Variations in the Presentation of AS Women

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Outlier, this is very similar to my situation. the details are different but the gist is the same.
My parents also had no normal yardstick to measure their children in any way - that is - if ever they had even been so inclined to even take an interest back then. too absorbed in their own pursuits.


At 16 my sister left home and moved countries to New Zealand. My mother never rang her and had barely any contact with her for 6 years and indeed, was relieved when her 8 children left home - one by one. I can now understand this from the persepctive of ASD's. my mother functions well living on her own, but back then was in a perpetual state of sensory overload and meltdowns which were quite severe. (too much stimulus and too much load for someone like her.)
My uncle who lives in America went to New Zealand to "find" my disappeared sister who had been gone for years and years and he still communicates that he could not understand how my folks could not even care about her whereabouts. I do know they cared, but like me, the capacity to translate that care into action is not quite on par with the norm. An annual phonecall from my sister back then was met with disapproval and huffing and puffing because it interrupted by mother's ritualised addiction to the national news hour.
I do not say this as a a criticism. My mother is very like me - moreso than anyone I know and her internal feelings and her outward expressions do not match - they are askew - as is the case for so many of us with an ASD. She is a very good person - just from an era where NONE of this was understood.

I would like it if my mother would post on here and give us her perspective as a woman with so many traits who had 8 kids and has led such a sad and lonely life in many ways. And I believe she would find identification here.

Yes that book was certainly not written for aspies. It tells what to say, but it doesnt say why... I had to try and figure it out for myself by writing down social mistakes I had made in a notebook and then trying to find it in How to Win Friends... after a while I started to see some patterns.

What is that? I´d be curious to know. I don´t know if I´ve read everything he´s written on the subject, so I´d be curious if I agree or disagree.

Okay, so here are some other thoughts about different presentation in women: feel free to reply to one, or as many of these thoughts as you wish...

1) It appears that one of the markers for possible autism in girls/women is anorexia, or other eating disorders. This problem seems to be very rare, almost non-existent in boys. Why is that? Is it conditioning? Or biological? Or is it possible that people who are more passive- i.e., who don´t tend to "act out" or have tantrums- end up internalizing their frustration, so they take it out on their own body? (Or do women of all personalities have eating disorders, i.e., there´s no significance between internalizing and anorexia?) If a girl is anorexic, should she have an evaluation to rule out possible autism? Did any of you have eating disorders?

2) Another possible difference is types of interests. I believe Attwood and others have suggested that girls are more interested in learning about social situations, reading about them, studying them, analyzing them, etc. Many AS girls seem to have interests in things like psychology. I know I did; around my teenage years- (possibly even pre-teens)- I started reading books about psychology, studying people and social situations. I have NO idea if this was biological, or if it was a reaction to the pressures I felt being a girl and trying to manage socially. (My theory is that boys don´t experience the same pressures that girls do socially, at least not when they are younger; however, this may have only been true of my own life. I have often felt that people have higher standards for females to be "good" socially, and react with horror if you don´t do the "right" thing or react with the proper empathy in any given situation. The rules for boys seem to be more lax). In any case, I think I realized that it would be in my best interest to read and study these things, and often had them as special interests. But if I hadn´t had these social pressures, I wonder if I would have been less interested in learning these things? I tend to think that´s highly likely....

3) Last thing- I just read Simon Baron Cohen´s book about the Extreme Male Brain theory. I had heard so much about it on WP, I was curious. He talked about the "male brain" (systemizing), the "female brain" (empathizing), and the "extreme male brain" (autism); however, he didn´t really say much about women and autism, and he seemed to think they should be quite like the men with autism. I took the tests, just for the heck of it. I know already I score in the AS section of the AQ, I also scored right at AS-average on the EQ; however, on the systemizing test, I only scored as high as about the average NT man. In other words, according to him I have a male brain, but I don´t have an EXTREME male brain. Just curious what other women think of this "male brain" theory. (Actually, my personal opinion was that Baron Cohen is an example of someone who sees the big picture, but without looking closely at all the details! He did make some interesting points, and he made sure it all fit together nicely, but I could have brought up about 50 counterpoints that I would have argued/discussed with him....)

