Thousands of GIRLS may have undiagnosed autism because they

Post Reply New Topic

If they exist and aren't being diagnosed they aren't going to recognized as an autistic child attending a mainstream school.

Rather unbelievable.

You would think so, I'm just struggling to see why parents of autistic (non-verbal) boys choose mainstream schools but not (on appearance) parents of non-verbal girls? unless there is less non-verbal autistic girls around? That's been my observation not just in schools but also social skills classes designed for ASD kids with speech delays. The latter is most peculiar as I've seen no girls in three different groups I've enrolled my daughter in over the past couple of years.

I did not enroll my daughter in what sounded like a great group outside of school--once found out no girls. I think that girls don't have integration aides might relate more to the criteria for getting an aide than the diagnosis.

Low functioning autistic girls can't hide them yet they are much less than LFA boys in numbers. Doctors and parents might not notice autistic traits in aspie girls but they would certsinly notice them in severe cases.

That really discredits the "aspie girls pass under the randar" theory - unless you don't want to consider AS as part of Autism.

In fact, most cultures expect girls to be more socially savvy, more talkative and more interactive at young age - so I don't buy it that girls are that underdiagnosed as often claimed, it makes no sense.

In my opinion it hasn't that much to do with "hiding" symptoms, but more about the subjective opinion of many psychiatrists who treat boys and girls very often entirely differently and interpret symptoms differently.

The point it seemed the article was trying to make is that AS, as the same underlying neurological condition, often presents different symptoms in boys than girls. Of course the argument could then be made that these girls, the hypothetical ones as described in the article who are not diagnosed because they fair alright socially on a couple of levels, don't in fact meet the criteria for AS.

I went to a catholic school and I never talked to the other kids at school in elementary and high school.
The nuns always described me as "good". Quiet was interpreted as good.

I think LFA will eventually be shown to often have a different cause (or set of causes) than HFA, and that the higher rates of LFA in males will be because of chromosome specific causes.


As far as "hide the symptoms" goes, I think it's a combination. I am the only daughter in a family that includes at least one Aspie brother. I self-diagnosed with Asperger's in part because:

1) When I was reading about Best Practice interventions with kids with Asperger's, it was EXACTLY what my parents did with me and made me do as a child, which was itself very gendered (my parents both prided themselves on being feminists and couldn't see how their expectations of me were different than those for my brothers). There was a ton of forced and repeated social interaction as a child for me, including scripts that I could check in with, to help me navigate different situations (interacting with very culturally different sides of the family and with specific age-related social expectations (both in terms of my age, as well as the age of the person I was talking to). As a result I expressed many fewer stereotypical Aspie traits than my brother.

2) I felt a shameful level of dislike/annoyance for boys with autism characteristics. Because of my knee-jerk response to them and my shame around it, I tried to figure out where it was coming from and realized that it was because I saw them as "getting away with" the same stuff that I was NOT allowed to, the stuff I'd get punished or excluded or shamed for. (Note: my parents didn't do much of the negative reinforcement, but it was prevalent in others). I knew I was able to suppress behaving like them, I knew how much effort it was, I knew it was part of my social responsibility, and I hated seeing them getting a free pass just because of gender.

When I've confessed this to a male friend who has received an adult diagnosis, he told me he really wished that his parents had done the kind of intensive social stuff mine did. That's helped me be less judgmental, but it can still very hard for me, especially when it's someone acting entitled. Another part of it is that I've rarely experienced sexual harassment (indeed, I seem to be luckier than many female friends of mine) but every time I have, it's been from an aspie/autistic boy/man who seems to prioritize his own sexual feelings/"rights" over my autonomy and dignity and, because he's "special" and "can't help it", I've been told I'm the problem or the one who has to deal with it. (I tend to wear tighter clothing and low-cut shirts for sensory reasons.)



Additionally, I think there is a perhaps a teeny bit of science behind some language/socialization delay stuff in boys (though gendered socialization/expectations appear by 6 months, so who can say) and parents/others don't interact with their sons in the same intensely social ways as they do with their daughters. The value of a daughter is tied up much more heavily in her social skills (rather than intelligence/strength/earning potential) and there is a ton more expectation that she will have good social skills. This means that from the earliest possible ages, females are socialized and expected to socialize. This can include very subtle stuff, like engaging her more while she is feeding as an infant. For this reason, I think girls do have an advantage in coming across as more NT than they are. The downside of this is that our struggles are even more likely to be seen as moral and individual choices to fail (because they occur at higher levels (in more complex social situations, for example) even though they come from the same underlying brain differences).

I am very suspicious of accepting the assumption that autism appears much less frequently in women. All that tells me is that diagnostic criteria for brain stuff is clumsy and sexist, treatment is in the very very early stages of moving from an "art" to a science, and we live in a male-oriented world where "diseases" are first defined by how they manifest in (wealthier, white) males.

I think a lot of the driving force is management. I think girls are diagnosed less often because, generally, it is easier to direct a girl with ASD than to direct a boy with ASD and gain cooperation. We socialize girls and women to cooperate and fit in. Having ASD doesn't mean not responding to social pressures, and somewhat I think the social pressure on girls if taken literally is cooperate, on boys is be independent. So literal kids with ASD are still socialized differently based on gender, with different results, in my opinion.

Like I literally said in my reply above that there are women on this forum who were not diagnosed until adulthood despite not speaking until very late.

Like there are probably a lot of autistic girls being diagnosed with other things if they're being diagnosed at all, and they're not ending up being handled alongside the boys who are diagnosed.

Similar for me, people said how good I was, because I was very quiet. But they were always prodding me to talk more, yet if I said much of anything I got in trouble for "talking back." So confusing

I don't buy it...what potential gender related factors would convince a parent. teacher or doctor that a non-verbal boy has autism but that a girl with similar traits has something else??

Do I have to do sexism 101 here now? If you refuse to believe something that is a real thing, how can we have any basis for discussion? Imagine if you had to establish the existence of gravity before discussion how things fall to the ground? Because that's how this response strikes me.

Here's an example related to heart disease: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?id=8416664

But it isn't just heart disease:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3 ... 3133228677

There are real studies that are peer reviewed that have found that when looking at "severe" autism that two boys are diagnosed for every girl who is diagnosed. If you're seeing basically no girls anywhere with this diagnosis, then it's probably not because girls don't have it.

"But autism is a boy's disorder"