The_Walrus wrote:
Aren't Aspies disproportionately likely to be gay- or rather, not straight? Whenever polls of sexuality are done on here, hetro comes well below the 90% you'd expect from polls of the whole of society.
I haven't seen any official research, and the WP subjects are of course self-selected like with all polls... but I wouldn't be surprised if this is true.
My own theory is that, since human sexuality is a spectrum and not a set of neat little categories, there are a wide range of possible sexual orientations (cf. the Kinsey scale). However, as they grow, people learn about themselves and sexuality from the culture around them, and our culture uses categories and sees heterosexual as the norm. (This is not necessarily a matter of bias; for example, by default, you are assumed to be straight unless you send signals or identify as something different.) As a result, people are subtly pushed toward hetereosexual, cisgender from their very earliest days, and only those who are strongly transgender or non-heterosexual will still identify that way by adulthood. People on the border between straight and bi will identify as straight more often, depending on how much their culture takes heterosexual as the norm.
Autistic people on the border between bi and gay, or straight and bi, are as likely to go one way or the other. We don't absorb the culture around us nearly as strongly. Similarly, we're more likely to be transgendered--most trans autistic people would have been trans even if they weren't autistic, but a few on the border weren't pushed into their birth-assigned gender as strongly as they would have been if they were neurotypical.
So it could be that among autistics, with the influence of culture much attenuated, we will eventually fall into a sexual and gender category determined mostly by our genes and hormones--even more so than among neurotypicals.
I predict that as atypical gender and sexuality become more accepted, neurotypicals will approach autistics in terms of the number of people who identify as a sexuality/gender minority.
Disclaimer: Unproven theory. Needs research.