Female Aspies? a different presentation?

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^ i think an official diagnosis has been really good for me, as has been the fortnightly trek up to an autism specialist who trained wtih Tony Attwood's Minds and Hearts.

I do not know how it is in the United States. Here in Australia i have benefited from access to a psychologist who deals purely with autistic people. I do feel fortunate as he is only 40 minutes drive away.
He understands the sligtly different presentation in women and he is also helping with a lot of CBT strategies.
Such a relief to be released from the Talk-FEST therapies that sent me further around the twist than i already was before. They just kept saying " FEEL THE FEELINGS" and i kept feigning to keep them happy and would then go out into the world and repeat the same strange behaviours i always had. Or i would just hide away and then be told I HAD TO GO OUT AND BE SOCIAL.

The thing is, social just is not high on my agenda. it ranks down the bottom of any list i can muster up.
Occasionally i am in the mood for short and sharp bursts with a couple of people. But i have learned i cannot linger with a group - the exhaustion is just too much afterwards, and i need to process and analyse my social contact in a way that is fairly typical of someone who does not have an intuitive sense of the flow of social play.

The good thing about WP is i can at least develop some connection and identification.
I have enjoyed this.

Millie, where are you located? I'd love to have an ASD specialist. My last psychologist tried to make me NT.
I agree with the whole social thing. I can do it but I'm very awkward and I'm not missing out on much if I stop. I don't mind being with friends, but to force myself into it is no good.
I've also learned that when I'm exhausted from socialising that I should have enough rest before doing it again, otherwise I won't be able to cope.

I've just been through reading (most of) these posts, and I'm finding the whole subject utterly fascinating.

For the record, I'm 40, so back in the 70s when I was a little girl, I doubt anyone knew what AS was. I do recall being put in remedial class because I was always running around and wouldn't stay in one classroom - I'd wander off during lessons. I remember my mother using the word 'hyperactive',but I don't know whether or not ADHD was suggested. There were talks between my mother and the head teacher, but nothing medical. It wouldn't surprise me if the school had wanted to investigate further but my parents had gone into denial; that's the kind of people they were.

I definitely relate to this - both on the level of how the other kids acted, and on the level of whether anyone realized how different I was.

I can understand the 'lost in literature' thing because I was very verbal (and still am, so apologize in advance for the length of this!), but in a very formal way. I had a habit of showing people books with something I'd read which fascinated me, and which I hoped would fascinate them so they'd talk to me about it. I did this up till my teens, and with adults as well as kids. It never occurred to me that that wasn't how you started a conversation. It got to the stage where I always had my head buried in a book because they were better company than the people I knew.

Progidious memory, check - never had any trouble whatsoever quoting reams of stuff for exams. Took a while to actually get round the thing of laying out facts so other people could understand them, though. I ran into an old teacher one time, and she reminded me of the habit I used to have of putting all my essays in note form.

Animals - I had a brief horsey phase like most girls, but I generally had this fascination with nature and biology. I also went through what's generally seen as a classic boy thing - a dinosaur phase.

Main reason it's hard for me to tell which gender attitudes are down to AS and which aren't, is my mother. She was older than most, raised very strictly, and obsessed with appearance and social status. She also, I think, didn't like other women very much. And she actively worked to stop me having a good relationship with any kind of older female role model. So I got this picture of these deceitful, superficial, shallow creatures...and I was supposed to grow up into one. Naturally, I wasn't keen, but I think my dislike of the whole appearance thing, the whole fitting in with the girly group, predated the worst of that.

I'd always pal around with the boys at school, even when I was forcibly separated from them (which, being at a British church school in the 70s with incredibly backward gender attitudes, I often was). None of the girls were ever going to want to swap fossils or talk about my heraldry project. And at home, my dad and I had a great relationship, because he liked doing the kind of stuff with me (finding bugs in the garden, making weird gadgets, Meccano models) that he obviously used to do with my brother before he grew up and left home. That, unfortunately, ended when I went through puberty, and he went totally hostile on me the way old-fashioned fathers apparently sometimes do.

Things were hard for me then because I was expected to become obsessed with appearance, and I didn't - or not in the right way. I mean, I loved colors and glitter and bangles and beads and the whole play side of it, but the fact that endless grooming was made out to be obligatory for me to be acceptable as a person, never made sense. So I lost interest. Also, I went to an all-girl school, and I have to disagree here...girls were way worse bullies than boys ever were. Totally. Usually, if boys bullied me, it was at the urging of the girls they liked. And it was at that school that after one bullying incident, the head teacher pulled me aside and gave me a grilling on how I ought to be more sociable, then things like that woudn't happen so much.

