Autism in Women Is Misunderstood
More in response to the comments so far than the article itself. In general, I think these comments too much reflect or defend against the idea that &quot;autistic women have it worse than autistic men&quot; and people are debating this when really the message is &quot;The scientific community does not have an official lsit of symptoms for autistic women versus autistic men&quot; This is important because noone knows what causes autism so diagnosis based on symptoms is the only way, and we are figuring out right now just how different these symptoms are, and how uneducated the medical community is at even thinking to get a girl diagnosed for autism.<p>40 years ago the medical community, even the guy who coined autism himself, didn&#x27;t even beleive it was possible for women to have autism at all (even the most extreme obvious cases) we are in close to that same position for high functioning women with Asbergers. Just take the fact that the average age of diagnosis for women is about ten years later in life than males, mostly because the symptoms accumulated over the past 40 years were only accumulated based on men. So women, just to get diagnosed (forget crying a life of &quot;oh we have it so much harder as being autistic) just to get a diagnosis you have to stumble into a series of misdiagnosis and oddities and lack of documentation about how these symptoms (again we don&#x27;t know the source) present themselves in women. BY then, women are just as much as men, if not more by a delayed diagnosis frustrated by everything theve been through and all the things that are &quot;wrong&quot; with them that their families can&#x27;t figure out.<p>The struggles autistic men and women face are not to be argued whether its worse for one gender or the other, but based on the whole point above, that they are DIFFERENT, and we are less educated about one set of symptoms than the other. It&#x27;s not about giving one gender a &quot;I&#x27;ve got it harder than you&quot; sympathy card.<p>1. In 2013 Asbergers was classified as being on the Autism scale.<p>2. Alot of high functioning Asbergers are technically autistic now that were medically&#x2F;officially not autistic 5 years ago, but these people are no different than they were 5 years ago, its that the medical community rearranged a big group of typically high functioning people and put them on the autism scale. I happen to be one of these, and was diagnosed (as Maya was in this article) with OCD at 8, and anxiety, and basically an accumulation of common symptoms of autism until I went to an Engineering school where so many people were on the scale a Professor made us all take the test and that is when I found out about all of this.<p>3. Speaking of that, You can be tested for this and registered on a scale. As we do not know what causes autism, we can only diagnosis based on symptoms, like a lot of things, so the conjecture about &quot;not knowing for sure&quot; on this thread is valid, but so is it for alot of other diseases and cancers that we don&#x27;t know the cause of, so that does not invalidate the seriousness of the impact the non sourced symptoms have on the lives of people.<p>4. Being an Aspie and a book nerd (my mom first took me to get me tested to see what was &quot;wrong&quot; with me when I spent the entire summer of my 8th year and read all 138 Mandy (kids mystery novel) books in 7 weeks and didn&#x27;t care to do anything else).<p>I have since being diagnosed, read 17 books on females with Asbgergers and about 15-20 books about Autism in general, and I think the comments about females with Autism on this Atlantic comment thread and the HN thread so far are way off. That being said...<p>5. I DO NOT like this article because it is almost entirely anecdotal and focuses on Maya&#x27;s extreme cases while for me, and alot of other female aspies I know (sources of female aspies below) it went more like all the things that make you cute and &quot;quiet&quot; growing up, you do not grow out of.<p>I would pausit (and youll see some horribly negative and ignorant comments on the actual commentary of the article&#x27;s page on the Atlantic) that alot of the anger coming from the responses is trying to put girls on this special &quot;i have it worse than you&quot; stage but its not about that. It&#x27;s that we have it hard in DIFFERENT Ways.<p>Girls are EXPECTED to be socially smooth, incredibly bubbly and cute and outgoing. Girls to have careers that are more socially oriented. We are expected to be flirtacious. We are expected to be stylish. Any deviation from this norm results in a horror movie of emotional bullying especially from NT girls starting in middle school, who feel threatened by you and think you are some kind of monster, and the bullying does continue, just in more nuanced pretensed ways as women &quot;mature&quot; and learn how to be &quot;fake&quot; nice, whereas typically we are considered to be continually naive and childish, and too innocent because we are bad at interpreting other peoples emotions, and more importantly, their motivations, which actually makes female aspies more vulnerable to being taken advantage of in any situation, but particularly sexual ones, and this aspect is only exxagerated by the fact that overall physically and emotionally aspie women tend to mature more slowly, and most don&#x27;t start their periods until 19-20ish.<p>I would say from there it&#x27;s not that our genetic inheritance or whatever the cause is, that our physical lot of autism is &quot;worse&quot; its that our personalities, career choices and lack of friends when women are expected to have friends where its generally accepted that alot of guys are introverts, is that we are just put in situations where we stand out like a sore thumb more and more, whether it be being the only girl of 5 in my Engineering Department and automatically standing out, in the male dominated career or the fact that when a guy tries to hit on me at a bar I may look normal but the nuances of these more subtle interactions I fail miserably at.<p>I&#x27;ve lost a couple guys interested in me because I literally could not flirt and do this properly.<p>It means for me I have NO idea how to flirt, how to make any eye contact or in an effort to make any eeye contact giving an acidental death glare.<p>To say it&#x27;s degrading for your self esteem is an understatement...<p>Being socially awkward,<p>5.5 So as far as the people on here making comments and posting articles about how the more they see high functioning women&#x2F;successful CEOs being autistic the less they believe it, BELIEVE IT! Because on the high functioning scale, we are masterminds and extremely laser focused and dedicated, but also sympathize with them how hard it is emotionally as well because it goes against the grain of everything people expect from women. Not to mention, women whove managed to surpass all these social abnormalities and become successful have learned more than ANYONE just how much success is based on political favour and shmoozing people, not because they are good at it or even succumbbed to it, because they KNOW how hard it has been not having those characteristics come naturally have had to put in the effort in one way or another to overcome inadequacies other people cannot even comprehend, and have probably faced alot of judgment as they have stumbled their way along. Certainly for me this is the case.<p>6. reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;aspergirls is a more realistic perspective of what high functioning &quot;autism&quot; specifically Asbergers is likem since it is a community of women who have asbergers or are atlast trying to learn more about it by sharing about their symptoms etc.