Men and Masking

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Re-posting since the link my original post was broken.

I think people really don't think about what counts as masking. When I found a list that was used in a research study, I realized I had done lot's of them and even had learned some more on here. Eye contact, for example. I had certainly had tried forced eye contact and avoiding facing the person. On WP, I learned the better technique of near eye contact (looking at near the eyes). The Deep Compensation group are the techniques most are probably not doing. I could imagine women being better at these and I certainly don't remember doing anything like them. I realize some of these are things anyone might do when they want to fit-in with a group. Here is the document with the list of masking techniques: Compensation Checklist

In this time,2021, I have no voice.

Being a white, CIS (I still don't fully understand this) gendered, and male means I am viewed as the "problem" with society. Trying to deal with all of that crap makes addressing my Aspie/ASD issues impossible.

I mean if I am already dismissed for being white and male, there is no way they will listen to my mental health issues.

This is a topic that I have given quite a bit of thought over the last couple of years, as it troubles me that the old stereotypes that have been too long fading away (e.g. autism overwhelmingly affects boys; autism is a childhood condition) are in danger of being replaced with new ones. I wouldn't deny that some correlations seem to be fairly conclusively established, but I also don't believe that autism innately has sub-types exactly corresponding to biological sex or gender identity. I think it's important to remember that masking is just a kind of behaviour - and our behaviour is not just mediated by the underlying sensory, perceptual, and cognitive effects of our atypical neurology. It depends also upon other personality traits; every social environment that we've ever interacted with; our capabilities for various kinds of implicit and explicit learning; and to what extent we're motivated to use self-discipline to modify our behavour from moment to moment.

Sure, those factors allow many routes for society's existing stereotypes to create correlations with sex and gender, and sex-dependent organic influences shouldn't be dismissed. But as a middle-aged straight cis male who's goto coping strategy has always been masking (or my best "uncanny valley" attempt at it), I cringe when I see the autism presentation with which I most strongly identify labelled as definitively "female" (I admit, maybe in part because I've heard so many people who bullied me resort to misogynistic and homophobic slurs). One could also posit a correlation between autism masking and the introversion-extroversion axis of personality, or between autism masking and the masking of other features such as mental illness or minority sexual identity. But whatever correlations might be found, fixing them as stereotypes will always encourage gatekeeping, even if only inadvertently. It's only out of necessity that autism is classified solely by observable behaviours, and while my diagnosis depends on that as much as anyone else's, I think it's a pretty blunt instrument when I compare it to the huge variations in how we describe our internal experiences to each other informally.

That's just a few thoughts that I happened to have already scribbled down somewhere - I may try to answer some of the other questions in a later post (it's my first day back here for months, so I have a lot of other threads to explore!)