Studies On Autism and Females

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Yes. I'm so envious of people who can pull of an androgynous look. I'm top-heavy to the point that I've discussed reduction surgery with my husband. I loathe them. Feels like I'm wearing a costume of some other person's body. On the other hand, I have no desire whatsoever to have dude junk in my pants. I just don't want to cart around any bulging genitalia of any sort.



I have children, but other women still talk down to me sometimes. I think it happens when they realize my social "game" is not on their level. When they insinuate something about someone, or make an innuendo and it goes over my head, for example. I can usually understand what they're hinting at eventually, but not at the speed of conversation. I think it makes me seem sweet and naïve, which y'all know I ain't.

I can still pass for a man if I wear a sports bra and loose clothing. I walk like a guy, I have a fairly dep voice for a chick, four kids have changed my figure somewhat (wider hips, bigger butt) but my lines are still reasonably straight.

I still get that crap from other women.

It doesn't have a whole lot to do with androgyny or kids.

I'm pretty sure it has everything to do with putting them off balance (and therefore on the defensive) by not playing the NT female social games.

Women are just as aggressive and competitive with other women as men are with other men (witness my whole family-- mostly female and fairly matriarchal-- completely flipping out over my hubby rubbing my cousin's feet). They're just more subtle about it. Complete pain in my Aspie.

Ugh...yeah, same for me, people have assumed I was naive (or dumb I guess) because I didn't catch what they were saying at first. A lot of times I do get it perfectly once I can hear what someone is saying, but I just can't hear them at first, or sequence the words properly. I'm pretty much never up to the speed of a conversation, but especially if other people are making their own inside jokes and comments and insinuations to each other in my presence.

I think some people do look down on someone who doesn't have children (past a certain age). Especially around here because this area is practically the teen pregnancy capital of the US, and a lot of people apparently don't understand the concept of waiting until your life is stable enough to raise a child, much less not wanting to have any at all. Plus there's that whole attitude of "you wouldn't understand unless you have children"...which I do understand, really, having a child changes your life forever, changes your priorities and takes a lot of sacrifice, but it doesn't make me less of a person because I decided not to do that.

I feel like a lot of women try to play up their roles as mother, wife, grandmother, etc. as a kind of status, as if it makes them superior to single and/or childless women. And most will make that the focus of any kind of small talk or casual conversation even if they aren't trying to be smug about it. It can feel very exclusionary and also like they are sizing me up based on how well I can relate to it. Which I can't. And it's like they don't know how to relate to someone like me either, if I was a 16 year old they might be saying things like "oh one day you'll find out what we mean" in a really condescending tone of voice. But then at my age, they can't really say that, but the tone is still there, except it means something more like "and maybe you never will know what we mean."

https://thetaskforceblog.org/2016/06/22 ... periences/

This is a related article I found this morning.
I've never tried posting a link before, sorry if it doesn't work.

I find the articles on women and autism fascinating, especially in the light of my younger sister insisting that I'm on the spectrum because "autism is different in women!" The thing is, though, not all social difficulty in early life is autism, and everything I read about autism in women is notably different from my own experience in several ways.

-I never lined up toys as a kid. I had elaborate social pretend games with them with this same younger sister who thinks I'm on the spectrum. This might be Darold Treffert's Type 3 Hyperlexic's normal or near-normal social function within an inner circle. (I was a slightly early reader, mastering my ABCs quickly and easily at age 3 while appearing not to be listening in on lessons intended to prepare my older sister for kindergarten, and reading independently by age 4, with nothing more formal than looking over my grandmother's shoulder when she read to me and watching Sesame Street. So if I was a type 3 hyperlexic I was a mild/borderline case.)

-I did not think to mimic social skills. I didn't seem to have any particular problems with body language in the first place, was not an impressive mimic, and frankly, I don't think I fully understood the importance of social skills when I was little. I was too naive and self-centered to think I might be hurting people, I might be interpreted as trying to hurt people, or that regardless of whether others' disagreements with me were valid (e.g., my sisters thinking the rules were unfair), I should respect them (by not ratting on my sisters). I also didn't think that I could learn social skills, until I gradually became more aware of and concerned with these subtleties in adolescence and adulthood. I didn't read novels, since the introductions were too boring, but I did read psychology later, as a young adult, which may have supported but was probably not primarily responsible for my continued improvement socially to the point of not having any noticeable problems today.

-Childhood was harder than adolescence. Because of the naivety mentioned above, I often got in more trouble than the boys in childhood. But as a teenager, once I was finally given a label (ADHD, which I don't think was quite right) and just naturally matured, I started to become more aware and act out less or less severely.

-I didn't have any problems with "being a girl" until adolescence, when I started to finally realize how much an orientation toward pleasing other people was a big part of the female gender role, and all those fine lines that had to be walked. Before that, it seemed to be just about liking, collecting, and wearing what I thought were pretty things. I took on a tomboy persona to help reduce the weight of other people's social expectations of me, and it seemed to work. But I don't consider myself genderqueer, because I didn't have an early or deep objection to gender roles. I was sexually harassed a little, like probably all teenage girls, but never sexually assaulted because (a) I was lucky and (b) I took the warnings against dangerous boys so seriously I avoided physical intimacy until well into my 20s (with a cute nerdy Aspie for my first experience).

