Is there such a thing as a GC Autism support charity?

[plipplops]

DD has recently been diagnosed Autistic.

We're flailing and reach out for support to charities and I'm bothered by the fact that they all seem to be affiliated to Stonewall, and have the lines 'Autistic people are more likely to be gender fluid/gender questioning etc..'

Luckily she doesn't seem to be interested in such nonsense but I really want her (and us) to be able to access support without risking her mental health deteriorating further by any suggestion becoming a boy/NB might help.

Anyone know if any charities haven't been captured?

Most of the strongest TRAs I've met in the autistic community are women.

As a whole, women are actually more supportive of trans people than men are.

I’ve had the exact same concerns and I do not know of a single charity - or most other organisations for that matter. None of them seem to have even read the report about autistic kids being much more likely to medically transition, and ask why this is, or whether this is a good thing.

I even went to look at a specialist school recently, and they proudly stated that one of the first questions they ask the autistic kids who attend is what pronouns they use.

I have an autistic child who is very vulnerable, and I am basing a lot of my decisions about his teenage hood in protecting him from potentially harmful ideologies and what I see as pressure groups in effect. He is quite impressionable and I want him to be able to find his own way, not one put on him.

Quite how I steer him away from social media, from therapists, schools or support which has all kinds of notions of autism I don’t know. It all seems a bit of a mess. What I do know is that other parents have had an awful time, with their kids becoming quite unwell as a result, when they’ve become attached to having to have an identity and it hasn’t made them happy.

Indeed.

They are being so badly let down in this 😪

OP in my experience, every charity needs a wide swerve. I even tried a local parents' group and found the same thing. Even in a relatively small group, the number of trans identified children was proportionstely large. The subject was discussed quite a bit, amongst other topics of course, and those that spoke confidently had a tone of finality that suggested they were experts. When I joined, I was still very early in to my journey of understanding to help my daughter (who had a mental health crisis which followed intense autism-related bullying at school and coincided with the arrival of her first period), so I was in listening mode.
I heard so many red flags, indoctrinated group think and no critical thinking. I left.

Also interesting to note the OP's daughter has just been diagnosed with autism, and the very first priority OP has is to "find an autism charity that is gender critical".

too fucking right we do. Autistic gay 50yo female here who would absolutely have been straight down the trans rabbit hole. Transitioning would have felt like it had solved all my problems between the ages of about 8 and 25.

luckily, I couldn’t take drugs or have surgery. Got stuck with just being a weird butch woman instead. I’ve had a gentle process of accepting who I am. Given the life limiting effects of the surgery and the horrific side effects of the drugs I am incredibly grateful I didn’t go down that route. I wouldn’t have had the amazing career or life experiences I’ve been fortunate enough to have.

I’m now on lifelong medication and have had surgery for medical conditions.. bloody hell it is limiting. Pain from scar tissue, having to plan your medication if you want to travel. Bloody travel insurance costs. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone I cared about.

i want to give my teenage ASD child the gift of choice — the ability to make a truly informed choice, to know that once you work through the distress of puberty the world is out there waiting for you. And it is going to be a whole lot more pleasurable without being tied to taking medication, or managing the side effects of invasive surgery.

I even went to look at a specialist school recently, and they proudly stated that one of the first questions they ask the autistic kids who attend is what pronouns they use

When we were looking at new schools for my daughter, this was my first priority. I spoke at length with the local authority during the EHCP review meeting last year (who told me that so many girls in particular were now identifying as boys... and they shared my concerns) as well as the schools I was looking at.

too fucking right we do.

Agreed. IMO this should be a top priority for any parent who is concerned about their autistic child being vulnerable to gender identity belief. We have a safeguarding statement (similar to what is in my daughter's EHCP paperwork) which we use at all health appointments, extra curricular clubs etc which lays out the impact of asking pronouns etc. Asking a child their pronouns is basically asking them "Are you sure you're happy being a girl? Do you want me to see you as something else?" Asking an autistic girl, who may already be very androgynous in appearance and interests because "girly stuff" isn't that appealing to their practical nature, has even more of an impact because it can start a single track train of thought.

Agreed @BonfireLady and @Odense

If DS wants to wear more feminine clothes for example I want him to be able to freely experiment without having to label that, join the social media club or feel that this is because he was born a girl rather than a boy.

