Female Autism

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I don't know why this came up on my suggested videos feed, but it did.

Good explanation of how some women experience autism.

I'm still not one of those girls who masked it. Social skills was and continues to be a huge issue for me, so I take umbrage with her saying it's never an issue for females, but anyway here it is. Do you relate?

It's not a good description of my autism, either. I've never had anyone not believe me when I've told them that I'm autistic, and I'm pretty sure anyone trying to interact with me at all can tell that something's up with me. I can't convincingly "mask" even if my life depended on it.

I think my autism presents itself in a more masculine way even though I'm female - certainly by her definition, it does. I never learned to mimic others well and have always had trouble socializing. I also can only handle an hour or two of socializing before I get so stressed/drained that I can't speak understandably (or at all) no matter how hard I try, and then I need a few days to recover before I can do it again. I also do have very strong special interests that are not considered socially acceptable - current ones are the band Tool and anything and everything to do with Hellraiser. The closest I ever got to a socially acceptable was for much of elementary school, I was obsessed with animals, but even that was considered odd at best because I was especially interested in insects. Asperger's was also the first thing I was diagnosed with - I didn't have major problems with anxiety and depression until later, and I never learned to adapt my persona to match different social situations as she describes.

I can relate to it a lot. I think I remember seeing this and a few similar videos a while back while researching autism, and the whole "putting on a mask" thing was one of the big things that finally made it really hit me that I was probably autistic. Unfortunately(?) since really looking into it and going for diagnosis, I think I've sort of become less able to mask.

I didn't mask much. I mean, I sometimes was able to hide my autism for a short amount of time, but the facade never lasted. I never was able to pass as normal in the long run.

I think she is generalizing too much from her own experience.

That said, I think I function a lot like her. In some social situations I play it very passive, just analyzing others and matching my 'persona' to theirs, and in others I dominate a lot and 'set the agenda'. That way I'm in control and don't get surprised, as long as I can keep the tempo high enough. This tends to be very anxiety-fuelled, though. I recently became aware of exactly how pushy I come across when I'm anxious, so I'm working on dialling it down.

I use a lot of what some people call 'social echolalia' for want of a better word. I'll catch myself saying certain phrases in a way that someone I know would say it, using their expressions and tone of voice. I see that a lot of autistic kids nowadays do this with tv shows, but I didn't grow up watching a lot of tv the way kids do now, so I model my words on real people. When I think of it, when I was a child we didn't have a lot of kids tv in my native language, so I grew up reading the subtitles on foreign shows. Since I was hyperlexic and struggled with following dialogue on tv this was great!

The social echolalia disappears more and more as I get to know someone better. I don't really feel bad about it like some people do, because I consider it all aspects of my personality.

I've had so many people tell me I'm so confident, and that they can't detect any signs of nervousness when I present something - even when I'm shaking all over! It's mindboggling how blind people are.

This all leads to a feeling of being invisible.

i never masked, could that be because i was more raised by and bonded with the father?
my mother masked a lot, i can't stand that much in people, eg using different voices for different people

another female autism

I also find it hard to imagine 'invisible' autism. My autism is quite...let's say: visible.

So, at first, I find it hard to imagine that there might be other ways of having autism. Specially when people state that hiding is possible because of a high IQ, and I do not have a low IQ, but nevertheless I am not able to hide my bluntness and my social clumpsyness.

Than, at second, when there are women, with autism, like me, but they do not have the same kind of autism as I do, and 'their' kind of 'autism' seems to be the most 'common one', then we might get the situation that I do not fit the criteria for 'female autism' anymore (because I am a woman, fitting the criteria of 'general autism'). So this development does not give me a very happy feeling. It makes me afraid that people might get the wrong image of me, as a female autist, without female autism...

I don't resemble her, or the majority of what she has described as female traits. I possess the traits that she has categorized as being exclusive to 'males'.

Overall, I think she spoke too broadly, though I do recognise a few parts of her experience. Not the best video I've seen on female autism, by a long shot.

To say special interests are firmly in the male symptoms category is unhelpful for all of us. There are loads of autistic males without special interests, and many females with them.

I was never able to chameleon totally into social groups with other women, but I could blend to a degree for a while. People would still comment on my differences, but I got along fine. This ability waned a lot after leaving school (I'm not sure why, maybe just a new environment), and even further after diagnosis.

I watched it twice. It struck me how similar yet different everyones experiences of autism must be.

Even though she states that it's from her personal experience of ASD she refers to all women and girls after that point and makes more black and white assumptions about the male/female experiences.

I don't experience masking as lying, it's something I have to do in certain situations, but it absolutely drains my energy. For me it's about remembering to be self aware enough to avoid potential risks in situations like work or around unfamiliar people.

Her video speaks for me quite well in terms of her description of (some or many?) females' autism, though I'm sorry she perhaps spoke in some ways that have made some other females feel excluded -- sounds like.

I was only diagnosed a little under two years ago, age 53 (I'm female). I've had a job almost all my life, college etc., with jobs that require skills at math, computers, cats... oops the cats don't help earn money but they're watching me type, sorry.

My family was quite, let's say, dysfunctional? so I strongly felt I had to "pass", "camouflage", "mask", or whatever you want to call it these days; as a kid, I felt I just had to adapt and do what the world required. I definitely missed some aspects of things, looking back! But I blamed everything on my family's lack of normal skills at things. (Now I suspect most of them were also somewhere on the spectrum, and damaged by their own abusive childhoods.)

It's true I was able to "pass", that has enabled me to have a very rich life in some ways -- but the camouflaging itself feels like a double-edged sword. It uses intense focus, is exhausting... I took classes in animal behavior, psychology, anthropology without knowing a thing about autism, decades ago, but I wanted to figure humans out.

I cannot camouflage more than about half an hour in just the environments where NTs relax the most it seems... noise, multiple people talking... never knew why, hated myself every time I failed...

Camouflaging is doing something really different from what the NTs are doing even though the surface apparently looks similar once you have studied and practiced for long enough w/ a similar subgroup of people.

I can't pay attention to deep feelings at all when masking, not good at that in the best of times... I blamed all my unusual issues on my PTSD, which is also still there and wasn't well treated by therapy where I pushed myself relentlessly to do eye contact (and which shut me down most of the time.)

It's now quite a journey to figure out how to help myself; masking was about survival, really aversive learning experiences involved in getting here... doing the best I can with the choices I see I guess. Luckily I have a cat on my lap, writing about this fries my brain too.

Very interesting video. I've considered for a while that the reason that fewer females are diagnosed with autism than males is not necessarily because males are more likely to have it, but because it's typically less visible in females.

Personally I feel as if I have a very masculine form of autism. I don't really enjoy social situations too much and my social skills are obviously not very good. I wish I could camouflage and 'act' like the girl in the video does, but my idea of hiding my social skills is by not saying anything at all.
And I do have several special interests that are rather intense and not typical of a girl her age.

Then again, I was diagnosed with classic autism at the age of 3, so the woman in the video might be talking more about the differences between what used to be known as Asperger syndrome in males and females. While you could say my autism is more high-functioning now, in some ways I still have traits more typical of classic autism than Asperger's.