-The biggest difference of all between me and women on the spectrum is that my sensory-type quirks, like not liking hugs, under-reacting to pain, and over-reacting to noise, disappeared without a trace by age 9. They did not and still do not come back under stress. This again fits Type 3 Hyperlexia much more than ASD. Occasionally I get a little obsessive and rigid under stress, but in a way that's fully consistent with a neurotypical case of nerves.

It all goes to show that telling genuine ASDs from quirky NTs is tricky, and especially tricky in women. I suspect the difference lies in the details of early development and what happens under stress in adulthood. (BTW, if anyone's wondering, I always come out NT on the popular Aspie Quiz.)

I could probably fairly describe myself as gender vague. When I was younger I could have described myself as genderless, but since marriage and kids I've capitulated to enough of the societal gender-typing that now I'm probably closer to being a female who does not enjoy femininity.

If people attribute it to anything, it's usually to anxiety about being valuable as a woman (bullshit-- I have anxiety about not being valuable because I'm not sufficiently womanly, not about not being valuable because of being womanly), or to a radfem desire to dominate (which I've gone so far out of my way as to become antifeminist in order to disprove), or to being raised by a single father from the onset of puberty forward (which is a reasonable and true attribution, but other than a brief period of trying to emulate Laura Ingalls Wilder-- a fair tomboy herself, I might add, for her time-- I have been this way as far back as I can remember). I clearly remember being 7 or 8 and the absolute despair of my very feminine (and fairly feminist) mother as I tried to teach myself boy-skills and mostly did boy-things in a very boy-way in my ratty boys' jeans and t-shirts, boys' hig-tops, and pony tail.

It wasn't that I wanted to be a boy. I've always thought lugging male genitals around would have to suck. I've never been interested in changing my sex. It was just that those were the skills and activities I was interested in, those were the clothes that I felt good in, and those were the ways that seemed practical.

Life would probably be easier if I'd been me, but a boy. My thought patterns are mannish, my speech patterns are mannish, my vocal patterns are mannish, my bearing is mannish, other than sewing and gardening and canning, my interests are mannish (and even in the garden, some of my favorite chores are the man's-work chores like turning and tilling and amending the soil and building infrastructure). I guess child-rearing is a womanly interest, but even that I tend to go about in a somewhat mannish manner, whether because that's my nature or because in my fairly heavily studied opinion, my dad was in many ways the best parent I had (not that any of them were really bad, other than maybe some of my step mom's earlier attempts, but if I'm going to parent, I want to give it the best of everything at my disposal).

I don't regret being born female, and I don't want to change. I do regret that society seems to have these deep-seated, deeply-rooted, so close to unconscious that a lot of people can't even seem to acknowledge them expectations for what people should be solely based on what's hanging between their legs. Seems as stupid a basis as skin pigmentation on which to base the determination of who a person ought to be.

Perfectly stated. Me, too. In modern Western culture, apparently we have to either be perfect Suzy Homemaker traditional housewife who loves jewelry and hates competitive sports, some man-hating feminist, or a sleazy fun-loving slut. I don't think our culture recognizes other kinds of women.

I'm very thankful to have a guy who cares nothing about me meeting any of those expectations.

where is O'Toole and how do i befriend her...
all joking aside, i would love to have a female friend who "gets it", and especially about autism and eating disorders. however it does bother me a little how the article talks about anorexia as a culturally female condition and doesn't even throw a sentence in about how the research for anorexia is biased towards females. it wasn't until the DSM 5 came out that losing one's period was no longer a defining factor for an anorexia diagnosis. it's the same type of story as male dominated autism research and it would have been an interesting point to make in this context.

but overall i enjoyed this article, and i'm glad to see that there are researchers who are dedicated to understanding autism in females. i was diagnosed early because i was very obviously neurodiverse (lack of social understanding, delayed auditory processing, sensory overloads), but only a few years after my diagnosis i had already learned enough to replicate many social interaction skills, could go through a winding channel in my brain to decipher auditory language at an acceptable degree of speed and accuracy, and could manage the effects of sensory overloads well enough to go unnoticed by others in most instances. if i had caught on to all of this sooner i doubt i would have been diagnosed at all.

i also find it really interesting how many women who have posted on this thread are categorically unfeminine or at least refuse to derive their feminine qualities from being biologically female. i'm not a housewife mother or a career feminist but i'm kind of both and neither at the same time. i clean up after my boyfriend's messes not because it's my womanly duty but because i care about cleanliness more than he does and the only way the house will be livable to my standards is if i do it my way. i'm not even obsessive about cleanliness and order i just have a different level of comfort and pay better attention to detail than him. with some reminders, he takes care of the trash and compost because i'd rather not take care of those things. i do the grocery shopping because i love grocery shopping and he does the liquor and purchasing because i'm not as comfortable making those choices (and dealing with those people). i'm a feminist but not radical--just regular. i love my long brown hair and social ability to wear pretty shoes and comfortable dresses and mascara without being ostracized. but i also love welding and studying fungus and playing competitive games. i can't relate to many forms of "female gossip" or "male bonding" but i'm not the only weirdo and i have had very few but very good weird friends because of this. i would never exchange that for a neurotypical brain.

this is me too! my main special interest as a child was reading and the social information i learned to mimic was all processed just like this. some autistic people talk about "pulling files" from their brain on how to behave socially, and that's basically how it works for me except it's not a clean, well organized file its a handbook that i'm continually re-reading and editing. you know how if you open the same pages of a book over and over again or if you crease it down it naturally falls to those pages? that's how i access the most important social information. it's so easy to find by now that it's almost natural.