Sounds like Simon Baron Cohen’s extreme male brain theory of autism. I don’t believe it’s correct as to causation, but many symptoms overlap with sex differences: men as a general rule tend to be less social, less socially adept, more obsessive about work/hobbies, more interested in things and particularly how things work rather than people, prefer to be blunt about disagreements rather than maintain social harmony. I’ve always found men easier to talk to, probably for this reason.
That’s interesting. Both my mother and my Aunt have told me they feel like they have a man’s brain. My mother was a mechanical engineer. I feel that way in some respects but ultimately came to the conclusion it was just internalized misogyny and a brain is a brain. (I know there are some sex variations but my understanding is they’re pretty loose.) For a very long time as a writer I was only comfortable writing men. But I think the real reason is that I needed to write about anger and there are certain ideas that women aren’t supposed to be angry, so this gender norm stifled me.
What’s also interesting is that a lot of autistic people identify as trans - something like 30% of the autistic population. Is that predominantly FTM I wonder, or is it more split?
Sorry, I got that statistic backwards.
8). Research also suggests that this relationship is bidirectional, where the rate of autism in transgender individuals is between 6 – 26% compared to a 1.85% prevalence in the general population (Thrower et al., 2020; Maenner et al., 2020; Walsh et al., 2018).
Gender Discomfort and Autism - Autism Research Institute).
Anyway it makes me wonder - could AFAB autistic people just feel themselves more “boy”?
Or could it be that autistic people are just less likely to GAF about gender norms?
Here’s a story that maybe contradicts what I said before about “boy brains”: one of the moms of an ASD child that I know used to think her daughter might be trans because she didn’t conform to gender rules at all. Then she got the diagnosis. Now she thinks her daughter might be “autistic-gender,” is how she put it.
What she means by that is that her daughter doesn’t really see a lot of cultural gender cues that other kids do, and also doesn’t seem to care a whole lot about whether she’s coding male or female, or whether she is male or female. I’m like that too, as is my daughter. I don’t consider myself trans and I use female pronouns because I have a female biological body and it’s more convenient that way. And sometimes I’ll be in cultural spaces (like church) where it’s easier for me to put on female cultural trappings, like dresses, than to make a big deal of it. But if I woke up tomorrow in a male body, I don’t think I’d have too many issues with that, or if people wanted to refer to me as “he,” that would be fine. I understand lots of other people have more of an attachment to their gender?
Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m very attached to my gender and my biological sex, to the point of pride, even. I love being a woman.
Where I am more stereotypically masculine is that I am very direct and very physical. Like as a little girl I used to wrestle with the boys and beat them up a bit. I spent a lot of time with boys growing up. I tell people what’s going on in my head, what I want, what I think, no subtext. I don’t understand why anyone would do otherwise for any reason. I never played dumb to get a boy to like me. It intimidated the hell out of them.
I missed that earlier, FWIW, the ADOS-2 is widely regarded as the most reliable and valid measure of ASD. It’s the gold standard. It has a very low rate of false positives.
My son has had two (for insurance reasons.) They will not cover autism services without an ADOS.
ETA: this has been a great thread! I sent it to my husband to discuss.
It’s both sexes, from statistics and my own experience. So the male brain theory can’t be the explanation. And some aspects of autism are more female coded, shyness in particular. It’s socially acceptable for a woman to be shy and quiet, and let her husband or boyfriend do most of the talking when eg interacting with salespeople. Not so much for men. It’s also a much bigger problem for men when looking for romantic relationships, since they are supposed to do the asking.
My guess it’s there’s an aspect of not fitting in with your expected gender norms, and an aspect of not caring enough as a child (the age they are usually learned) to mould yourself to fit them, and another factor is caring less about other people’s judgement, which for normal people would tend to restrain them from thinking about transitioning. But also, it seems plausible that if your brain develops abnormally in one way, it’s also likely to develop abnormally in another.
I think you’re on to something. Perhaps autism interferes with the usual process of finding role models of the same sex, and internalising aspects of how you are supposed to behave in your particular society, so you end up kind of genderless?
Personally, I’ve gone through phases of identifying more and less with other women. I must seem quite masculine as an adult, because people are always surprised to learn I wasn’t a tomboy as a child. Back then I was friends with girls, played with dolls, loved pink, and always wore dresses (because I found trousers uncomfortable).
