Gender dysphoria is a catchall label for autistic or gay teens
Konstantin Kisin said:
“the Cass Review and others have found a strong correlation between autism, being gay, and other things that make you somewhat different... the argument is, well, a person going through adolescence and puberty who is different in some way sees this gender dysphoria label as a way to, as a catchall for all these different sort of feelings that they experience that make them uncomfortable”
The Cass Review is a real and substantial document, and the elevated rates of autism and other neurodivergence among gender clinic referrals are genuinely documented. The concern that a label might be applied too broadly to distressed young people sounds clinically responsible.
The correlation is real, and taking it seriously is the right instinct: autistic young people, gay young people, and young people who have been through difficult experiences do show up in gender clinic data at higher rates. But a correlation tells you that two things are associated, not that one causes or explains away the other. An autistic person can also be trans. A gay person can also be trans. What the Cass Review actually called for was more careful, individualised assessment, not a rule that neurodivergence or sexuality should lead clinicians to set a young person's gender identity to one side. The 'catchall label' framing assumes that if you can find another reason for someone's distress, the trans identity disappears with it, and that is not how any of this works, and it is certainly not what the evidence shows. The practical cost of believing it falls on autistic trans young people, who already face longer waits, more scepticism, and higher rates of mental health difficulty, and who now face the additional obstacle of having to prove that being trans is not simply a feature of being autistic.
What I said at the time:
“There are people who are autistic who are also transgender. There are people who are gay who are also transgender. There are people who've been through trauma who are also transgender. But that does not mean that every transgender person, we must look for the reason, because by far the majority of people are just transgender because they are.”
Autistic trans young people, who face the additional barrier of having their gender identity treated as a symptom of their neurodivergence rather than a separate and valid aspect of who they are.
I have answered this one in full: Why are autism and gender dysphoria so often linked?