Autism in "women" when you're a genderqueer person

kashiic
Community Member
My GP has recently raised the possibility that I, an AFAB person, am autistic. He said that "Autism presents differently in males and females", which I didn't know! In order to better understand what this might mean, and figure out whether that query might be something I wanted to look into further, I went down the google rabbit-hole (as you do). Unfortunately, *all* the websites I've found talk about "autism in women", "women with autism", etc. I may be female, but I am not a woman. So these websites are triggering my dysphoria, on top of the anxiety around this potential new thing that I don't properly understand yet. Are there any places specifically set up for genderqueer/non-binary autistic people? Does anyone have any advice about how I could better research this topic?
3 Replies 3

smallwolf
Community Champion
Community Champion

hello.

it sounds quite frustrating to want to find out more, to educate yourself and find that the pages you are looking at are not quite what you were looking for. Google is good and bad in this area.

not sure if this is advice so perhaps will call this a suggestion... if you are using google search for

genderqueer autism

I tried this search before posting and the results on the first page were mostly from the .org sites and worth looking at. And if you find a site that resonates with you, you might want to send an email to them for more information. At least that is where I would start.

Hope that helps.

Whimbo
Blue Voices Member
Blue Voices Member
Hi kashiic,

There is a correlation between autism and gender dysphoria, though it is not 1:1. Ultimately, most people with gender dysphoria don't have autism and most people with autism don't have gender dysphoria, despite a pretty significant relationship. If you are really concerned it may be worth talking about it to your GP a bit further. There is a lot of research coming out about gender dysphoria and autism, so know that if you are having these concerns you are not alone.

The main characteristics of autism are difficulties in social communication and interaction, plus restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests and activities - and these symptoms can't be better explained by other disorders or environmental factors. I only mention this because some pop-psychology sources can disregard this and focus on some atypical or 'quirky' symptoms of autism, some which can even be generalisable to neurotypicals. Furthermore, this symptoms have to be severe enough that they cause significant distress in your life for a diagnosis to be valuable.

If you're still interesting in learning more, scientific articles can be a great resource, despite some of them being wordy and convoluted. If you can find it online, there's one entitled "Mentalising Moderates the Link between Autism Traits and Current Gender Dysphoric Features in Primarily Non-autistic, Cisgender Individuals" by Kallitsounaki & Williams (2020). It found that autism traits was correlated with gender dysphoric traits, and builds on that finding with mentalising as a contributing factor. Remember that these correlations aren't perfectly strong, so if you feel like any of these findings don't represent you, they probably don't!

Guest_206
Community Member

Hi there kashiic,

I just read on the Reframing Autism website that Autistic individuals are more than seven times more likely to be Trans/Gender Non Conforming than their neurotypical peers.

Maybe you can check out the Reframing Autism website too?

Xg