The Highwire with Del Bigtree - AUTISM IN THE CROSSHAIRS OF THE TRANS MOVEMENT

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

The often polarizing gender debate has now added those on the autism spectrum as possible clients for gender reassignment. But how is the medical community determining who’s a candidate?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Dell, the gender space, especially in America, has got to be one of the most controversial spaces to talk about right now. And we really entered into it here at the high wire when we saw two things happen that we've been well versed on in covering vaccines. We saw the government in the medical community combined to come in between children and parents during really important medical decisions. And we saw drugs being pushed on kids that aren't really being studied for long-term side effects. So this is where we're at. And, you know, just a couple of weeks ago, we had Luca, a detransitioner, come on the show. And she talked about the pressure she received during, you know, a really, a really big decision in her life. And this is just a quick look at how that went. Check it out.

I started to open up about the fact that I was like, oh, well, I don't really like my chest or I don't like the fact I would got my period at that point. And I was just feeling like generally uncomfortable with like growing up into a woman at the time. As someone who was uncomfortable with their breasts and was wearing a binder at this point, like consistently almost like eight hours a day or more, I was like, maybe this will help. And I had talked about it with my therapist at this point a little bit. And from there, she was like, yeah, we could get you into someone in your city that can do this. My therapist had like sessions where I was not there and it was just my parents. They thought that like, okay, well, this is this must be like an established like treatment plan in the medical like medical world if they're saying that this is okay. We don't want our kid to like kill themselves, so we're going to be supportive.

So it was during the summer of 2018 in July is when I was 16 years old and I had top surgery or double mastectomy. I take responsibility for my part in it, but I have a lot of, but I have a lot of, also can't be the only one. I was a teenager on like who had a history of mental health issues at this point and approached with the idea of like, hey, I want to cut this part of myself off to feel better. And the medical community went, yeah, okay. It became no, you're born in the wrong body. There's something wrong with you. And you need to be medicalized to fix this. Yeah, that was an incredible story. So many of you wrote in about that and the idea I was amazing how many people said I never knew that there was this

movement of people that called themselves detransitioners that really regret the decisions that were made when they were a lot of them on drugs for depression and then made decisions that just was like a snowball that didn't feel like they could stop and the medical establishment pushing them in that direction really really a scary story and it's happening inside of our schools now across the country right it's interesting because I'm starting to see some polarization polarization of the media on the detransitioner story as they come out and tell these stories. They're getting a little pushback from the legacy media. But, you know, this conversation has so

many offshoots on it. And this is one of the main ones is the gender care for kids. And this is Politico just recently, this article says health access, health care access for trans youth is crumbling and not just in red states. So they said it used to be, you know, Republican problem. But we see this map here. And we see, you know, almost like 15 something states. In dark purple, we have the states that have banned gender affirming care for kids. Some of these are banned but in joint, meaning there's legal battles going on here. So this is a legit hot battleground for this conversation. Another offshoot on this is in Washington state, the governor that are just signed a new law.

This is what that looked like. Very similar to California is a transminor protected from parents under Washington law. So here's the coming between parents. This is licensed shelters and host homes in Washington had generally been required to notify parents, within 72 hours when a minor came into their care. Under the new law, facilities can instead contact the State Department of Children, Youth, and Families, which could then attempt to reunify the family if feasible. Youths will also be allowed to stay at host homes.

These are private volunteer homes that temporarily house young people without parental permission. So, you know, they're called Sanctuary States, people going from those banned states in purple on the map we just showed. The kids can go to Washington now, get into a host home. have some have some space there. So just a lot of the conversation is there's so many offshoots here. But one of the biggest offshoots, I mean, it just stopped us in our tracks when we saw this recently. This was one of the headlines. Apparently there's been studies going on for a little while now. This was one of the largest study to date confirms overlap between autism and gender

diversity. And it says in here, it talks to a lot of experts, doctors in the field, it says, it also indicates a need for clinicians and educators to talk with autistic people about gender identity, DeWinter says. and to be aware of potential mental health impacts that can result from what's called minority stress or the difficulties associated with being part of a marginalized group. Being both autistic and gender diverse can intensify such stress. So now we have this piece. The autism community is being looked at by the gender transitioning doctors now.

