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Research now shows that a large percentage of transgender-identifying children are autistic or have related mental health issues. So why is the medical profession steamrolling them into experimental, harmful, irreversible treatments?
Earlier this year, a young woman named Chloe Cole, who underwent a medical gender transition as a young teen and who now regrets her transition, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that doctors ignored the fact that she displayed autistic spectrum traits and instead focused on treating her gender dysphoria in isolation.
Cole argued that it is “common” for girls who are on the autism spectrum to present as more traditionally masculine, with tomboyish characteristics. But now, instead of recognizing that, medical professionals are rushing to “treat” these children and teens with off-label drugs and mutilating surgeries.
That’s exactly what happened to Cole. Doctors placed her on puberty blockers at age 12 and cross-sex hormones at 13, and then at 15, she underwent a double-mastectomy. At 16, with her mental and physical health declining as a result of the medical interventions, Cole realized that she wasn’t actually a boy and began to detransition.
Cole, now 18, is suing the Kaiser Foundation Hospital and associated medical professionals who facilitated her gender transition, arguing that doctors should have offered her therapy to address her autism spectrum symptoms and related co-morbidities rather than make her gender dysphoria the top, and only, priority.
According to Cole, medical professionals made “no attempts to treat her coexisting autism spectrum symptoms, but instead put her on an immediate path to a gender transition.”
Cole’s claim that children with autistic traits are more likely to believe they are transgender is being backed up by a growing body of new research. For example, a 2017 study conducted by Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, explored the relationship between gender identity and six mental health conditions, including schizophrenia, depression, and attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), many of which co-occur with autism. He found that gender-diverse people have higher rates of all six conditions than non-gender-diverse people do, with the highest associations being for autism and depression.
Moreover, a 2015 study done by researchers for Kaiser Permanente found that 34-36 percent, or more than a third, of teenage girls on the autism spectrum are likely to have high rates of depression and anxiety, and a few studies have even found an overlap between autism and eating disorders, including anorexia, which is another body dysphoria condition.
In England, Tavistock, the world’s largest gender clinic, actually buried evidence showing that 35 percent of child gender patients had moderate to severe autism. The National Health Service (NHS) shut down Tavistock after an independent review discovered that medical professionals at the clinic were pressured to unquestioningly affirm children’s gender identities and skip the normal clinical assessment process.
What’s more, these studies could very well be undercounting this prevalence, as autism in girls, especially teenaged girls, is now believed to be wildly underdiagnosed. That’s because girls with autism often present with very different symptoms than do boys, on whom the autistic diagnostic criteria was originally based, so signs are routinely missed.
So why are children with autism more at risk for presenting with gender dysphoria?
A key reason, according to Dr. Susan Bradley, a Canadian psychiatrist who has been treating children with gender dysphoria from nearly 50 years, is that children with autism focus intently on subjects of interest and have great difficulty letting go of things they believe are true. This trait once caused autistic children to be more likely to believe they were overweight and develop anorexia and bulimia; now, given the ubiquitous push to teach schoolchildren about LGBTQ ideology, it makes children on the autism spectrum particularly susceptible to suggestions that any discomfort a child has as they approach or go through puberty might be an indication that they were “born in the wrong body.”
In March 2023, a special report by the American Psychiatric Association detailed the medical implications of this type of inflexible thinking in patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), warning clinicians to “be aware of high rates of gender dysphoria in patients with ASD compared with the general population and, conversely, high rates of autism traits in those who identify as transgender and gender diverse.”
Cole’s story bears all of this out. Her exposure to hours of online transgender influencers “convinced” her that she was actually a boy and not a girl.
Jamie Reed, who served as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, also pointed to the autistic connection when she blew the whistle after witnessing alleged practices in which the clinic rushed children into irreversible sex change procedures, often against the wishes of parents. Reed observed that, post-2015, the clinic saw a sudden increase in adolescent girls — many of whom had symptoms of autism, as well as depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, and obesity, but no history of gender distress — suddenly seeking medical gender transitions.
There were even patients “who declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).”
While doctors disbelieved and ignored those latter claims, chocking them up to social contagion, they never doubted a patient’s self-diagnosis of being the opposite sex and “always” viewed gender transition, “even with all the expense and hardship it entailed, as the solution,” according to Reed.
Given this information, shouldn’t clinicians and medical personnel be focused first on utilizing psychotherapy to first treat and manage autism, as well as those conditions that can be associated with autism, including depression, anxiety, ADHD, and suicidal ideation, rather than immediately pushing for these children to undergo so-called “gender-affirming” treatments and procedures that mutilate and permanently alter their bodies?
The facts are increasingly clear that too many doctors are taking advantage of people struggling with autism by wrongfully using symptoms experienced by some on the autism spectrum as a false pretext to pressure these individuals into damaging gender-transition procedures.
This is a direct assault on the image of God in the lives of every single young boy or girl suffering from autism or any other mental health issue. They each deserve careful, sensitive, individualized treatment specific to their condition, such as psychotherapy, and not to be used as a launching pad for unholy experiments driven by the cult of gender ideology.
Scripture gives a stern warning to those seeking to harm little children for any nefarious purpose in Matthew 18:6:
“But whoever causes one of these little ones, those who believe in me, to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
Doctors are supposed to heal, not harm. They’re supposed to diagnose patients, not allow patients to diagnose themselves. And they’re supposed to carefully analyze and determine the underlying reason for a child’s discomfort, not react in a knee-jerk fashion to sudden, unexplained symptoms of what might be a social contagion or a desperate attempt to fit in with the LGBTQ fad.
With this in mind, we as the Church must work together in our communities to be an advocate for children with autism and other mental health issues who are being taken advantage of by both the LGBTQ movement and the medical profession. And as part of that, we must strive to execute a more biblical version of justice by utilizing every civic tool provided us as citizens, including the justice system, disciplinary boards, and the legislative process, to hold accountable those medical doctors who are ignoring their ethical oath and perpetrating harm on vulnerable children for sinful gain.
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