But as an adult, I’ve often felt quite alienated from other women. It’s not just that I have a lot of interests more popular with men, or that my personality seems somewhere between typical male and typical female. It’s reading or hearing about other women’s experiences, and realising they don’t match mine at all. For example, the nigh-universal complaints about husbands and boyfriends not doing their share of the housework, and about being in charge of organising the household. I never really internalised the idea that I should be in charge of it, so I’m not. Similarly with various appearance-related tropes. The ‘no make-up selfie’ is just a selfie. And I’ve experienced rather little sexual harassment-type stuff, which makes me wonder if it’s related.
It all adds up to make relationship and friendship advice aimed at women pretty useless for me, and even counterproductive if I followed it.
I never identified as a man, but for a long time I identified more with men, and ignored or suppressed aspects of my personality that were more typically female. However, as I’ve got older, the commonalities have become more apparent. And in particular, having a baby has made me feel like I have more in common with other women, both in the physical aspects of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding, and the different experiences of mothers and fathers.
I suspect that right there is a reason for some proliferation of ‘syndromes’?
Just on principle I too have reservations about how many of these seem to have been discovered (or invented?) in recent decades. One has to wonder, as medical science progresses, how many of these will still be considered valid or useful terms in future?
After all, phrenology and the four humours were once supposedly ‘science’. Or, as noted in another thread, ‘moron’, ‘imbecile’ and ‘idiot’ were acceptable medical terms, in some circles at least, a century or so ago.
I am not for a moment denying that diagnosible mental conditions exist. But maybe the existing battery of labels should be taken with at least a grain of salt?
Were you present for your son’s two ADOSs? I’m curious if you got to see what is involved. Though mine was in August, I plan on making an appointment with the assessor/facilitator as I am curious about some of the things mentioned in the report as examples of autistic behaviour during the assessment.
Also, notwithstanding that we have free healthcare in Canada (with a couple of exceptions), I got mine privately and out of my own pocket, due to the waiting time for a public system assessment.
This… makes a lot of sense to me. People talk a lot about role models with gender and race, and other people I know who are underrepresented in media gender and race wise have felt something profound when they see people like themselves in movies, books, etc. I never really have. (But reading, say, Murderbot, was like the flash of recognition other people had told me about, and it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized that Murderbot is pretty clearly encoding a spectrum-like personality.)
This is fascinating to me. I was the opposite, but in a way that makes me feel like we have a lot of commonality, lol. Growing up, I felt like I had more in common with boys and it was much easier to talk to them, I tried playing with dolls but wasn’t really very good at it, I hated dresses. But as an adult, I feel like I have got more practice at both figuring out the part and playing the part, so to speak, so I’m better at acting like a woman. Though it helps that I’ve figured out a social group (my kids’ school has a lot of spectrum-y and quirky kids, and the parents have kind of found each other) where they don’t really talk about super-female-coded tropes like makeup (what’s that?) and woman fitness classes (this was a big topic among the moms in the school my kids used to go to, and I was always completely ??? when it came up). (I am in charge of organizing our household, though.)
Yeah, all of this resonates with me a lot.
And in addition, as an adult and particularly as a mother of school-age kids I’ve become much more cognizant of the advantages of being a woman – the close social networks that are traditionally the domain of women are really quite good for passing on information, especially local information, which is very useful for parenting kids, and for in-group bonding, which is also useful when one is trying to figure out and develop one’s kids socially.
I was present for my daughter’s ADOS at age 5. It was so long ago now that I don’t remember a whole lot about it, but I do remember a sinking feeling as the examiner tried to engage her (and mostly failed), because it became more and more clear to me that she wasn’t behaving like a typical child. The examiner told us afterwards that the most cogent sign was that she wasn’t involving either the examiner or me in her play – not feeling like she wanted to share with me a cool toy or thing she had found. (There’s a name for that which he told us but that I am forgetting.)
(She does do that now, as a teenager… which itself is definitely showing that her emotional development continues to be greatly delayed, because at this age teens have stopped doing that with their parents and are doing it with their friends. But she doesn’t share things with her peers, and doesn’t have close friends.)
My neurotypical son, at age 5, was totally all about “Mommy! Mommy! I want to show you the thing!” and still is at age 8, for that matter.
Um, yeah.
