Abigail L. Fischbach

Children's National Medical Center · Division of Neuropsychology

Objective: Situated in Children’s National Hospital (CNH)’s Neuropsychology Division, the Gender and Autism Program (GAP) is the first clinical service dedicated to the needs of autistic gender-diverse/transgender youth. This study describes GAP clinical assessment profiles and presents a multi-perspective programmatic review of GAP evaluation serv...

Increasing rhetoric regarding the common intersection of autism and gender diversity has resulted in legislation banning autistic transgender youth from accessing standard of care supports, as well as legislative efforts banning all youth gender care in part justified by the proportional over-occurrence of autism. Yet, no study has investigated whe...

Objective: Sexual and gender minority (SGM) stigmatization is a key factor related to transgender adolescent mental health. While previous research has focused on direct associations between stigmatization and mental health, the present study of transgender youth, equitably recruited across the autism spectrum, examines cognitive and developmental...

Many youth who identify as gender diverse are autistic; a meta-analysis of available studies on the autism-gender diversity intersection estimated that 11% of genderdiverse individuals are autistic. At this point, evidence for how to best provide gender-related care to autistic youth is limited because long-term outcome studies of gender-diverse y...

Background: Autistic transgender people face unique risks in society, including inequities in accessing needed care and related mental health disparities. Given the need for specific and culturally responsive accommodations/supports, the characterization of key experiences, challenges, needs, and resilience factors within this population is impera...

The common intersection of autism and transgender identities has been described in clinical and community contexts. This study investigates autism-related neurophenotypes among transgender youth. Forty-five transgender youth, evenly balanced across non-autistic, slightly subclinically autistic, and full-criteria autistic subgroupings, completed res...

Gender identity is a core component of human experience, critical to account for in broad health, development, psychosocial research, and clinical practice. Yet, the psychometric characterization of gender has been impeded due to challenges in modeling the myriad gender self-descriptors, statistical power limitations related to multigroup analyses,...