Exhibit A: The Autism Research Centre, Simon Baron-Cohen, and the Feckless Waste of Autism Research Funding
For decades, researchers have studied autism, receiving millions in funding to examine everything from diagnostic criteria to genetic markers, yet autistic people in the UK—especially transgender and gender-diverse (TGD) autistic individuals—are worse off than ever. The latest paper from the Autism Research Centre (ARC) at Cambridge, led by (ugh) Simon Baron-Cohen (SBC), once again confirms what autistic people have been saying for years: we face severe healthcare disparities, higher rates of chronic illness, and systemic barriers to accessing care. But rather than using their influence and funding to push for tangible improvements, the ARC continues to churn out research that simply reaffirms the same grim reality, offering no solutions, no demands for policy change, and no accountability for the institutions perpetuating these failures. They get paid. They secure more funding to “study the problem.” And meanwhile, autistic people—my friends and family—continue to struggle without meaningful support, whilst wait times for diagnosis, healthcare, and basic services spiral further out of reach.
This is not just an oversight; it is a systemic failure. Research institutions like the ARC have positioned themselves as authorities on autism, yet their work has done little to materially improve autistic lives. Instead of addressing the crisis in healthcare access, education, employment, and housing, they remain fixated on theories of cognition and speculative biological origins. Their priorities are clear: securing funding, publishing papers, and reinforcing their own academic standing. Meanwhile, the autistic community remains an afterthought, treated as research subjects rather than people in need of urgent, tangible change.
As an autistic trans woman, the child of a Crown subject born abroad with many relatives still in the UK, and an engaged citizen, I see this as emblematic of a deeper problem. Autism research has become an industry that funds itself whilst failing autistic people. It is a machine that justifies its own existence by producing endless studies that document our suffering without ever demanding solutions. This latest paper from the ARC is Exhibit A: a well-funded institution acknowledging yet again that autistic people are struggling, whilst doing absolutely nothing to fix it.
The ARC’s Latest Paper: More of the Same, With No Solutions
The name of the journal itself, Molecular Autism, doesn’t just hint at the ARC’s eugenic focus—it screams it. The institution’s legacy of work proves this point entirely, prioritising biological essentialism over lived experiences and treating autism as a puzzle to decode rather than a disability / way of being requiring systemic accommodations. Given this history, their latest paper is just more of the same: a detailed account of autistic suffering with no tangible solutions, no policy recommendations, and no accountability for the institutions that continue to fail us.
The paper outlines what autistic people already know and have been saying for years—that we experience significantly worse healthcare, poorer health outcomes, and systemic barriers at every level of the medical system. The findings are stark: TGD autistic people (people like me) are even more at risk, reporting higher rates of chronic illness (my erythromelalgia), mental health struggles (the loss of an entire decade to a psychiatry industry that doesn’t understand autism), and self-harm (yes, violent contact sports counts) compared to both non-autistic and cisgender autistic individuals. These statistics are damning, but they are not new. Autistic people, particularly those of us who are also TGD, have been screaming about these disparities, yet no one in positions of power seems to listen or care. The ARC’s researchers certainly don’t—if they did, their work would focus on demanding systemic change rather than merely confirming, once again, that we are struggling.
What’s missing from this paper is any meaningful discussion of why nothing has changed despite decades of research. There is no attempt to explain why previous studies highlighting these exact same healthcare failures haven’t led to improvements in services, training, or policy. Instead, we get the standard academic cop-out: “more research is needed.” But what kind of research? Who benefits from another round of studies telling us what we already know? Certainly not autistic people.
One glaring issue is their exclusion of TGD non-autistic participants due to “low power.” This raises serious questions about the study’s framing and its lack of proper intersectional analysis. Are they truly unaware that neurodivergence and gender divergence frequently intersect, requiring robust, well-powered sampling? Or was the sample size conveniently too small because they weren’t really looking? The exclusion of this group means the study fails to answer a crucial question: Are these disparities a result of being autistic, being TGD, or the intersection of both? Any researcher serious about addressing healthcare disparities would understand that proper controls are essential—but instead, the ARC falls back on vague methodological excuses.
This is the pattern, and it is exhausting. The ARC produces study after study, documenting autistic suffering without ever ensuring that findings translate into policy, healthcare reforms, or meaningful interventions. They highlight systemic failures while making no effort to fix them. Their research provides a perfect feedback loop: expose a problem, secure more funding to study the problem, publish another paper confirming the problem, repeat. Meanwhile, autistic people remain in crisis, waiting for change that will never come from institutions that refuse to demand it.