I doubt I’m autistic; but there’s . . . something. There’s the partial faceblindness, for one; and there’s the near-total social cluelessness in childhood, for another; and the distinct sense that, while I never approached it in a mathematical fashion (I seemed to be great at math for my age all the way through basic algebra, and then we hit calculus and I was totally lost and never even tried to go further), I learned social signals painfully over many years and very much from the outside in. Nothing to do with empathy, which if anything I had too much of for standard people and a tendency to extend it to, for instance, hairbrushes. I understood perfectly well that other people had emotions. I couldn’t understand that some of them didn’t seem to care that I did, and wanted to do things that obviously disturbed me. And, as I figured social signals out, or to whatever extent I have figured them out (I think these days I fake it pretty well but suspect I don’t always know if I do get it wrong), I can often understand communications problems other people are having that they can’t see. Oh – X is furious at Y because X doesn’t know what a fear grin is or that humans do it too! (X wouldn’t believe me when I tried to explain that the reason Y was smiling while telling X something X didn’t want to hear was because Y was afraid to tell him that, not because Y thought it was fun to tell him that.) Oh – Z behavior I can’t figure out (or for that matter Z behavior that I grew up with as normal and assumed that everybody did) is a cultural thing. But these other people don’t do Z, they do anti-Z, or maybe Q. And now those people are angry at each other because they all genuinely believe it’s the other who was being deliberately rude. (And probably also don’t want to listen to me trying to tell them so; though occasionally somebody will.) And so on.
But some of the other stuff just doesn’t seem to fit at all.
But it’s massively useful to me to be able to hang a name on the faceblindness, and to have this be something that dubious people can look up and find out actually exists, so that I can warn people ‘I won’t recognize you next time I see you, you’ll have to tell me who you are’ or be able to explain to the person at a party who I didn’t warn why I don’t know they’re who I was talking to ten minutes before. I think this significantly reduces the number of people who get mad at me because they think I deliberately snubbed them, or didn’t give enough of a damn about them to notice what they look like.
People with entirely genuine problems who could manage when they had one source of income may well not have wanted to go through the massive amount of hassle (including judgementalism) necessary to get another source; but, if that previous source of income disappeared, may have been forced into it.
So no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence; but I don’t think it necessarily indicates malfeasance, either. It is difficult to apply for assistance. It is more difficult to apply for some forms of assistance than others (and often more difficult to apply through specific regional offices than others, partly due to the chance of who may happen to work there.) Many people won’t do it if they can manage otherwise. If/when they can’t manage otherwise, sometimes they’ll force themselves to it.
If I’ve really lost it, I go dead silent and freeze. There is too much fury trying to get out for it to decide on any specific channel by which to do so. Doesn’t happen very often, for which I am thankful – it’s no fun, and also not useful; though at least more useful than grabbing the nearest plausible object and swinging.
One step short of that I shout. But if I’m at that stage I can still hear somebody telling me to stop shouting, and I will.
Thank you, I appreciate what you wrote as well. I think your standards for how a disability should be documented seem pretty reasonable to me. I think the main difference we might have is that you see people as more trying to deceive and I see them as more lacking in self-efficacy. It’s also possible these people just have really bad advocates, or professionals who can’t help them get their documentation together or say the right things needed to communicate their plight. But obviously not every case that crosses your desk is valid, some people are lying, etc. That is true.
It’s actually more common for someone to have multiple comorbidities than to have none at all. Mental illnesses tend to cluster together, and neuro-developmental disorders tend to lend themselves to vulnerability to mental illness. This could be because neurodiverse people are more likely to be bullied or encounter problems trying to live their lives, and that in and of itself can make them vulnerable to other disorders. In cases where there can be overlap, the DSM usually affixes a requirement that says something to the effect of: “Symptoms cannot be explained by any other disorder.” For example (in my case, actually) a lot of PTSD symptoms mirror ADHD symptoms, particularly with regard to focus, emotional dysregulation, etc.) When I thought I might have ADHD, I sought out a specialist who could determine whether my symptoms could be attributed to PTSD only. If they can, an ADHD diagnosis should not be made.
IOW, each diagnosis has to stand up under its own weight.
As for what constitutes weird vs. disordered, something really only rises to a disorder if it significantly impairs functioning.
That’s a bit misleading, because you don’t have to have a mental illness for insurance to pay for therapy. A common billing code is Adjustment Disorder, which vaguely means, “going through some stuff.” I actually have two therapists right now, one I’m seeing for EMDR who is billing for PTSD and the other I’m seeing to manage the stress of having a special needs child, who is probably billing for Adjustment Disorder. Originally I just had the one for PTSD, but the ongoing issues with my kid started taking over my therapy sessions. That lady has helped so much, I think we are just about done with that work.
As for the benefits of labels, here’s an idea to consider.
Let’s say someone has a conflict with another person. Let’s say for the sake of simplicity, their spouse is doing something that pisses them off and they need to have a conversation about it.
