Nature Communications. The study involved 641,860 people who provided information about their gender identity, neurodevelopment and psychiatric diagnoses, including whether they were autistic.
The information came from five separate databases.Across the datasets, transgender and gender-diverse people were between 3 to 6 times as likely to be autistic than cisgender people.
The authors of the study said: "We use the term 'cisgender' to refer to individuals whose gender corresponds to their sex assigned at birth."Past studies have found a link between being transgender or gender-diverse and autism, but the samples were small, according to the authors of the study.The team found this pattern in the information they used despite the datasets.