And what's interesting on this is you and I have a lot of experience with this community and some of their challenges. You have children dealing with motor planning issues. You have children dealing with social interactions that's affected by their autism spectrum disorder, you know, like the basic communication or the ability to build and hold relationships. So, you know, this is, is this just a subset? Is it a small situation here? Or how widespread is this? Well, on the CDC's own website, remember the CDC who refuses to even look at autism

and call it an epidemic despite the rise. They're advertising a 2023 national transgender health summit. Interesting. So the summit just passed. So we went to the summit's website and I looked at the schedule. And in that schedule here, sure enough, we have a gentleman named Dan Karasik and he's, he's teaching something called the mental health track. This is managing patients with co-occurring mental health diagnoses, neurodiversity. Okay.

So this is very interesting. Neurodiversity, we have autism community now being directly a part of this. And so there is some audio that came from that talk. Let's take a listen to it. It's really kind of astonishing how many times over the years parents have attributed to their trans where it's very clear the kid is trans. They just also have autism. and especially in a minor way where the parents kind of convinced themselves that the issues

around gender dysphoria and gender expression are just like obsessive repetitive you know interests related ASD so you know he's saying there look you have someone with autism who one of the, you know, severe odds isn't one of the key points is a repetitive behavior, ticks, things like that. This person is saying that apparently the parents are kind of misinterpreting that because those are actually signs in some cases of misgendering or gender expression that they're missing. So it's interesting. We're waiting into this now.

We're seeing how they're talking, you know, not really behind closed doors, but at these conferences where these doctors meet. So now it goes on from there. they're talking about assessing how do we assess kids with severe autism and take a listen to that people are patient I'm picking out you know despite their quite severe autism is very clearly trans and clearly you know benefiting from being on um you know something and even being patient for more of feminization and you know wishes they had had gotten treat it earlier for that reason.

I was just thinking to add to that. I think it's really important when we submit an assessment to basically say the problem is with the assessment requirements and that they're very neurotypically designed. And that is preface it. Due to that, I used other measures in information to find out about this particular person and then simply educate people around there's

different ways of knowing and if we use the standard template we're not going to find out we may have to depend on parents we may have to depend on drawings but we can't just say well until you can be verbal and answer the questions as we have in this assessment packet we can't clear you that's really just your manager it's considered an education opportunity maybe for those above us that don't understand asd as well as you know some clinicians do because even though there was obvious communication in some of the assessments that I did, I still got pushed back because there was not enough coming from the person themselves and instead from the parent.

So it's very, very frustrating because you're correct. It's very, very narrow, typical. And it drives me crazy. And I'm hoping that in the future we can change that. Well, it's actually you mentioned, Tom, because this particular, patient is able to draw her feelings better than to speak to. I, honestly, Jeffrey, of all the things we've ever covered, this one is absolutely mind-blowing the level of stupidity here.

I don't understand that these people are overriding parents that are dealing with the difficulties, and I have interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of these incredible people that what they're being told is you know what your child's problem is, the repetitive disorders and things like that, and forget the fact that they're nonverbal. They're drawing pictures, and what we're getting from those pictures is that they're trapped in the wrong body, and we need to put them on gender-transforming drugs,

castrate them, and then ultimately maybe cut their genitals off. That will solve their issues. I mean, is this? I don't even know what to say. I can't even imagine. I know how much of our audience right now are dealing with this at home of all the issues that you have to deal with. And by the way, can you imagine prior to figuring out how to communicate or communicate,

and I would say right now, forget the drawings, forget transgender right now, go to spelling to communicate, get your child communicating, or if they're an adult now, get them when you had this film. This is a game changer. Let them communicate to you, you know, in a real way. know what's going on. We're not going to have a bunch of psychologists and people that want to transgender your child staring at pictures and somehow making something out of that. But just this idea, I mean, when you think about the severe autism, the frustration and the communication with this child, I can't even imagine putting them through surgeries and things like that, changing their

gender while, you know, with everything else you're trying to work through, this is madness at a level that I don't think has ever graced the screen of the high wire before. At least that's my personal opinion. Maybe somebody else is out there. No, Del, you're seeing this the wrong way. But am I missing something? You know, what's interesting is they're saying, I'm trying to basically start this transition track with these people.