^ for the record, severe eating disorders anorexia/bulimia from teens to late twenties acutely, then less so until 36. Addressed this issue and am ok now, although still rigid around food, food flavours - the latter never varies. Everything i eat is flavoured with hot chillis and salt. But not all women with an ASD have eating disorders and not all women with eating disorders have and ASD. But the two can go together and fit in with the rigid, repetitive behaviours part of an ASD.

As for interests - human psychology has been one of them - analysis of self an others to the extreme.

Baron-Cohen's extreme male brain theory? I am not a trainspotter or mathematician, but all aspects of my life are viewed in terms of extensive systems and networks - a great patterning is always the prevailing tendency in all areas of my life. This includes people, special interest, the categorisation of information, the compartmentalisations and idiosncratic associational thinking in my own mind, the way i line up objects on my dresser and surfaces and the way i view human beings in terms of types. Even the way I view a room...I seek out the patterns, the grids, the lights, the regularities as naturally as I breathe.

Somewhere on WP there's another thread on women and presentation or women with AS, can't remember which, where someone posted something by Attwood or something written about Attwood's individuals studies about women with AS, making it sound almost like they have no serious problems. I got the impression when I read it that, with AS, men have the serious problems and women do not and that's what is meant by "milder presentation". That's just the impression I got after reading it. It also sounded like Attwood was saying girls aren't prone to the same treatment as boys, that girls are coddled and mothered by other girls which left me feeling kinda distraught because it's so not true. Girls don't coddle us. Usually they are antagonistic and sometimes they tried to get boys to be antagonistic toward us too. I saw them more as being manipulative and troublemaking than motherly.
My schooldays involving AS involved this:
Being shunned
ostracized
teased
bullied
teachers put me on the fringes of the classroom, kind of pushing me off to the side, on the peripherals because they didn't have the time or patience.
was thought of as immature and they didn't want me there and didn't want to deal with me

I ended up missing a lot of school because of this. I pretended to be sick a lot and stayed at home whenever I could. I had what you could call "school avoidance".

I wasn't any worse behaved than the other kids other than the fact I couldn't control my talking. That was the one thing I got in trouble for over and over...talking when I was supposed to be quiet.

So, I spent most of it doodling pictures of horses hundreds of them, maybe thousands. I never thought I was good but I did get much better at it eventually. I became known as the horse doodler. One time I drew a picture of a badly proportioned horse on the board before school and all the kids laughed over that. Years later in an art class in middle school a kid I went to grade school remarked that my horses improved greatly. They had the same pose though. Always a profile. Sometimes it was a profile of a head, other times a view of a horse from the side. They all wore English saddles too and had bridles and reigns.

Some of your experiences are identical to my own. absolutely identical. my truanting to avoid school was ferocious.
I was bullied by many manipulative girls, teased by many boys because i was weird and not girly.

But also, I was targeted in another way and this relates to the coddling girls who befriended me.
So, some girls do try to coddle us.
^Again,these experiences need to be contained as one's own. It may not be true or accurate in someone else's case and yet my experience is diametrically opposite to that outlined by ooooanaoooo.

I am formally dx'ed and I have a history of being "coddled" by weird maternal women who see my crippled eccentricities as something they can fix and attend to. They usually try to befriend me and enter my life - mainly because i do not know how to effectively ward them off, and then after a while they leave the "friendship" full of blame and antagonism and hatred toward me because I have been impervious to their requests for me to change and be more who they want me to be!

Last edited by millie on 20 May 2009, 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My experience is prolly much more common than you realize.

Millie, were you coddled by women or girls because I think I remember reading something about Attwood and girls being coddled by other girls. I got the impression Attwood was saying girls with AS are socially naive so other girls mother them because of it.