Like a lot of other autistic kids my DS seems to be finding choices for himself difficult. He needs time and protected space to grow his own sense of what he likes and who he is. This is probably even more true for autistic girls.

In my experience with DS there is a woeful lack of safeguarding amongst autistic kids.

If she's not interested there's no reason she's going to be 'captured' as you call it, no one's going to tell her she ought to be trans or anything. Good video here by an autistic woman who was a very gender-non-conforming child, to the point her mum kept saying she 'ought to have been a boy' setting out very well many reasons why autistic people are not likely to be 'talked into being trans', it's very interesting anyway and might help set your mind at rest if you are worried about this.

Doesn't stop them trying. A teacher at my DS's school kept telling him he was asexual even after I had to tell her to stop because it was upsetting him. It took me threatening to involve the police, lawyers and the teacher body over grooming behaviour towards my son (what sort of person badgers an 11 year old about his sex life) to get her to leave my then 11 year old alone.
It did stop her until she was sacked (reported her as a safeguarding concern to the relevant bodies anyway).
The fact is unless you have fully inoculated your dc against gender woo they will push it admittedly maybe not as obviously and forcefully as with my ds but once they can get a thought worm in an asd kids head about being trans that poor kids in for a world of emotional pain

@Echobelly there is a huge disproportionate number of autistic kids, mostly girls, who are identifying as trans. A very thorough report of children at the London clinic considering medical transitioning found I think around 25% were autistic.

This was an objective, measured, unpolitical report that was just about the concern, safeguarding and care of young people.

So I think this trumps any social media opinion pieces. And it is a wake up call that yes, there is a much higher rate of autistic kids identifying as transgender. There was also a much higher rate of looked after children and children who has been abused/vulnerable. And that there are questions around this that are important to ask and clarify, that we have not looked at adequately yet.

I joined the "GC Autism" facebook group.

It looks just like Reddit's Gender Critical sub that got banned.

Why couldn’t you leave it alone? What is it with TRAs that they have to colonise everything that is meant to be free of them?

You are not GC. So why go near GC spaces?Shame on you.

Are you talking to me?

Not sure if I would call myself GC. Agree with some things but not all.

I believe lived experience is an important concept in most spheres when considering minority/disadvantaged groups.

I believe researching and gathering the opinions of a wide range of individuals within a minority/disadvantaged group through proper research, rather than relying on the anecdotes of a few outspoken individuals, is an important concept in most spheres.

I hate the ‘superpower’ thing.

Well said. Our society is so messed up these days because people are prioritising "lived experience" over rigorous research. Feelings over facts is a terrible way to examine and deal with difficult issues. It means the loudest types hog the limelight, and experiences that don't fit an ideological cause are conveniently discarded and ignored.

Autistic kids can feel like they're different and there's something not quite right with themselves, because of their autism.

Surely encouraging them to believe that this is because they need to remove healthy body parts is beyond fucked up.

I really despair of our world sometimes. I'm sorry op that's not very helpful. I just can't believe how ridiculous things have become.

I agree Nonny and Prawndumplings. I see now in the mid 2020s charity sector, a terrible rot that started with David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea from when the coalition got into power in 2010. With George Osborne’s ‘savage cuts’ slashing government funding into Austerity and the Tory welfare ‘reforms’ it has sent us back to the philanthropy of Victorian times.

Central government totally backed off financially from the charity sector at the same time as a global recession. So no more big grants coming to charities or big business with big oversight creating financial stability and expectation of certain reporting and conduct standards. Gaps and duplications then emerge more strongly in the third sector. By definition relatively wealthy and time rich people, move in to prioritise issues they really care about, which also by definition will not be the hard-to-solve unpopular structural causes. They will be the easier single issue and local appeal causes which are media-friendly. That is the Cameron Big Society. A perfect recipe for a proselytising charity like Mermaids led by someone like Susie Green. And for LGB charities to need to look beyond tackling boring old homophobia into whole new areas to fundraise for.

An absolutely terrible negligent situation for governments to push. Same with Michael Gove and free schools, government money in spades was going to amateurs like Toby Young setting up schools. Gove indulged in imposing his own Victorian vision on the national curriculum by making school qualifications completely exam based and with a bigger homework workload and much more constant performance stress.