Morgana and ephemerella, I've been following your exchange and I really, really identify with a lot of the witch/oracle/succubus type of thing. For the first: I'm pagan, I've had some deeply mystical experiences which I rarely talk about, and I've often been told because of my interest in afterlife/psychic type of things that I 'think too seriously' and am 'morbid' - and yet other people find it fascinating and are always asking me about it. I was the 'class astrologer' for several years of school, and I'd get certain people telling me one day that I was damned for being interested in the stuff I was into, the next minute coming to me for a reading! I'd be advising other people about their relationship issues, yet I was never in one of my own. I've really thought, on and off, about doing something like this professionally...but then I wonder if I have the people skills!

For the second: I temper the tendency to speak my mind for the simple reason that my mother was one of those people who believed that hurting people - deeply, to the core - was the best way to make them change. I know that this doesn't work - because I'm one of those she hurt - and I don't believe that people who use this method are truth-telling nearly as often as they're pushing their opinions. I strongly believe that there must be other ways to put truth across, but I admit I err more in not telling than in telling it wrong.

And the third: this has been hard. I had no sex education - none; I went through puberty early, and that and my naivety were irresistible to predatory older men. And it was all too easy for them to say I was leading them on, so I attracted something of a reputation by the time I was at college, without ever actually having done anything (miraculously, I didn't manage to let a guy talk me into bed till I was 19). It was very, very hard to deal with. Truth is, if this isn't TMI, I didn't fully come to terms with and start to enjoy my sexuality till I was past thirty. Meanwhile, I was experiencing massive confusion with the guys I actually knew and liked, because while I would feel connected to them I often wasn't sure if that connection was intellectual, creative, emotional, sexual, or something else, or all of them, or some, or none - and I was ultra-bad at judging what kind of energy was coming from the other direction, and I got it wrong a lot of the time. Some things in life should come with an instruction manual...

Gosh.

Whatever happened to plain, good, straight-forward, sensible friendships that were based on feelings of mutual understanding and trust?

They still exist don't they?

When did all this over the top cliquy silliness start?

Are these extreme emotions an American thing, a female thing or some other cultural thing?

I've talked to older generations: most of these fashions and fads weren't invented back then. People couldn't afford anything flashy in those days, so they just had to get on with their lives and wear the boring clothes that they could afford. They often had to wear the same outfit each day. They didn't have time or money for all this other non-sense.

If you didn't join in in the playground and just sat at the side reading a book, nobody minded as long as you did the work. Nobody honestly cared that you weren't "socialising appropriately for your developmental level". There wasn't all this pressure to be social or to keep up with trends. Now there is.

Why?


I never had any problems with fashions when I was a teenager: I had to wear school uniform.

What's so wrong with wearing comfortable, practical clothes anyway?

Presentiment topic

Even amongst female aspies of the same generation here I am different.

But I understand what is meant by exhausting socialization rituals. My daughters and their fad-fashion-friend frenzetics just frazzles me.

It's wrong because it does not gain them the admiration and envy of their peers, the attention of the opposite sex, or increase the feeling of having self-worth through looking attractive. Just a guess.

I knew a HFA girl like that. She sounded like a prepubescent girl. I also know a girl who I am sure has AS and she also has this odd voice like a prepubescent girl.

I go the other way, for some reason. My voice is low and gravelly like a man's.

That could almost have been one of my memories.

They are described as still extant but less accessible to female persons like us because we do not understand our peers and they do not understand us. Surely you can see why this would impact on anything based on mutual understanding?


Before humans were human. Our primate “relations” also manifest this same trait.

A consequence of developing bodies, with extreme hormonal conditions, and the initial manifestations of adult characteristics in the context of pre adult neurology and life skills. In addition to struggling to control their changing emotional profile, adolescents experience problems with controlling their changing physical characteristics also. A familiar example of this is teen clumsiness and the “breaking” of male voices.

Well obviously todays fashions and trends are contemporary and not necessarily the same in content as those of other days. Indeed this seems to be part and parcel of the definition of a fashion, fad, or trend.

There were fashions, fads and trends when the older generation were younger, and will be for any subsequent generations too. While the content may change, the phenomena is the same.

I find this a completely unrealistic assessment.



I went to schools with uniforms too, and this did not in any way shape or form prevent me from being subject to exclusion and victimization by my peers.

This is because the text you are referring to, is giving an actual example of a wider phenomena. If it were about being dressed trendy, then there would be no such issues in any environment where uniforms are mandatory, but the same things happen in schools requiring uniforms. The content of these fads etc might change, but the phenomenon itself is relatively stable.

In my case this was so, and in my father's, because we were very passive. I don't know whether it would be any different these days where I live, though. I doubt it. I barely uttered a word at school and would do things like sit alone picking weeds, circle the buildings, or do handstands alone non-stop not caring I was revealing my underwear. The teachers ignored my isolation because I was very passive and studious. One would just laugh at my mutism and not do anything about it. If I had been actively showing inappropriate social behaviour I am sure it they would have reacted completely differently.

even without knowing the statistics, I'd noticed the blatant difference in the ratio of aspie girls to guys so this thread piqued my interest and curiosity.

anyway, just happened to read this and yeah, that part's true for me anyhow. I'm a guy and typically i get along way better with girls. always been that way even when i was little. my bestfriend even today is in fact, my stepsister =D.

she's a bit of a goofball at times.

