this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Do you think the current research into gender transition doesn't account for autism as a variable? There is a medical consensus for the current treatment for a reason. For a person to properly transition, they will have undergone years of psychology assessment and so on, seems to me that an autism diagnosis would immediately follow. Is there any evidence of correlation between trans individuals and autism? (There may well be literature on it, I'm genuinely asking).
Also, if that were the case (autism misdiagnosed as gender dysphoria etc etc) you wouldn't have the robust literature with follow up surveys of individuals and how satisfied with their outcome they are. The outcomes of medical treatment of gender dysphoria are quite positive; if like you said, in the end they still don't know how they feel, these outcomes would be vastly different.
This is not so much an unpopular opinion on something which might be ambiguous or up for debate, it's an incorrect opinion which goes against evidence.
There's nothing to support people mixing up autism and gender dysphoria since theyre wildly different things, but there is a correlation between being autistic and being lgbt. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_and_LGBT_identities
I get the feeling you're personally offended by this, and if so, I'll apologize as it was never my intention.
The above statement is just an observation myself and colleagues I've shared my concerns with did. It might be a coincidence, but nearly all our transitioned patients had a prior diagnosis for autism, and without exception all had psychiatric comorbidities.
This also seems to be in line with the (scarce) literature on the subject. (I.e. 1 2)
I hope I'm wrong and my patients are just exceptions, and that we won't look back at these years with regret.
I'm not personally offended, don't worry. I'm not part of the LGBT community myself, back when I was studying I looked into the literature around transition and the perceived hot controversy on the issue. You've touched on an important issue, which is that a large percentage of people who will end up transitioning have a lot of stressors which will end up severely impacting their mental health, not just the innate stress from gender dysphoria, but the lack of support from friends and family, ostracization, etc.
This helps explain the psychiatric comorbidities, like depressive and anxiety disorders.
It seems to me that the current medical pathway for trans patients is robust, and should weed out the odd patient with transient dysphoria or patients which have serious psychiatric issues that mistakenly led them down this path.
For those that go down the path, regret rates seem to always be between 1 and 2 per cent. At this point, we can accept these rates as statistically accurate, when we have data from thousands of individuals.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01605-w#Abs1
https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/03000/regret_after_gender_affirmation_surgery__a.22.aspx