A terrible way to try to teach loads of kids who don’t learn or perform in that specific academic way, turning them off education, or and really bad for kids with anxiety which fits exactly with the cohort we are talking about. It’s a perfect storm allowing autism charities to set out to (or feel they have to) stray beyond their core expertise into issues of gender identity. So they don’t serve their key beneficiaries as well, or they alienate them from their services by pushing a particular type of politics at service users.

Meanwhile the UK’s Charity Conmissions who have legal oversight of the conduct of charities are starved of funds by central government who have been cutting back across the whole public sector since 2010… and here we are.

Yes I would agree with this, and I am on several groups as a ‘lived experience’ person. So I do think real, actual experience is valuable but we just seem to have no good way of ‘weighing this up’.

For example, I see very little action/research/spotlight on speech development or behaviour in autism - because those that can advocate on lived experience are few and far between, and if a parent, are generally very tired and overwhelmed! I’ve tried to also speak for those kids, but it gets drowned out and all the focus ends up on adult autistic independently able experience. Because that’s the most able to be articulate. I’ve not seen or heard from a single autistic person with learning disabilities for example or their parents in all of these groups I am on.

It worries me deeply.

For example, I see very little action/research/spotlight on speech development or behaviour in autism - because those that can advocate on lived experience are few and far between, and if a parent, are generally very tired and overwhelmed! I’ve tried to also speak for those kids, but it gets drowned out and all the focus ends up on adult autistic independently able experience. Because that’s the most able to be articulate.

You miss out two additional problems here:

1. Parents are demonised by adult autistic communities (ignoring the fact most are also autistic), in large part because…

2. Any therapy or treatment, or attempt at behavioural change is considered to be destroying their authentic autistic selves. This isn’t restricted to quack therapies offering a ‘cure’ or ABA as practiced in the 70s/80s. This includes mainstream speech and language therapy and pretty much everything that falls under ‘parenting a small child’ and balancing needs of siblings. Completely failing to consider child development.

Plenty of autistic children and adults feel very out of place among their peers, they don't fit in or relate to others or find it hard to find others who share their interests and passions. This is very isolating and it can feel very comforting to be told that not feeling like a girly girl or a rough-and-tumble boy must mean you are trans or non-binary.

Not only this but there's the love bombing of being able to join a group of peers who will welcome you with open arms at first and all you have to do is declare yourself non binary.

Another big red flag for me in the autism parenting group I was in (other than the gender identity discussions) was that I was told the word resilience, and the concept of resilience, was bad. Ableist in fact.

Whilst I do agree that some of my daughter's brilliant skills are akin to an "autism superpower", this has to be carefully balanced out with reality. The reasonable adjustments that she gets at school should be just that: reasonable. Instead, the prevailing view was that effectively everything should be accommodated, no resilience on the part of my daughter was required and the brilliant bits of her personality and skillset should be elevated.
No. The world is not like that. The world is full of all sorts of different and sometimes difficult situations. Yes, my daughter needs some reasonable adjustments because of her autism but she absolutely needs resilience. Everyone does. She also needs to understand that she isn't a victim or the centre of the world.

When you layer gender identity in to this mix it becomes even more destructive. An adolescent child who is figuring themselves out is being encouraged to have free reign on how they process what it means to be a boy or a girl. With no guardrails or frame of reference, and with active encouragement about everyone being free to choose their "identity" they are vulnerable to the messaging that comes from the TRAs and Be Kind people. Instead of "there is no right or wrong way to be a boy or girl" it seems to filter through as "you can do girl things or boy things, so you can choose which you want to be". It all then gets underpinned by the victim/ableist problem if it gets challenged.

@BonfireLady this is the clearest explanation of reasonable adjustment and resilience I've ever read and has been very helpful. Thankyou.

100% agree. I am extremely worried about this. I’ve already had a SLT (speech) therapist ridicule and look down at me for wanting more speech therapy for DS - she told me we needed to ‘respect his authentic autistic voice’ - and basically leave him with zero speech support.

Kids behaviour is not being well supported either. Resulting in a lot of disregulated autistic teenagers and young adults with self harm/aggression/mental health issues who are somehow to fend for themselves or with an exhausted family. I don’t know how we can’t see the crisis in this.