“Everything and Nothing”: Measuring Perceived Salience of Gendered Cues at the Intersection of Autism and Gender Diversity

Background: Some autistic individuals report not connecting with neurotypical gender constructs. A general-population-based theory of gender identity development states that unless gendered cues (i.e., the indicators of various gender groups) are salient to an individual, one is not motivated to self-categorize in terms of gender. We hypothesized that autistic individuals are less likely to perceive gendered cues as salient than non-autistic individuals. We define gender salience as being aware of, paying attention to, and finding importance in gendered cues. Methods: Objective 1 involved codeveloping a measure of gender salience with a group of autistic adults and applying factor analytic techniques and the alignment method of measurement invariance testing to validate this measure, using data collected from 1834 participants via Prolific. Objective 2 involved assessing, in this sample, whether autism status, gender-diversity status, and sex-assigned-at-birth were significantly associated with scores on the subscales of the gender salience measure, with age as a covariate. Results: We identified five factors. We interpreted the factors as gender-related introspection, gender expectation awareness, gender-related rumination, gender social categorization, and gender self-identification. We found associations between being gender-diverse and higher levels of gender-related introspection, gender expectation awareness, gender-related rumination, and gender self-identification. Self-identified autistic adults, regardless of gender identity, were more likely than non-autistic adults to have higher gender-related introspection, gender expectation awareness, and gender-related rumination. Conclusions: Autistic adults perceive the salience of gender no less than, and in some respects even more than, non-autistic adults. These findings inform a “difference-and-not-delay” framing of autistic gender identity development.