Gender and diagnosis

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I am just wondering for those of you who are both women and professionally diagnosed AS ADULTS, do you feel that you would have been diagnosed much earlier if you had been male?

I never considered this before, but I am beginning to think so now after a lady I know who was diagnosed with Aspergers as an adult told me this was likely the case. I am very stereotypically autistic, and was taken to the doctors promptly after I regressed and became nonverbal at the age of 3. Despite losing the ability to speak (which was originally delayed as well--I became non-verbal just a few months after having said my first words), and having many other clearly autistic traits, the possibility of autism was not even brought up. I am female and this would have happened in the mid 1980s. I find myself feeling quite bitter that I had to suffer through life being undiagnosed (I do not think I would have "suffered" if I was diagnosed because I would have understood myself and my differences and have gotten some therapy that would have had more of an impact if given to me at the age of 3 rather than at the age of 27 when it likely will do no good anyway).

We didn't really actively attempt to get me a diagnosis until recently, and I got it, but I might have been giving it in high school if I was male. I probably wouldn't have been given a diagnosis any earlier, because of having been told so repetitively that it wasn't worth getting a diagnosis.

We also did not actively go for a diagnosis (my parents never even thought of autism until I pointed it out in my 20s), but I truly do believe if I had been a boy and presented to the doctors with the symptoms I possessed, THEY would have at least suggested it (non-verbal until almost 3, then verbal for 2 months followed by a 2 1/2 year regression, socially isolated, frequent stimming, constant meltdowns, abnormal use of toys--spinning/lining up/categorizing, etc)

Voted dx's as adult, would have been dx'd earlier if male.

Boys get bullied and I would have gotten bullied by other boys cause I'm so awkward. As it was lots of friendly "mother hen"-type girls took me under their wings. And the "popular" girls ignored me.

Also when I went into a psychologist for the first time at 16 I think I would have been diagnosed with AS instead of just social anxiety if my psycholgist thought to recognize As in girls. This was not your average social anxiety. I am a weird one in every way.

I chose diagnosed as adult even though I was diagnosed at 15, because that's still very late for a childhood condition that was diagnosable when I was 7-8 or so.

I don't think I'd have been diagnosed earlier if I was a boy, though. My first school, which I attended until I was 10, thought every behavior problem was ADHD, and got me sent to a pile of doctors who were looking for ADHD and not for autism spectrum. Plus I was atypical for an autistic kid because I was highly imaginative, made eye contact and acted pretty sociable, and those traits would have confused them just as much in a boy as a girl. My next school said not a peep about me being different. Then, when I was 12 I was very briefly in a disastrous school setting and the principal figured I had Asperger's Syndrome. But my parents didn't pursue it because they didn't see me as having a problem, they figured I was just different and society had a problem with me. I was only diagnosed after self-diagnosing and then teaching my parenmts about neurodiversity enough that they could conceive of me having a diagnosed disability that wasn't a bad thing.

I'm actually glad I wasn't diagnosed earlier. My parents couldn't have done a much better job of raising me if they'd known about autism - in fact much of the advice I've seen out there would have backfired horribly for me. And I shudder to think of how my first school would've reacted to an autism diagnosis. They'd have tailored their emotional abuse to autism and made it a lot harder for me to accept myself (it was really hard for me to accept an ADHD/autism overlap because of how much they wanted me to have ADHD). And the standard autism treatments would've really offended me as a kid, and caused the same kind of damage my school did. I was very much fighting for the right to be myself and autism treatments are all about remaking yourself into someone more acceptable to the majority.

The one thing that would've been great was knowing other autistics while I was growing up. I only knew one other disabled kid - a girl with mild CP and MR - and we weren't all that similar. I felt so incredibly lonely as a kid.