Women and autism

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What is about autism in women that makes it so much less obvious?

Whatever it is magically doesn't effect me. I've been told it was obvious my entire assessment.

I was taught as a child that shyness=rudeness, and that I had to look people in the eye, smile, speak up, walk properly, and not fidget. I remember until around age 12, my parents actually had to tell me the polite thing to say to strangers, in front of them ("Say please, say thank you"), and I'd repeat it.

No idea why females seem to be more successful at learning 'proper' NT behaviors.

I don't know what it is. I'm too busy listening to The Kinks and making avatars of them to think about the answer.

when I was a child it was obvious, but now it is much less so as I have learned various skills and mechanisms that allow me to function alongside nt's more or less. people definitely consider me "weird" but in my adult life so far I have placed myself in an atypical environment anyway, which makes my weirdness more acceptable.

Perhaps that is true for some. Growing up I had very bad social manners regardless how many times my parents reminded me. Eventually I did learn. To this day I still dislike eye contact and have difficulty keeping it. I also have difficulty following "confident" body language. It does require a lot of work and mind control to follow normal standards.

There seems to be a subgroup of autistic females similar to me, and I get them and get along well with them.

I was probably pretty obvious as a child, or would have been if Asperger's syndrome had been known in the English-speaking world at the time. Like a lot of girls, though, I learned that I could get away with being different if I kept quiet, nodded, and smiled when everybody else did. Many adolescent autistic girls are withdrawn and quiet, whereas I think autistic boys are more vocal and obvious.

I have a long reply I would love to make, but I'll keep it as short as I can.

From what I've read, girls and boys at the same diagnostic level of autism (designated HFA/Asperger's for discussion's sake), present symptoms in ways unique to the inherent differences in many males vs females. So where boys may show delayed speech, girls aren't. Boys may have a restricted interest to the point of standing out (the example I read is that of a 9 volt battery), where a girl's restricted interest may be fairy tales and princes, which is perceived as normal and not as focused.

This isn't a broad application, just one to explain why girls seem to fall through the proverbial cracks.

Personally, I think it is because too many supposedly credible therapists, teachers, and psychologists still ascribe to the belief that Asperger's is a male only disorder, and assume that an 'odd' female child is just 'odd', or has other issues. In other words, a case of someone working outside of their scope of practice and/or education, which I abhor.

My reply above being said, I was pretty obvious as a child to my retrospective eyes. My parents were/are incompetent, narcissistic, morons who never should have procreated to start with.

The women generally seem to have a higher level of self-awareness. (As in all things there are bound to be exceptions to that).

There is a negative aspect to this greater self-awareness however: if seeking formal diagnosis, the presentation of greater self-awareness can mean that clinicians who work from very rigid diagnostic perspectives (which seems to be the great majority of them) will wrongly reinterpret this greater self-awareness as "proof" that the woman isn't on the autistic spectrum. There are clinicians who cling to hidebound notions such as autistic people don't have any capacity for insight.

Women tend to be more penalised by these outdated notions in diagnostic settings, I think. Psychology and psychiatry are very conservative disciplines, and don't take kindly to new information which tends to be dismissed as disruptive; this attitude (and it is widespread) works to stop the progress of better understandings in those disciplines and the flow on effect of better service delivery. Current practitioners can be seen as experts on past practice and knowledge, into which present insights are not absorbed and certainly none that are further seeing and futuristic possibilities. Operating paradigms always change slowly and lag behind the state of the art knowledge.