I don't know.

Even when I was really socially clueless and had no idea how to respond, I get the impression that other people (including other females) were trying to understand me. This was the case even when I acted out and people were puzzled by my behaviour.

Even when I didn't understand all of their habits and beliefs, I tried to listen, even when I thoroughly disagreed with what they were saying.

Maybe they were trying to figure me out in the same way that someone would try and figure a foreign exchange student out.


I can say that I have had meaningful friendships with people, even if these friendships were unconventional or at more of a distance than what's typical for females. These weren't clique based friendships at all: I seemed to be able to have people talk to me from several different cliques, even if I couldn't initiate the interactions all that well.

Maybe my weakness lies in responding socially.
I tend to be very passive.
Maybe I do process some social cues, or they become garbled because I process stuff too intensely, I don't know.

What I do know is that I've been able to help some lonely and unhappy females.
I've also talked with females from different cultures with different mother tongues.
That definitely required some mutual understanding, even if it might not have been full mutual understanding.
I have tried to be there for other people, even when I have been clueless.


Maybe I've had to try and train myself up to this over the years.

There are rare people who value trying to find mutual understanding in friendship: I've met some of them.

I've also been able to help people out individually, but I've never really understood this whole "clique" concept and I've been useless at finding groups to work in when required. I also have trouble interacting and chatting in large crowds.


Perhaps I'm an "atypical" case, I don't know.

Maybe the kind of social understanding experienced depends on the individual and how well the individual is able to process social cues.

I appreciate that different people are probably affected in different ways and will therefore have different experiences.


All that I know is that I was assessed for AS in the past and I have been able to have some friendships with people.
I did feel that some of them were meaningful, even if I was socially clueless or forgot to reciprocate at times.


Maybe I will never fully understand other people socially and emotionally, but at least I can try.

Surely that counts for something?

I know the last post was posted a year ago, but I am very interested in this aswell and I've only just came across this thread, so let me have the chance to give my opinion.

Both males and females on the spectrum experience the same symptoms, but can express them in different ways. I think Aspie females have that social trait in them, because all females are more socially conscious than males. This is not a stereotype - it is a known fact. I'm not saying NT men aren't social, I'm just saying that all men express communication in a different way to women. My mum often likes to get together with her friends when all their husbands are at work or out doing their own things, and her friends agree the same way too. But, on the other hand, my dad likes to get together up the pub with his friends, without their wives involved. I'm not saying this always happens, but it does happen sometimes.

So that's what I'm trying to say with this. Female Aspies can learn to hide their AS, more than male Aspies can. It is also a common fact that most (not all) male Aspies are more confident in admitting they have AS without getting embarrassed, because they know they might aswell. But some female Aspies tend to feel slightly embarrassed with explaining to NTs about having AS. I'm not saying they all do, because I've never met another female Aspie before in my life, but my dad knows a few friends who have got Aspie daughters, and none of them like admitting their condition to other people. They'll rather keep it to themselves, and know they can get away with hiding it without being found out. I've met a couple of boys on the spectrum, and both of them love to admit it, and have become rather excited with it. But me, I'm a female Aspie, and although I'm opening up about AS on here, I don't tell anyone at work about it, and they would be very surprised if I did suddenly turn round and say that I have it. I tell doctors and employers about it, but I don't go no further than that. I don't talk about it to my relatives, only my mum sometimes. But I am very ashamed of it, and although I get obsessed with things, I'm not obsessed enough to base my career around it. I'm obsessed with the weather, but I don't want to get too over extreme with it and become a geologist or a weather forecaster, because I'm not obsessed enough to. I'll probably lose interest if I did. But I heard an Aspie male can focus on his obsessions more. And usually Aspie males can be very clever, but again, female Aspies can be, depending on the person. But it is more likely an Apies female can pick up social cues and/o learn to hide their AS more than an Aspie male can, but an Aspie male can typically be more able to take his intelligence seriously and not care so much about social cues. But again, that can vary, depending on the type of person. But I'm just saying what I've read up about AS in males and females.

It sounds like you're moving toward a common gender difference, the "Little Professor" (boys) vs "Little Philosopher" (girls). The little philosopher is harder to detect, understand and accept. I know it's true for me.

When a little boy who is obsessed about trucks knows more about his topic than the adults around him, they can look it up and confirm any particular detail. It's not so easy with the little philosopher.

Like -- when my severe allergy to fascism or social fiction flairs up, people can't see their own denial, and see only a defiance that must be crushed. I was a natural-born whistle-blower long before I knew any of the words. I've learned to suppress my natural impulses and keep it to myself, but I can't fake an enthusiasm for something in the culture that I instinctively see as vile. They sense that something's off, but they have no idea what. Some need to hate me, even when I haven't said a word.

Does any of that sound familiar?