I dunno if women being coddled by women was specifically mentioned. Can't remember for sure if it was or wasn't.

TBH, Millie, often I was the brunt of terrible jokes, some of them even dangerous and other girls were the instigators. One time in grade school I was left on my own in not so safe place by another girl who asked me if I could ride my bike home from school with her. Besides that, a neighbor put the bike together for me and purposefully didn't do it the right way so I was stuck walking the bike home by myself through this unsafe neighborhood (my house was on the other side of it and since I was a latch key kid most my childhood, I had to make my way home alone to an empty house) It was all a big joke to everyone. That's just one experience and I have others that are worse than that.

So you see, it isn't a bundle of maternal forces all benefic and doing their part to protect.

yes. one at a time. It still happens. it is really weird. It is like I am a target for them. THey must read "weirdo" on my forehead and make a beeline for me. I do not know how to extricate myself from their advances and while i am blunt and direct and verbose i am also rather passive in some respects because i do not understand the social subtleties and subtexts.

All I know is their "type" and "patterning" seems to fit in with the co-dependency model articulated in D&A literature....And I wonder if these are the same "type" of women who need a drug-stuffed or alcohol-wrecked partner to "fix and control and guide." I suspect so, as this is inevitably what has happened - they tend to want to fix me and change my social isolation, my wish to be alone., they want to "loosen me up" and almost be a kind of heroine who introduces me to the delights (ugh - we all know how odious it is) of the "social world."

^ also, for the record, my experience has been many of these "coddling" based relationships have been as damaging to me as the group targeting by the manipulative girls at school, by the manipulative girl gangs on the streets, and by the manipulative girl gangs who had go's at me in prison.

I am not trying to imply that we don't experience that awful persecution stuff - goodness knows i still go through it in the art scene with the gangs of women artists who hate me and i cannot understand what I have done to warrant it - except be a woman with an ASD.

I really do relate to this and am not trying to maintain a stance that implies it does not happen. I just know I had a few otehr experiences as well as that that Attwood does actually outline.

Oh, I know about that, but "motherly" is the last word I would use to describe. Have to agree with the part about attracting controlling types because I did grow up with someone who was controlling and very destructive. Maybe the word "motherly" should be exchanged for "controlling and destuctive"?

^hurrah! we reach agreement! I am completely with you on that one!

Yup. I think it may be a pretty common experience. Boys seem to have this problem too, they experience it when they are bullied by other boys. We get bullied too but it's usually more of a control thing, with people trying to figure out how they will teach us a lesson, make fools of us, figure out ways we will feel shunned and ignored. Maybe we get more passive aggression?

Being an MTF transexual, I wonder if I had have been born female if I would have still been diagnosed, assuming the only difference in me was gender, and not being trans.

Yes, I had eating disorders from my teens, until well in my 30's. At first it see-sawed from anorexia and bulimia. Then it was just long periods of anorexia. I remember keeping strict calorie records; I carried a little notebook around and wrote down the caloric value of everything, down to sticks of gum and pieces of hard candy. I remember finding that cough syrup would make me vomit, so I would have some after a large meal to make myself purge. Later, I found it easier to just "purge" in other ways, such as extensive exercise and other activity.


Same here. I was intrigued with my older brother's psychology text book, and would read it whenever I got the chance. I also read extensively-whatever I could get my hands on. Non-fiction, fiction, biographies, as well as countless movies on the television.

yes. passive aggression recipient here. (which i loathe to the point of rage.)
and also, I can think of being at an art thing and a group of women making comments i cannot grasp - I smile dumbly like the brainiac buffoon - then later - with isolation, time and quiet analysis and running over the incidents with others who are objective, being informed they were completely taking the mickey out of me. that is what really hurts - when i discover women still doing this, in their 40's and 50's.
I try not to focus on it too much. Otherwise i thnk we can reside in terrible pain. So i try to push those things aside and stay positive where I can. (on my own....)