Male Centric Autism Narrative and Undiagnosed Autistic Women

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I am not a behaviorist.
My current area of research is cognitive/computational neuroscience involving brain/cognition/behavior.
Most of the behaviors that I study are subconscious motor movements measured by machines.
Brain activities are also measured.
Then, both brain + behavior measurables are used to understand cognition.

Another thing that is confusing to me is why the current autism definitions are considered male-centric.
Which part of the criteria are male-centric, I am not sure.
I am female, and I fit the classic autism presentation in childhood, then the high-functioning autism definition later.

I am a female and a strong feminist but in spite of the two facts i filed to understand where exactly you see male dominance in autistic field,except of course,everywhere.
But being aspergers type thou weak,i want things named, so please tell us where males maltreat us female in this field except,i repeat, everywhere.
Thank a lot sister.
Niki
Ps, so that there is no misundetstandung about the nature of my feminism,i love males exactly the way most males love female,that is as sexual object lol

Referring back to your opening post on this thread, Ganadox, this may be an interesting little read for you:

http://quixoticautistic.blogspot.co.nz/ ... drome.html

Hello,

My brother-in-law and nephew both have Asperger's and their behaviour would be observed as being on the spectrum far quicker than they would notice in me. In fact, this is often the case. They both physically act out when they are over-stimulated, whereas I will deal with the physical pain that over-stimulation brings with it in solitude. I have learned this through conditioning, and have stored hundreds of LT memories in order to help to me do this. I am mighty good at being a social chameleon. It wears me out entirely, but others don't see that, they see the socially integrated human that I appear to be. In my experience, I have found it terribly difficult to have others understand that I am struggling with the same difficulties that the ASD males in my family are struggling with.

My thoughts on empathy and ASD are emphatically that we can experience empathy as readily as NTs, we just can't communicate it as easily. Just because we can't use the right words to help someone feel better in a situation (in my case, without giving unwanted advice) shouldn't mean we are not accurately understanding someone else's distress. I have highly affective empathy and feel deep, physical pain when someone around me is hurting. If someone who is feeling mildly sad walks in the room, my mood will shift to mirror that feeling. I try my very best to comfort that person, but from past experiences/memories and an inability to communicate effectively, I really struggle to offer that person the right words. I am a psychology student, so I am learning the right words to share, but I didn't need to be taught how to see minute differences in people's behaviour to indicate something was "different" or "wrong". That part just comes naturally. I don't always know what is going on around me, but I notice the most subtle differences. There are suggestions that this need to make others feel better comes from a self-centric perspective, but I'd disagree. Others' pain does cause me physical distress that I'd like to minimise (naturally), but I also vividly remember hundreds of examples in which I felt uncomfortable/angry/upset/hurt/embarrassed and extend that to how the other person might be feeling, which I believe to be altruistic empathy.

Sophie

Welcome to WP! You have made a great start. I think your point about withdrawing instead of acting out when overstimulated is really pertinent to this thread, it is a significant difference I have noticed too and which also applies to myself - like you, I need total solitude, peace and quiet in that circumstance to restore my inner well-being. By definition what we do is not observable and not woven into the process of recognizing women's typologies in the narrative of diagnosis. We are not part of that discourse, nor do the "experts" wish us to be.

"What behaviors differentiate this unrecognized group from recognized group?" That's what this whole thread is about! I'm sorry that you missed it, but I'm not going to repeat myself again, if you still don't understand try to get someone else to explain it to you and hopefully they get it. Also, there behavior might not even be different, they simply might go under the radar simply because they are female and the same behavior is interpreted differently!

When the numbers are assigned and then just correlation is taken, when if you take the subranges there is actually positive correlation at both extremes, not just an overall positive or negative correlation, really it's just trying numerize the qualitative in general. I know they understand what they are doing better that I do, but what they are doing still pisses me off.

"I also don't understand why you don't want to read the eggsisting literature on a topic" I HAVE read stuff, but I'm a busy man, I don't have time to read all this stuff. The way so much of the stuff is written pisses me off too much to have any desire to read it anyway.



It's NOT the definitions, they are flawed and get updated every so often, but generally they are fine, it's the narrative. It's the cultural idea of what autism is, not the technical one. In discourse, autistic people are almost always automatically assumed to be male.

Last edited by Ganondox on 07 Jan 2015, 3:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

Did you mean to link a specific article? It goes to the blog in general.

Thank you for the welcome!

I am currently in the process of "recharging my threshold" as I call it, as the social Christmas period drains me! The more time spent alone, recharging, allows me to express myself calmly and allows NTs to see my attempts to empathise more clearly. Cultural expectations of women being intuitively sensitive, caring and warm are difficult to meet sometimes. This isn't usually because I don't have this ability, I'm just too tired or overwhelmed to meet those expectations. This can be tiring in itself because I'm aware of the expectations, and aware that I'm not meeting them.

As a child and an adolescent, the things I became obsessed with were more likely to be celebrities, fashion, television and movies, cooking and cleaning and gardening. I can't imagine these things would stick out too much as being abnormal, because they are operational obsessions. Compared with young boys who memorise train timetables, my behaviour went by somewhat unnoticed. The intensity with which I pursued these hobbies was probably noticeable, but I was tidying my bedroom, so who cared? It wasn't until I was a young adult whose time needed to be spent doing more "productive" tasks, such as paid work and reading uninteresting university text books, did I notice that I had severe difficultly with attention. This is probably something experienced by both genders, though.

As I read hundreds of journal articles relating to ASD, I find it more and more disheartening to read such classical definitions of Autism and ASD. There needs to be far more literature relating to gender differences in ASD experiences.

But ..when we head of as a 'group', with my poor english skills and not being tested or having any knowledge about medication/therapy I feel already excluded before being included as to now

In the "resources for woman with as', I think at first 'that's about how to earn money', but it turns out to be tests but not specially adapted for woman, imo. Keep stuck on the doorstep, I'm not so good at those tests, if one out of two questions doesn't give a good option as an answer, what does it messure then?
score 29 (http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/autism.htm) You are not asperger. Aspergers starts at 30

I can't help I don't have a passion for numberplates, so for an official testing you should always answer that you have a special interest for numberplates ? (but that's a common NTmale thing too IMHO)

No special anxiety or sensivity issues, but I've strong routines for discipline or I won't do nothing at all and let doubt take over.

I don't understand the pretending thing either, I hated that (role-playing?) as a child and still, but I get very well along with little children. I don't need pretending to play with them. When my children had their birthday at kindergarten, you were allowed to stay the morning, and I turned it in a big play of constructing something or reading to them, the ladies would ask me to come more often, as I didn't kept them from working as normal mothers would. Actually I believe NT's are far more anxious or fear-driven and therefor measuring and seeking confirmation, or conformation.

Maybe it's not aspergers then, it's probably just the precoce performers-familytraits. People who are not well-liked and may turn out not very succesfull later in life. There are no questions about precoce learning abilities in those tests (as far as I have seen).

http://www.autism-help.org/autism-high- ... ng-hfa.htm

If that's the AQ, I only got a 27 on it, while I'm clearly autistic, but I got a friend of mine to do it and she got a 40 on it despite apparently not being autistic.

Btbnnyr, I would be interested to know your perspective on this question, which is very puzzling to me:

If autism is a "bundle of behaviours" (the diagnostic criteria proposes this is what autism is) then: what is the nature of the string which holds the bundle together, to form a syndrome?

Given your professional interests, I am including internally observed brain behaviour, as well as externally observed behaviour). Where is the string, and what is the string?