Poll: Are you male, female, or some other gender/sex?

Post Reply New Topic

Hello, folks.

I'm putting in this poll because I believe females, most definitely, are under-represented as members of the Autistic Spectrum.

My hypothesis: The proportion of males to females on this Site is less than 3 to 1; hence, the proportion of males to females is, possibly, less than 3 to 1 within the Western World at large.

It is often stated that there are 4 or 5 times as many males as females on the Spectrum. I hope, per the results of this poll, to at least present the possibility that the true proportion is actually much less.

Thank you very much, everybody, for reading this.

Going to put a poll at the top? It'll be a lot to count the replies.

I know...but how do you do that? They seemed to have taken that function out.

I'm a male, by the way.

It's in small print but if you edit your original post, under the text box, under the smilies, under Attach a signature (signatures can be altered via the UCP), and Notify me when a reply is posted, there should be "add a poll" or something.

I'm male, however I don't allow Madison Avenue to dictate how I dress, thus my wearables are as likely to have been purchased out of the womens' sections as the mens'. I want my looks to please me, not the public.

Thanks!

Results of a poll about male/female ratio in autism mean little and is not a good way to get at the true ratio in autism.

Nature is not gender neutral and has no interest in human notions of balance, fairness or equality.

Men have shorter lives. Women have more capacity to endure pain. Everyone knows the burdens of reproduction are not equally distributed among the sexes, but it's less well known that the XX XY genetic structure can have profound impacts on the way genetic variations affect males and females.

There are genetic variations that affect only the X chromosome. A woman may have a damaged X matched with an undamaged X and rely on the undamaged copy so the variation does not show up as a difference, or shows in a mild way. A man with the same variation is just out of luck: the X is matched with a Y, so there is no second copy to act as a backup source for the needed genetic information. The symptoms associated with such X linked variations always show in full force in males.

It seems clear that autism has no single source, no single gene basis, so there is no simple system like this that accounts for the imbalance in the rate of male:female diagnosis, but such mechanisms make the imbalance perfectly plausible. The 4:1 ratio does not necessarily mean that girls are being missed in diagnostic assessments.

(since nobody else has said it and this is the one being bumped the new thread krafti made with the poll on it is here: viewtopic.php?t=290463 )

I added a poll. I used sex like the title, if you'd prefer rather it referred to gender (Man/Boy, Woman/Girl, Other) then just say.

I thought I'd seen a thread with a poll...