When it comes to mental illness/neurodevelopmental disorders, the advice that person needs is going to vary depending on what their diagnosis is.
autism: social cues not being the strong suit, this person may need coaching on how to tactfully frame the conversation, understand what the other person is trying to express, and make the other person feel heard
adhd: this person probably needs to put a reminder on their calendar to have the conversation. They may need support around managing intense emotions that come up. They may need help staying on topic.
ptsd: this person might be afraid to broach the conversation at all out of fear they will get hurt. Grounding exercises, maybe some cognitive restructuring would be appropriate here
social anxiety: this person might be afraid to broach the conversation out of fear they will be judged. This person probably needs some support around tolerating highly anxious feelings, some cognitive restructuring
borderline personality disorder: this person will have such a strong sense of victimization that they may have a hard time viewing the offending party as anything other than evil. They will need strong DBT skills - is this emotion justified? Am I using black and white thinking here? Anger management could be key
IOW, when faced with a given problem, people with different issues are going to need different sets of skills to manage their daily lives. I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to match skills with issues than through a diagnostic framework.
As for “self-identification,” I don’t love it either, particularly if the person mistakes one disorder for another one, it could interfere with their ability to find the right resources. It also leads to spreading of misinformation, VERY common with ADHD. Back when I was on reddit, you would get posts like, “I had no idea my hatred of jeans is because of my ADHD!” This leads to people thinking things like, “Well I hate jeans too! Maybe I have ADHD!”
When my son was diagnosed with autism we connected with a number of clinical psychologists on the subject of ABA, which is the hot-button controversy of the adult ADHD community. A lot of them worked with autistic adults. They said they had seen a huge uptick in people coming into their office, convinced they have autism because of their sensory issues. Like, okay, a lot of things can cause sensory issues. The thing that makes the diagnosis is the confluence of the symptoms together.
All that said, spitballing on a message board about the vague possibility that you might be autistic is relatively harmless, and might lead to some people reading this thread going to find out for themselves.
Personally I think whatever elements of autism I might have in me, are probably a combination of my weird way of coping with a turbulent childhood combined with social anxiety. I report myself as being socially awkward but my husband doesn’t really see it, and it’s more likely that I assume I’m awkward because I second guess and overthink every social action that takes place. One of my husband’s criticisms of some measurement tools for autism is that they tend to give false positives for people with social anxiety disorder.
But as my husband and I theorized about our autistic traits, I said “maybe you’re half an autistic person and I’m half an autistic person and together we make one autistic person.” And then we laughed because we did make one autistic person.
Yes. It can be very hard to watch. My son actually scored higher (more signs of autism) on the one we did this month - so about an 8 month gap between them. That’s what convinced me that he needs ABA. His fine motor and OT skills have improved so much, his speech skills have improved so much, but social skills? Nada. The result was the same on this one - Level 2 - but I felt as I watched him this time around that he was missing a lot of social cues. With the first one I didn’t really know what to look for or what they were testing for. There were a lot of things I missed.
I’m not sure what the ADOS-2 looks like for adults, but for kids it’s basically putting them in play environments and seeing how well they engage with the interviewer or their parents. Is eye contact consistent? Are they trying to get the interviewer involved in what they are playing? Are they showing joint attention (following pointing, able to focus on something the interviewer is focused on.) Do they respond to their name? Are they able to do imaginative play? If the interviewer suddenly shifts gears, will the kid shift gears too or stay adamantly stuck on the first thing? They are also looking for repetitive movements and behaviors, like rocking, swaying, toe-walking, hand-flapping, spinning in circles. They are looking for differences in voice intonation and pitch. They are looking for an unwillingness to engage in anything but their preferred activity. In the most recent one we had, my son kept insisting on numbers, over and over, despite the wide range of toys available to him. At one point opened the lady’s drawer and started raiding it for numbers. He found some. He always does.
That should be, the adult autism community. Sorry.
I am nodding so hard at this. I also often understand the dynamics of what’s going on communication-wise better than the people themselves do, and specifically, like you point at here, can figure out how people have misunderstood or misinterpreted what someone else is doing. While at the very same time I am often completely missing other things – in particular, I have a tendency to take what people say at face value, and have to have others point out to me that X is prone to self-delusion, or whatever.
In my case I think it’s partially my brain being atypical, but also there’s a large component of it that is due to my mom getting over-the-top upset at unpredictable times, and also she gets offended extremely easily. So I also had to learn some of these skills in self-defense – I understand that kids of alcoholics often develop the same kinds of skills. (My neurotypical sister, though, did not.)
Ugh, I read a book recently about girls with autism that I absolutely hated – the author, a woman with autism, was not self-identified, she’d been tested I’m pretty sure. But every. single. thing about her life, especially if it was negative, she attributed to her ASD. Some of it seemed legit. But a lot of stuff she mentioned seemed to me to be pretty standard for reasonably academically gifted kids, ASD or not. And there was also at least one thing that I thought was flat-out wrong – she said she wasn’t good at deductive reasoning (vs inductive reasoning) because she was ASD, and I was like, uh… it’s a stereotype of ASD individuals that they’re much better at deductive reasoning?? Not to say that ASD individuals are all like that, but I don’t think you can blame that on ASD.
