Community experience and knowledge tells us that a lot of gender diverse people are also neurodivergent. There is a growing body of evidence that supports this: gender diverse people are more likely to be neurodivergent, and neurodivergent folx are more likely to be gender diverse. (See articles at bottom.) We don’t know all of the whys, but experiencing the world differently than the masses may be related to experiencing our bodies and our genders differently, too.
What Does Neurodivergent Mean and How Is It Different From Neurodiversity?
Neurodivergent (NT): coined by Kassiane Asasumasu to mean “neurologically different from typical.” That just means some people’s brains capture, store, process, or recall information differently from the way the majority of brains do. Neurodivergent encompasses a HUGE range of brains. Neurodivergent brains are not just autistic brains or ADHD brains. They could be dyslexic brains or synesthetic brains or epileptic brains. They could be brains that see or hear or control body processes differently. “Neurodivergent” is meant to be inclusive.
Neurodiverse (ND): Neurodiverse describes a group of people with various neurodivergences.
Autistic: Describes people with brain differences that cause difficulties in social interaction and communication. (While writing this, we were tempted to include the medical definition of autism and dive down that research pathway…but we don’t really need that, so re-directing! This author is pretty sure that they are autistic. They are not formally diagnosed.)
Allistic: Someone who is not autistic. Allistics may still be neurodivergent!
A lot of our patients are neurodivergent. Some of those people are autistic, and some are allistic. But we hope that we can offer tools to support the wide range of neuro diversities that our patients inhabit!
What’s normal?
We think that neurodiversity, just like gender diversity, is normal. Human brains are wonderfully diverse. Bodies are fucking cool. They do amazing things, in all kinds of fabulous ways.
“Normal” gets mixed up with “average” a lot. Average means that a “typical” person will have a certain experience. That’s not the same thing as “most humans will have this experience.” It is very much not the same as “this is the experience you’re supposed to have.”
There are a lot of experiences and ways of being that are normal but not typical.
Just because there are fewer queer, trans, and neurodivergent people around, does not mean that being queer, being trans, or being ND are abnormal, wrong, or unhealthy. We have always been here. We are normal.
Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and sexism make being not part of the typical majority harder. The pressures on being part of a minority are the reasons why we experience differences in how healthy we are, how much money we make, and how much stress we experience. (We’ve talked about minority stress before, if you wanna read up about health disparities.)
You–we–are not the problem here. The problem is that many of the cultures we live in have narrowed down “acceptability” into a tiny range of human experiences. This doesn’t mean that being neurodivergent or gender diverse or other isn’t really fucking hard sometimes.
We believe that healthcare needs to do better, and part of that is supporting gender and neurodiverse communities (and not just because we’re part of those communities, too!)
Medical appointments can be overwhelming and anxiety-provoking, we know it. We want to try to make them better.
We recently added the ability to select neurodiversity-friendly tools and strategies to our patient intake forms.
We’re hoping it will help us support you better.
We do telehealth, so there are no exam rooms with harsh and bright lighting to wait in. You don’t have to change out of your clothes or sit on crinkly paper or sticky vinyl, or smell industrial or medical cleaners (or room “freshener” cover-ups!)
If you have internet access in your comfortable space, you can have your appointment in your comfortable space. We want you in a place where you feel most able to talk about personal things (it helps us if that place is quiet and private, too!) Your pets, fidgets, squishies, stuffies, and blankets are welcome! We want you to be comfortable during your appointment.
Here are some of the tools we can use in appointments:
- English-language closed captioning.
- Using chat instead of verbal communications.
- Using visual cues to pause or interrupt the conversation, or make space to ask a question.
- Not having to look directly into the camera or being able to sit far away from the screen.
- Being able to turn your lights off during your appointment.
In order to establish the provider-patient relationship, we do need you to be on camera for part of the appointment, but you don’t have to stay on camera for the whole thing.
Some of us need more time in information-intense environments like medical appointments. One of the reasons why our first medical appointment is an hour long, and our adult follow-up appointments are 30 minutes is so that we don’t have to rush. All of our youth medical appointments are an hour long. If you need more time, we can make that happen. Unfortunately, to adequately support our team, we do charge for additional time.
If you need support with filling out your online paperwork, our administrative staff are available to help at a lower sliding scale than appointments with our clinicians. Please encourage folx to donate to our scholarship fund: we can use it to cover the additional time costs or interpreter costs for folx who need them! (Note, our scholarship fund is currently offline while we look for a new sponsor.)
We also have an open-ended question on our intake form: do you have other tools, strategies, or supports that have worked for you in the past? We might not have the resources to support additional requests, but we’d love to know about them so we can support them when possible or help you find a team who can!
More info on how appointments work and what to expect here.
Articles
Warrier V, Greenberg DM, Weir E, Buckingham C, Smith P, Lai MC, Allison C, Baron-Cohen S. Elevated rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, and autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse individuals. Nat Commun. 2020 Aug 7;11(1):3959. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17794-1. PMID: 32770077; PMCID: PMC7415151.
Warrier V, Greenberg DM, Weir E, Buckingham C, Smith P, Lai MC, Allison C, Baron-Cohen S. Elevated rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, and autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse individuals. Nat Commun. 2020 Aug 7;11(1):3959. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17794-1. PMID: 32770077; PMCID: PMC7415151.
Glackin A, Pearson A, Davis R. “You Are the Expert of Your Own Experience”: A Thematic Analysis of Experiences of Autism and Gender Diversity in Adulthood. Autism Adulthood. 2024 Sep 16;6(3):300-311. doi: 10.1089/aut.2022.0111. PMID: 39371358; PMCID: PMC11447393.
Heylens, G., Aspeslagh, L., Dierickx, J. et al. The Co-occurrence of Gender Dysphoria and Autism Spectrum Disorder in Adults: An Analysis of Cross-Sectional and Clinical Chart Data. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 2217–2223 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3480-6
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