totally understand why so many autistic kids think that transing themselves might account for their feelings of being unlike their peers and wanting to reject gender stereotypes. We know that autistic teen girls especially are at high risk of ROGD.
The Twitter uproar has, predictably, been huge. Search the #WeAreNotConfused hashtag and you’ll see hundreds if not thousands of autistic trans people.
And yet they haven’t figured out that correlation might actually mean causation in this case.