Autism and gender incongruence can coexist
Dr Helen Webberley on LBC: trans healthcare, with Tom Swarbrick, LBC
If a young person is autistic, their sense of being the wrong gender is probably just a symptom of the autism, not something real in its own right. So treating the gender incongruence would be premature, or even wrong.
Being autistic and being gender incongruent are two separate things, and one does not cancel out the other. I've heard this argument used again and again as a reason to withhold care, as though autism somehow disqualifies a person from knowing who they are. It doesn't. What it means is that the person in front of you may need support in more than one area of their life, and they deserve that support in full, not a version with the gender part quietly removed. Excluding someone from gender-affirming care on the basis of a neurodevelopmental difference is not caution. It is discrimination.
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