Some of the world’s leading experts in transgender healthcare convened in San Francisco last week where they shared their knowledge about how non-verbal autistic youth can communicate their transgender identities through drawing, and told anecdotes about the severely autistic children and adolescents they have set on the medical sex change pathway.
Psychiatrist Dan Karasic delivered a talk titled “Managing patients with co-occurring mental health diagnoses” at the San Francisco Trans Health Summit pre-conference event on May 5, and in the audience was none other than Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a leading figure in the field of child sex changes, who shared baffling anecdotes about non-verbal children expressing their gender identities.
In an audio recording of the talk obtained by The Post Millennial, Karasic can be heard asserting that severe autism should not prevent a person from being approved for an experimental medical sex change, dismissing the common concern of parents that a fixation on gender is due to the intense focus of interests typical of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and engaging in the bizarre exchange of ideas with Ehrensaft about youth communicating their transgender identity through drawing.
Karasic was the lead author of the mental health chapter of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care 8.
Karasic began his talk by noting that autism spectrum disorder overlaps with gender dysphoria “more than expected, for reasons we don’t know.”
“Anyone who is doing gender work sees a lot of people with autism spectrum disorder,” he said, without showing any signs of curiosity as to why that might be.
Then came an acknowledgment of the difficulties faced by gender clinicians treating this complex group, which ranged from communication issues due to many of the patients being quite “verbally impaired” and many lacking a strong social support network.
R&I _TP