But, you know, the standard template, I'm coming in here with the standard template, it's not working because they can't talk. So, you know, I got to look at drawings and maybe which way they point or what they're pointing to. So it's the standard templates fault. We need to change that. it seems it seems very interesting that that is the conversation there and you know the person said in the in the

audio too that well I have a person with severe autism on estradiol this is a major female steroid hormone and they seem to be doing much better it's something you're doing great I wish they would have elaborated on their feminization they're trying to tell me they want to feminize faster really through pictures right and so we have this the guy who led this Dan Carras Sick. He is not just kind of a figure, maybe like a blogger that's trying to get a spot at a conference to maybe get some attention. He's a main author in the standards of care of the health of transgender and gender diverse people, version 8. So this is not someone who's just a bit player. So this conversation is, you know, it would be considered more high level than just your average run-of-the-mill side conversation at a summit or a conference.

But, you know, this, this kind of these two trains colliding of gender dysphoria and autism spectrum disorder are not anything new. So we have a Danish study and they found similar situation here, gender dephoria and autism spectrum disorder narrative review. And they said, despite the limited current literature on GD and ASD, there is now some replicated evidence of an overrepresentation of co-occurring GD and ASD compared to what would be expected by chance based on the estimated prevalence in the general population in both conditions. As up to around 20% of gender identity, clinic-assessed individuals reported clinical range features of ASD, we can cautiously conclude that co-occurring gender dysphoria in ASD is frequent. So that's what we're looking at here. This is something that is going to be a story moving forward because it looks like the autism community. They're clearly targeted the autism community and specifically severe autism where these children can't communicate. they're going to teach, you know, just like, I mean, when you think about how, you know, demented this is,

in the story of Luca, Luca can speak, but she's dealing with depression and being told your way out of your depression is you're just in the wrong body, and they talk her parents into it. Can you imagine with a child that you're already having trouble communicating because they're, you know, nonverbal at the moment, which we now know, they're fully cognizant. I want to make that clear. They're frustrated. They're inside there. They're having motor, you know, neuron connection. issues. They're making it hard for, you know, fine motor skills to lead to speech. Spellers taught us so much and just these brilliant minds inside there. But, man, when they talk about how frustrating it was just to try and, you know, explain that that's not my favorite kind of food, you keep feeding me, you know, burgers, I want chicken, things like that. If we couldn't figure

that out, how is it possible? But what we did figure out is you were trapped in the wrong body. And then you think about the vulnerability. And you're right. You know, One of the issues with this, you know, broad spectrum issue, autism spectrum disorder, is this difficulty connecting with people, right, of understanding. Even those that, you know, are high-functioning Asperger's go to university, but one of the issues around depression is they don't know how to connect with people. Well, what happens when some doctor says, you know why? Because you're in the wrong body.

We just need to cut off your genitals and that will fix everything. You know, and they're vulnerable to that. If Luca was vulnerable in depression, how is someone that has really got an issue that that is one of the primary effects of it is difficult to connect? And now you're told, here's your silver bullet to fix that. It's demented. It's twisted. And it just shows just how incredibly out of touch, I think, many of the leaders of this conversation are. At least that's my opinion. I'm sorry. I'm stating it.

Well, as we're talking about information and getting more information, and like you said, the spelling to communicate, it would be a great way to take power away from these health professionals, put it back into the families and the actual children and autistic spectrum disorder people and have them speak for themselves. What a time for that to come in at this point. But we're talking about more. And for anyone that doesn't maybe are brand new, go check out our episode, you know, where we discussed spelling to communicate with Jamie. We aired the film. Over 13 million people watched it. You can still find that online in different places. But if you know anyone that is dealing with, especially, you know, autism spectrum disorder in a space where they're having difficulty with communication, this is just a true miracle. I want to make sure that everyone seeks that out. It's one of the miracles that we have witnessed on this show with our own eyes.