The Autism Research Industry: A Self-Perpetuating Machine
When I see an announcement about a new paper from Simon Baron-Cohen or Molecular Autism, it’s always a groan-worthy event. Ugh, what now? Another study telling autistic people what we already know? Another round of self-congratulatory research that confirms our suffering but does nothing to alleviate it? SBC and the Autism Research Centre have been receiving research funding for decades, positioning themselves as the UK’s foremost authority on autism. But what has all that money actually achieved for autistic people? The answer is depressingly clear: nothing of consequence.
If anything, the situation for autistic people in the UK has worsened. We are still seeing studies highlighting basic healthcare failures, but where are the demands for structural reform? The ARC exists within the NHS research sphere—why aren’t they using their influence to push for better services, faster diagnostic pathways, and healthcare accessibility? Have Thatcherism’s neoliberal austerity policies so thoroughly gutted the NHS that even the ARC sees no point in advocating for real change? If that’s the case, shut the ARC down and redirect the funding directly into the NHS for actual care. At least then, autistic people might see some tangible benefit instead of another paper telling us how bad things are.
Instead of practical solutions, the ARC remains obsessed with theories, fixating on abstract cognitive models that have little to no relevance to our daily lives. SBC’s Extreme Male Brain theory, which suggests that autism is a form of “hyper-masculinised” cognition, has been widely criticised for its gender essentialism, lack of empirical support, and outright harm—yet it continues to receive funding. Similarly, the ARC’s prenatal hormone exposure research is speculative at best, pursuing a biological determinism that does nothing to improve healthcare, education, or accessibility for autistic people. And then there’s the empathising-systemising model, another of SBC’s pet theories, which reduces autism to a personality type rather than acknowledging it as a disability that requires societal accommodation. None of this research makes life better for autistic people, but it certainly keeps the funding flowing.
Meanwhile, our actual needs remain ignored. Where is the large-scale research into autistic healthcare accessibility? Where are the studies on sensory accommodations in hospitals, trauma-informed care, or the long-term effects of medical gaslighting on autistic patients? Why is autistic employment, housing, and community support still a footnote in academia rather than a central research priority? Worse still, autistic-led initiatives receive a fraction of the funding that institutions like the ARC hoard for themselves. If research funding was allocated based on community impact, autistic advocates and grassroots organisations would be leading the charge, not career researchers who see autism as a theoretical puzzle rather than a lived reality.
The ARC is not solving problems; it is sustaining itself. It studies autism, but it does not serve autistic people. It exposes disparities, but it does not fight to end them. It justifies its own existence through a constant cycle of funding applications, journal publications, and media attention, all while autistic people are left waiting—waiting for healthcare, waiting for accommodations, waiting for someone, anyone, to actually listen and act.
The Cost of Inaction: Autistic Lives on the Line
The consequences of the Autism Research Centre’s inaction are not theoretical—they are deadly. Autistic people in the UK face significantly higher mortality rates than the general population, with suicide emerging as a leading cause of death. The research is damning: autistic individuals are far more likely to experience self-harm, suicidal ideation, and premature death due to systemic neglect, poor healthcare access, and chronic stress from navigating a world that refuses to accommodate us (Cassidy, 2020; Cassidy et al., 2022; Hull et al., 2024; Warrier & Baron-Cohen, 2019). The situation is even more dire for TGD autistic people, who face additional layers of medical gatekeeping, discrimination, and exclusion from essential services. This is not a crisis waiting to happen; it is already happening.
Study after study has confirmed these risks. Autistic people are ten times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, with masking, depression, and unmet support needs emerging as key risk factors. Autistic youth are particularly vulnerable—self-harm rates among autistic children range from 7% to 73%, depending on study parameters, a horrifying statistic that should be a call to action. Autistic women are at an even higher risk, with one study showing they are 5 to 13 times more likely to complete suicide than non-autistic women. If any other demographic faced suicide rates this high, there would be immediate public outcry. But because it’s autistic people, the research community simply shrugs and concludes that “more study is needed.”
