Girls and boys on autism spectrum tell stories differently

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Yeah I'm pretty darn special when it comes to worry

With a c3.5 year age difference and the fact that Tim went to boarding school when I was about 4, I was not really aware of Tim’s behaviour being particularly different until he was about 7 or 8. From what I heard from my parents however, from the age of about 4 he started to become more quiet and perhaps withdrawn.

Most things I have read about girls/women on the spectrum and their ability to avoid detection makes me think that I am either a women trapped in a mans body or have a female subtype of autism.

Why would they want to avoid detection? If I had a medical problem, I would want to be diagnosed accurately, not avoid detection.

Aah, you're right; it must have just been a temporary link. Luckily, I remember where I found the link; this article on the Language Log blog, which often has pieces which are pertinent to autistic language difference (the writer, Mark Liberman, writes there often and is also one of the paper's co-authors.)

Here's an alternative link that I managed to find, and a more searchable description in case the link goes dead again...
NAACL, Exploring Autism Disorders Using HLT, Mark Liberman et al., June 2016


Yes, I have felt the same, and often identify with the female posters here more than my own gender. I can understand why people speak of "female autism" and "male autism", as the strategies people use to cope do genuinely seem skewed by gender, but I do think that this is too much of a generalisation. A lot of the men I meet who were late-diagnosed seem to also fit the "masking" pattern of coping, as do I, and I do worry that they are as likely to be dismissed by services as is so common for females. I think we need to be careful not to turn the "masking" strategy into a gender stereotype, for the sake both of men who present that way and the women who don't.