Health ministers in charge of children’s hospital transgender clinics across Australia should take responsibility for investigating the overrepresentation of teenage patients with autism, according to federal Health Minister Greg Hunt.
Mr Hunt’s intervention follows reports in The Australian that a leading authority on Asperger’s syndrome, Tony Attwood, wants an inquiry into the autism trend, and revelations that the country’s biggest gender clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne had 45 per cent of a group of chiefly female-born teenagers showing autism features on a screening test.