So why isn’t the ARC leading the charge for actual change? Why aren’t they at the forefront of policy recommendations to reduce suicide and improve autistic mental health services? Where is their pressure on the NHS, NICE, or UK policymakers to implement autism-friendly healthcare models, provide crisis intervention tailored to autistic needs, and end the catastrophic diagnostic wait times that leave people suffering for years? These are the questions that should define autism research—not another study on prenatal hormones or outdated theories of "male brains."
The most damning part of all of this is that the solutions already exist. Suicide prevention strategies tailored for autistic people have been proposed: early autism screening for individuals presenting with suicidal thoughts, mental health literacy programs, and tailored intervention frameworks. Researchers outside of the ARC have already identified key risk factors and preventative strategies, but these findings remain trapped in academic journals rather than being implemented at scale. The ARC has the power, the funding, and the institutional influence to turn this research into action, yet they refuse to do so.
Instead, they continue publishing studies confirming what we already know: that autistic people, especially TGD autistic individuals, are dying preventable deaths. Their research does not challenge power, does not demand urgent policy shifts, and does not prioritise saving lives. If the ARC will not act on its own findings, if it will not use its platform to push for autistic-led reforms, then what purpose does it serve beyond self-preservation? How many more studies need to be written before something is actually done? How many more autistic people need to die before action is taken?
Where Do We Go From Here?
It is long past time to stop funding research that merely reaffirms what autistic people already know. The ARC and similar institutions have spent decades documenting our struggles whilst doing nothing to alleviate them. How many more studies need to confirm that autistic people are dying young, struggling with inaccessible healthcare, and being failed by the system? The problem isn’t a lack of data—it’s a lack of action. If research funding is to continue, it must be redirected toward solutions, not just problems. That means prioritising autistic-led research and policy initiatives over outdated cognitive theories that do nothing to improve our lives.
The first step is to shift funding away from institutions like the ARC and invest it in tangible improvements. If millions are available to fund endless studies on prenatal hormone exposure and the so-called “extreme male brain,” then money is available to train medical professionals in autistic-friendly care. If the government can bankroll research that merely confirms autistic people face discrimination, then it can fund policy-driven research that leads to actual changes in NHS protocols. If academics can justify spending years rehashing autistic suffering for journal articles, then they can no longer claim there isn’t enough funding for community-led support networks, mental health interventions, and services that autistic people actually need.
Beyond reallocating funding, research institutions and funding bodies must be held accountable. No more grants for research that exists in a vacuum. Every autism-related study must include a practical impact plan, with clear pathways for its findings to be applied in healthcare, education, or public policy. Researchers should no longer be able to publish studies on autistic disparities without pushing for concrete measures to end those disparities. The NHS, NICE, and policymakers must be directly engaged as a condition of future funding, ensuring that autism research is no longer an abstract academic exercise but a force for real change.
Autistic people do not need another ARC-funded paper telling us that our healthcare is broken. We need immediate action to fix it. We do not need another SBC theory about why autistic people exist. We need funding for the resources that will help us survive. If the research establishment refuses to prioritise our wellbeing, then it’s time to defund the institutions that have failed us and invest in those that will fight for us instead.
Final thoughts …
Decades of funding, countless studies, and yet nothing has improved for autistic people—if anything, the situation has only worsened. Autistic people are still fighting for healthcare access, still being left to deteriorate on endless diagnostic waitlists, still struggling against a system that refuses to accommodate us. TGD autistic people face even greater barriers, often being denied basic medical care altogether. And what do we have to show for all the research supposedly dedicated to our wellbeing? Another paper confirming our suffering, another round of funding secured for researchers who will never have to experience the consequences of their inaction.
The Autism Research Centre, under Simon Baron-Cohen’s leadership, is not a centre for progress—it is a research empire that thrives on documenting problems without fixing them. It has built its legacy not on solutions, but on perpetual observation, reinforcing its own necessity by repeatedly confirming the same grim statistics while doing nothing to change them. This is not just an institutional failure; it is a failure of moral and scientific responsibility. If a research body can receive millions in funding yet leave autistic people worse off than before, it has no right to call itself an authority on autism.
Autistic people do not need another study telling us that our healthcare is inaccessible. We need real-world solutions. We do not need another round of “more research is needed.” We need policymakers, funding bodies, and researchers to be held accountable for failing autistic people for decades. Funding should no longer be awarded to institutions that merely observe autistic suffering—it should go to those actively working to end it. The time for detached academic analysis has long passed. What we need now is action.