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Parents ask us this one all the time, in a dozen different wrappers, but underneath it is always the same question: is the autism making my kid think they’re gay, or trans, or nonbinary? I understand why it gets asked, and the honest answer isn’t a reassuring pat on the arm, it’s the research, because the research on this is better than most people know and it says something clear. Autistic people are a lot more likely to be LGBTQ+ than everyone else, LGBTQ+ people are a lot more likely to be autistic than everyone else, and neither one is a symptom of the other. As our own autism and AuDHD hub puts it, you can be both, fully and at the same time.
In 2020 a team at the University of Cambridge published the largest study of this overlap ever attempted, in the journal Nature Communications. They pulled together five separate datasets, 641,860 people in all, and asked one question of each: were transgender and gender-diverse people more likely to be autistic than cisgender people? They were, in every one of the five, and by a lot: between three and six times as likely, after the researchers controlled for age and education. And it didn’t stop at diagnosis. Trans and gender-diverse people who were not autistic still scored higher, on average, on measures of autistic traits and sensory sensitivity than cisgender people did.
Three to six times is not a rounding error. It’s the kind of number that shows up because two things travel together, and the honest answer to why is that nobody knows yet, which the researchers themselves say plainly. What they don’t say, anywhere, is that one causes the other, and neither does anyone else who has looked at the data.
The gender side gets most of the headlines, but the orientation side is just as consistent. The largest study of autistic adults’ sexual orientation, from the same Cambridge group in 2021, surveyed 2,386 adults, about half of them autistic, and found that autistic people were less likely to say they were heterosexual and more likely to say they were asexual or something outside the usual labels. Autistic men were more likely than other men to be bisexual, and autistic women more likely than other women to be gay.
A Dutch study in 2017 put numbers on it from a national autism register. Among autistic women, 22 percent said they were attracted to both men and women, against 10 percent of women in the general population, and only 57 percent said they were attracted to men only, against 87 percent. About one autistic woman in five reported some feelings that didn’t fit the gender she was assigned, and so did about one autistic man in twelve. An earlier online study of about 300 autistic adults found seven in ten reporting a non-heterosexual orientation, though that sample volunteered itself and skewed heavily female, so I’d hold that one loosely and the Dutch one tightly.
Everyone should be able to live as the gender they know themselves to be, and autistic people are no exception.
That sentence is from a joint statement the Autistic Self Advocacy Network put out with two national transgender organizations in 2016, and I keep it around because it’s the whole argument in one line. The statement also names the problem we see on the South Coast: trans autistic people “often lack access to services and supports that understand and respect all aspects of their identity.” Autism services that flinch at the gender part, and LGBTQ+ spaces that don’t know what to do with the sensory part, and a person left standing in the doorway between them.
The CDC’s newest count, published in 2025, puts autism at one in 31 eight-year-olds, and its best estimate for adults is a little over 2 percent, which works out to more than five million American adults. In that same adult model, Massachusetts came out with the highest rate of any state. And the federal count of students with disabilities lists 27,662 Massachusetts public school students served under an autism classification in the 2023 to 2024 school year. Twenty years ago the state’s own Autism Commission was reporting fewer than five thousand.
Now put the two halves together. In 2022 the Trevor Project asked nearly 35,000 LGBTQ+ young people whether they had ever been diagnosed as autistic, and 5 percent said yes, while another 35 percent said they suspected they were. Among trans girls the diagnosed share was 14 percent. And the LGBTQ+ young people who had been diagnosed had 59 percent greater odds of having attempted suicide in the past year than the ones who hadn’t. That number is the reason this isn’t an abstract post. Somewhere in a Fall River or New Bedford or Taunton classroom right now is a kid who is autistic and queer and getting the message from at least one direction that one of those things is a mistake, and the research says that kid is carrying more risk than either identity alone would explain.
Here’s the part worth sitting with. When an autistic teenager tells you they’re trans, or bi, or ace, the autism does not make that report less reliable, and autistic adults have been saying so about their own lives for decades. The Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network puts it about as plainly as it can be put: “you claim your identity, not that you are assigned it.” Calling a kid confused is not a finding, it’s a way of setting their answer aside, and what it actually teaches them is that the adults in their life can’t be trusted with the real one.
Two things follow from that, and they’re both simple. The first is to believe the kid, the same way you’d believe them about being cold or hungry, and to get curious instead of frightened. The second is to make sure whoever is supporting them, at school or at a clinic or at a table like ours, knows how to hold both parts. Our hub is written in what the autistic community calls identity-first language, “autistic person” rather than “person with autism,” because, as the Autistic Self Advocacy Network explains, autism is part of who a person is in the same way being lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender is, and you don’t say “a person with gayness.” If someone prefers the other phrasing for themselves, that’s theirs to choose, and we use it.
The Network runs an LGBTQ+ Autistic and AuDHD hub on this site, and it exists because of exactly the gap that 2016 statement describes. It has a plain-language guide called Being Autistic and LGBTQ+, which walks through the Cambridge study in words a fourteen-year-old can use on a parent. It has sections on sensory life, on health and your body, on your rights as an adult in Massachusetts, on what happens after school ends, a toolkit of fillable templates and scripts for the conversations nobody wants to have cold, and a map of local services. Everything on it is free, and the guides don’t ask who you are before they let you read.
And then there’s a room to walk into, because the Network runs an LGBTQ+ ASD Social, a low-stimulation gathering for autistic LGBTQ+ adults. I’m not printing days or places here on purpose, because schedules are moving this fall and I’d rather send you to the live version than leave a stale one sitting in a blog post. Our events page has what’s actually running, and if you’d rather ask a person, call or text us and ask about the ASD Social, and we’ll tell you what to expect before you walk in, including how loud it is, because we know that’s the real question.
If you’re autistic and LGBTQ+ and you’ve been told, by anyone, that one of those cancels the other, I hope this page is the last time you have to hear it argued. You’re not a contradiction, you’re the most common thing in the world that nobody bothered to count until recently, and now we have, and the door’s open!
Sources: Warrier et al., Nature Communications (2020); Weir, Allison, and Baron-Cohen, Autism Research (2021); Dewinter, De Graaf, and Begeer, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (2017); George and Stokes, Autism Research (2018); the Trevor Project, Mental Health Among Autistic LGBTQ Youth (2022); CDC, MMWR Surveillance Summaries (2025) and Dietz et al., National and State Estimates of Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (2020); U.S. Department of Education, IDEA Section 618 child count, 2023-24; the Massachusetts Autism Commission annual report (2021); the Autistic Self Advocacy Network joint statement (2016) and its identity-first language page.