I also know at least two people who were sure they had one disorder, and on testing it turned out to be something else – so I hear what you’re saying about self-identification.
Same. Which is why I am probably not autistic. The ability to read these kinds of cues is commonly (but not exclusively) associated with an abusive childhood. My mother has borderline personality disorder, which is a level of volatility that is difficult to predict. But when you live with it, you get good at predicting it. And watching all the ways she interacted with people I could exactly nail where it started to go wrong.
(ETA: I probably should have read, and processed, what you wrote after that. We are on the same wavelength!)
When I was maybe 19 or 20 she tried to convince my psychiatrist that I was delusional and that she should have power of attorney over me. The psychiatrist was having a visibly hard time keeping her shit together in dealing with my mother (not the first time I observed this.) For me, business as usual. Afterward, my psychiatrist wiped her brow and said, “Wow, that was incredibly stressful. I can’t believe how well you handled her.”
Yeah, I mean, I had decades of practice.
But I don’t have to practice any mooooooore woo! Three cheers for parental estrangement.
Haha, yes! My daughter can’t at all do this kind of thing. I have no idea whether an abusive childhood would kickstart that ability in her, and I am going to try my best not to find out.
YES! I’m so glad you have been able to do that. (I hope this is not creepy, but I remember your many struggles with your mom, and when I came back to the Dope after years away (and a stint on a message board elsewhere where people talked a lot about dysfunctional families) and saw you were still here, I did a quick search and was really, really happy to see you’d cut her off.)
(I’m not no-contact with my mom, but she was never as bad as yours and she has proven amenable to boundaries, which your mom never did. I’ve definitely got those boundaries, though. It’s not chance that I live halfway across the country from her!)
TBH I don’t remember ever feeling anything profound. I used to identify with female characters, and play as them in games with other kids, but as I got older there weren’t many good female characters, or maybe not many who resembled me. Too many kids programs back then had a bunch of different characters, all male except for one whose character trait was basically ‘being female’. I think and hope it’s different now.
Glad you’ve found a good social group. I’m really hoping my daughter will be able to make friends when she goes to school, and it would be great if it means we can get to know other parents, too. I completely missed out on meeting other mothers when my daughter was a baby, since everything was closed due to Covid. Probably wouldn’t have become best friends, but it would have been really nice to know other people going through the same experiences, and have someone to talk about kid stuff to who wouldn’t be bored by it. 
And I want my daughter to be able to have ‘playdates’, too. I’d hate for her social life to be adversely affected by my comparative lack of one.
Did you hate dresses because they were for girls, or because they were uncomfortable or impractical? I mostly wear trousers now, because it’s just easier and more practical in many ways. But I’m very fussy about fit, can’t stand anything tight.
Oh my god. It took me way too long to stop caring about the feelings of inanimate objects. And I don’t have face blindness, but I do feel like I have some kind of ‘face partial sightedness’, for example not recognising my mum as a child because she’d had her hair permed. I have terrible trouble remembering names, too. I used to think it was because I wasn’t interested enough in people, but recently I realised I do remember all kinds of details about people when they’ve talked about themselves; it’s just names that won’t stick.
That’s an autistic thing too, no? And an extremely unfortunate reaction if you can’t suppress it.
What factors make you think you aren’t autistic, if you don’t mind me asking?
Thank you for saying this. And ability to work is not a binary thing. Many people on disability would be capable of some kind of work, but a) does that job exist, and b) if it does, is a somewhat disabled person likely to get it when there are perfectly able people also applying?
I’m employed, but it’s always been somewhat of a struggle to find a job and perform it adequately. (At this point in my life executive dysfunction is probably a bigger issue than the social problems. I’m starting to wonder if I have ADD too, since I learned it’s common to have both.) And I know people who’ve slipped through the cracks; plenty of talent and ability, but never got it together enough to find a career that suited them. If there was more support and guidance, their lives might be very different, and their potential wouldn’t be going to waste. Disability payments are not the ideal solution in this case, but cutting them off is not going to magically enable someone with real problems to get a job.
I do think, though, that a diagnosis can be used as an excuse not to try to improve, or it can limit someone by lowering ambitions/expectations, and that’s bad.
And finally, it’s sad to see how many people in this thread had a difficult or abusive childhood. I hope you’re all doing better now.