3:41pm August 12, 2014

ASD in girls/women/afab people

I’ve gotten quite a few requests for a video on the topic of ASD in girls/women/femme/afab people. These requests are usually accompanied by the question, “How is ASD different in girls?”

This isn’t a topic that I feel comfortable taking on in video format, at least not for a while. This is something that is very interesting to me (being an afab person myself) and it is on my list of things to read and collect information on, but I just don’t feel like I can draw any conclusions from the information I have available to me now.

Also, I’ve known boys/men/amab people who present with the “uncommon” or “feminine” characteristics and traits of ASD, and girls/women/afab people who present with the more stereotypical “masculine” traits of ASD. So is it really a female/male divide, or a common-vs-uncommon presentation of ASD?

I just don’t know yet. I know that a/Autistic people may (probably?) have higher rates of gender dysphoria than non-autistic people, and that we tend to care less about (or not at all) about conforming to our society’s “correct” gender expression. I know that Samantha Craft’s Females with Asperger’s Syndrome (Non-Official) Checklist has helped a lot of a/Autistic girls and women, but also that a/Autistic men can identify very strongly with these traits too, and that some a/Autistic women feel like Samantha’s list doesn’t really apply to them. And what about non-binary autistics? I know that ASD is definitely underdiagnosed and diagnosed late is girls/women/afab people, but that ASD is also underdiagnosed in POC communities.

So, in short, I don’t even know exactly what I think about all this. Well, that’s not true— I am pretty confident that Simon Baron-Cohen’s “extreme male brain” theory isn’t right. But in general I am just not confident enough to make a video on the topic.

Here are a few links on ASD in afab people, and Samantha Craft’s checklist.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/aspergers-diary/201008/its-different-girls

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/12/autism-aspergers-girls

http://www.myaspergerschild.com/2011/02/female-version-of-aspergers.html

http://aspergersgirls.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/day-62-females-with-aspergers-syndrome-nonofficial-checklist/

Thank you.

I know a lot of AMAB autistics who identify with the “autism in women” checklists.

I’m AFAB and genderless, and I have mixed feelings about the checklists.

One thing I know for certain though: Tony Attwood’s views on autistic women, are taken almost entirely from his interactions with Liane Holliday Willey and possibly one or two other autistic women. He makes general statements about “how autism looks in girls”, but he’s making them based on a really tiny number of actual autistic girls and women.

I know this because I remember when Liane’s book Pretending To Be Normal first came out. And I remember Attwood instantly pouncing on that and making all these pronouncements about ASD in women. And they were all based on very specific events in her book. And … his statements haven’t changed in the 15 years since then, not appreciably.

It kind of weirded me out, also, because he never really took Temple Grandin or Donna Williams into account, and they’re easily the two most famous and prolific autistic women writing about what it’s like to be themselves, out there. (Although Donna is actually plural, so she isn’t just female, she has both women and men in her system and that makes things more complicated.)

But as soon as Liane Holliday Willey came along (around 1999?) then suddenly Tony Attwood had his Model Autistic Woman ™ that he has used henceforth to describe what all autistic women must be like. It’s very weird.

I honestly expect there to be many many different forms of autism, and some of them may be attached to either gender or sex, but others may not. I wonder sometimes if mine leads people to be more likely to be genderless, but I’ll probably never know, and I don’t want to speculate too far because there’s already so much of “autistic people are so unaware of social conventions that some of them don’t even see themselves as having a gender” bullshit out there I don’t want to add to it.

But of the people I know in my subtype of autism, there’s a lot of people with genderlessness or body dysphoria or other gender issues going on. (I’m thinking of four people, myself included, right now. Two AFAB, two AMAB, three genderless, the other one not sure but I know that one has body dysphoria because we used to discuss at length our ideal bodies. And their body dysphoria was not the type you usually hear about where it’s just “I’m AMAB and I want to look as if I was AFAB”, any more than mine is the opposite of that. They were AMAB and wanted to simply have nothing that dangled off anywhere of any kind. I would not be surprised if they were genderless, but I’ve lost touch and never talked to them about gender issues since then.)