Asperger's Syndrome blunts sex differences in the brain.

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I don't believe sexual differentiation is so much as mitigated in the AS brain as it masculinized, i.e., male Aspies have an exaggerated male brain structure and female Aspies have a masculine brain structure. It explains a lot actually.

.........except for the biologically male Aspies who identify as male-to-female transgender, or the people who don't identify with either gender.

As for a "masculine brain," seeing as the only stereotypically "male trait" Aspies seem to posses, as described by the literature, is "systematizing," I doubt that the autistic brain could be accurately described as particularly "masculine."

"Aspie" men are real men, and so are the women.

That's a good explanation.

And those of us who are really neither?

I think the whole "extreme male" idea is built on a flawed interpretation of "autistic brains tend toward systemization." I also think that men being less empathetic and more systemizing is probably enculturated tripe and not an actual neurobiological tendency.

Makes sense to me, since I always had trouble even understanding the concept of gender identity. I mean, I know what type of behavior is expected of me because I have a female body, but it seems completely arbitrary and I don't feel "female" or "male" and can't really imagine what that would even mean.

It is really too bad the link doesn't tell us whether the aspie brain was somewhere in the middle or not, as you guys mentioned.

EDIT: Here's the whole thing http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/doc ... rences.pdf

Looks like "somewhere in the middle", at least for the white matter volume.

Except if it that was the case they would probably have mentioned that, the way they say it sounds more likes it's neither. Plus the whole extreme male brain thing is BS.

EDIT: I just skimmed through the study. As it turns out it looks like they were trying to find hypermasculinization in autistic brains, and instead they found a lack of masculine traits in the autistic brain, debunking the stupid theory for what it is. The conclusion they got is simply that their is less sexual distinction in autistic brains.

I've always felt androgynous.
Thanks for posting this.

Well, I never understood the gender roles in society.

Wild. This would explain how many of us Aspie guys have a certain "softness" to us. I wonder what occurs in the brains of homosexuals . . . What a explosion this has created in my mind, as I am gay and autistic!

So. We're possessed of brains which are less sexually dimorphic than the baseline and have an increased ability to form connections, as well as increased sensory ability, and an amygdala that is larger than normal.

Interesting. There must be reviews of exactly how the Autist brain differs from the baseline?

Personally, I subscribe to the socialisation theory of gender identity, so I won't go into the entire issue of MtF transgendered Autists. However, perhaps it is indirectly linked - a more androgynous brain leads to less-than-typical gendered behaviour, affecting the development of identity.

Still, I'd like to see how this outworks IRL.

Okay, I'll admit that I didn't read the study, but I'm wondering where hormones come into the picture. I wasn't the girliest of girls but I still liked my sparkly stuff as much as the rest of them.

I dont conform to gender roles, although I can't say I never identified with one. But mostly I feel feminine even though anatomically I am male.

As we move away from old fashioned cultural norms, gender roles wont be very much different and wont matter.

I think people on the spectrum are less likely to conform to gender roles due to us not picking up social norms readily therefore we are not as strongly socialized (depending on our abilities to interpret social cues). Gender is almost completely compiled of social constructs. What is ok for 1 gender is not always ok for the other. Many aspies might not pick that up. We may gravitate towards certain activities, ways of acting that are not always consistent with our gender. But then we are not picking of the social stigma society is sending us. Whereas an NT that might be doing that will see the social stigma and withdraw from that activity.

As a girl, I had a fairly rudementary concept of gender. So when I was a Jr in HS, I wrote a ridiculos essay which my teacher probably was amused by saying that male/female were the same. Of course that should have raised some red flags that some sort of social intervention should have been done because i was also a loner too. The essay we were writing was "what it means to be a ___________" (female/male). I'm not 100% sure how she reacted, probably somewhere from amused to shocked. *shrugs*