Thursday, March 22, 2018

Autism and transgender

Slate has an article discussing something I didn't know:
“We have enough evidence, across multiple studies internationally, to say that autism is more common in gender-diverse youth than in the general population,” said John Strang, a neuropsychologist and founder of the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington. Strang authored a 2014 analysis that found that more than 5 percent of autistic youth sampled for his study also displayed some level of desire to be the other gender, according to parental reports. (He cautioned that it’s too soon to say what the exact percentage in the overall population may be.) Another widely referenced study found that 7.8 percent of young people being treated for gender dysphoria at a clinic in Amsterdam had a confirmed diagnosis of ASD.
I wonder if this has anything to do with some rather nerdy professions - IT and engineering, for example - perhaps being disproportionately over-represented in transgender numbers?  (I'm not 100% sure that they are, but I have a vague feeling that I have read something indicating that.)

1 comment:

Jason Soon said...

this is not news to anyone who's been reading Scott Alexander (slatestarcodex) interestingly he discovered the link himself while doing a survey of his readers!