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starrytigress
Tufted Titmouse
Tufted Titmouse

Joined: 14 Oct 2021
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Posts: 47
Location: New Jersey

29 Jan 2022, 6:03 pm

txfz1 wrote:
starrytigress wrote:
Mostly because of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory#Criticism
The idea that autism is somehow and extreme expression of male phenotype and shows a distinct lack of any expression of female phenotype (hence the 'girls don't get autism' nonsense). He's also the one behind the concept of autistics being 'mind blind', and is an autistic person is completely incapable of understanding that someone has different thoughts, feelings, perspectives and goals from their own. Which I feel like autistics are on the receiving end of this more often than NTs. Basically he proposed an idea that puts all of the onus of conversation failure on autistics, but a more recent idea proposed called 'the double empathy problem' proposed that if SBC's idea was correct then autistics would have an even HARDER time communicating with each other than with NTs, but the opposite is true. Autistics have an easier time talking to other autistics than NTs, which means that it's more a problem of dialect than theory of mind.
Example: In American English the first floor is the floor on the ground level and usually the one you enter a building on, in British English, the first floor is the floor above the one one the ground level (which is called the 'ground floor'). So if you were unaware of the difference and said 'meet me on the first floor', well, the American English speaker and the British English speaker are now waiting on two different floors.



Thank you for the link and the summary. The one book I’m reading has not given me the same impression, so I am curious and will continue to to research it. It is written for the layman and hasn’t claimed any difference between women and men. From my own ignorance, using the stereotypes of men are problem solvers and women are the nurturers, I would think there would be some difference in the autistic genders. How much and any effect would be beyond me. For my own reading, I was just trying to understand how low empathy has affected me.


From what I've read and personal experience, there are some sex differences, which account for women being under diagnosed. Google 'Autistic Masking' or 'Autistic Camouflaging'. It's believe that the trait to successfully mirror peer interaction to the point that an external view would assume competence is more common among female autistics, and explains why they get diagnosed later. That and the fact that and females don't show the same sorts of obsessions that is considered typical of male autistics.
And you might not have low empathy, you might have something called Alexithymia, which is an inability to recognize emotions, both in yourself and in others. In fact there was a recent study, that I found fascinating, that stated that there isn't much of a difference in terms of empathy between autistics and NTs, once you control for alexithymia (basically make sure that you compare alexithymic autistics and NTs to each other, and non-alexithymic autistice and NTs to each other).
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00332/full



txfz1
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Joined: 13 Dec 2021
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29 Jan 2022, 6:15 pm

Thank you for the link. I’ve planned to look into Alexithymia next, also BAP.