Sexual orientation & AS/Baron-Cohen 'male-brain' theory.

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I was wondering whether anyone has seen any info on demographics for sexual orientation among autistic people... I would think the breakdown would be the same as for the larger society, but maybe not. I think I saw a question on one particular Aspergers related source worded something along the lines of, "Do you find yourself to be more sexually nonstandard?, pardon the paraphrase. I don't know if this was just a control question of it's ever been substantiated in some study that there might be some relationship of some kind between these two issues (perhaps an elevated or a diminished occurrence of gay or lesbian people among among autistic people or Aspies?

Also this kind of gets in to Baron-Cohen's idea about AS as being a "an exaggerated version of a typically 'male' brain". He seems to have ideas about testosterone levels in utero... This is very interesting to me, as this same issue has been raised as having a possible linkage to homosexuality.

Would like to hear people's comments about this, or if anyone knows any sources for this kind of demographic info--or even anecdotal ideas about it. Thanks.

The male brain theory has been used to explain why there is a high number of FTM's among the Aspie population, but is easily enough put down by the fact that there are several MTF's as well. Supposedly 50% of Aspies have gender dysphoria. Other than that - as sexist as it may sound, ASD manifests itself differently in males and females (supposedly). The idea for it being extreme male brain comes back from the times where ASD was believed to largely affect the male population, not females. It also largely implies that ASD is part of the gender spectrum - where male is logic and female is emotion/social skills. Something like:

ASD --- Manly Man --- Normal Guy --- Almost Gay --- Gay--- >
And so on to female ending with Girly Girl, or probably "Emotional Ditz" (If we want to go that far and be insulting). So I do not believe this to be the case.

Other than that - I am asexual-aromantic (or as I will usually say, I cannot fall in love nor see the reason for the appeal). Which again, for Aspies is higher than the NT population, but not exactly "common."

This scale is kind of nonsensical. It's part of the idea that "gay" is somehow the opposite of "masculine". This is simply not reality. Gay men that range from very masculine to very feminine--as, in reality, do heterosexual men. Straight men have strong social inhibitors preventing them from expressing this, where as some gay people "lay it on" as an act of liberation the repression they experienced in society growing up. However there are certainly extremely masculine gay men. What we're talking about in terms of the "manliness spectrum" here is gender identity (in a literal sense), not sexual orientation.

I'm not really trying to get at these kinds of stereotypes, but get to actual issues of sexual orientation in autism or AS.

Also this scale presented above makes no sense according to the Baron-Cohen theory about this vis-a-vis the idea the elevated levels of male hormones producing more instances of gay people. If anything (if these ideas both had legitimacy), then occurring together with greater regularity would be gay males and ASDs. I'm trying to find out whether there, in fact, are more gay males statistically among an autistic sample than within the general sample.

I've never seen any study about sexual orientation and the spectrum, but I have read that women with aspergers tend to have brains more similar to males, and it makes since if you think about it (males are more likely to have the disorder,) and I'm not sure if it's coincidence or not, but I do see a lot of lesbians around here ( which I get a kick out of , who doesn't love lesbians?) I also have seen a fair amount of gay guys around here, so I don't know, maybe people are just more open about that kind of thing here.

I have looked at orientation in the female general population (i.e. those not diagnosed with an ASD), and its correlation with autistic traits (as measure by the AQ). The options were limited though as I used an already existing survey, which only had the options hetrosexual, homosexual, bisexual and asexual. Those with higher AQ scores were significantly less likely to be heterosexual, and more likely to be asexual (than those with lower AQ scores).

The study that the survey came from looks at ASD subjects as well. It is called 'Elevated rates of testosterone-related disorders in women with autism spectrum conditions' by Erin Ingudomnukul, Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, & Rebecca Knickmeyer. You should be able to find some more interesting info there.

Yeah, that theory is inconsistent with the existence of male-to-female transgender Aspies. It's hard to argue that a "man" who thinks about suicide all the time due to gender dysphoria has an extremely male brain.

Correct me if I'm wrong, as Cohen is saying that elevated levels of testosterone is a factor in ASD it seems somewhat unrelated to the studies of homosexual males. I believe they suggested that a lack of prenatal testosterone had an influence on 'making' the baby gay.

It's linked to the birth order hypothesis isn't it? The mothers woman sees the testosterone of a male foetus as a foreign chemical, and combats it with oestrogen which slightly feminises the foetus. They say that the more male foetus' the mother caries the better her body gets at doing this, the more likely the next baby will be gay.

So, I don't know, if Cohen is talking about elevated levels of T in his extreme male brain idea wouldn't the birth order idea mean that there would be less male homosexual aspies?

Are there?

Wow, that's really interesting Yellowtamarin--thanks! Granted I'm ashamed that I don't know more about how the theory about elevated male hormones in the womb (producing gay males) is supposed to handle the question of the production of gay females (i.e. is the same phenomenon supposed to create both, or would there be some corresponding, opposite sort of phenomenon for gay females? I have no idea, haven't heard anything about that.) I'm going to check out the study you mention... Thanks for the great feedback

The Baron-Cohen stuff (to my knowledge) doesn't really focus on the sexual orientation, and if so it's only tangential. The other studies I was talking about were separate. These DON'T in fact suggest a lack of prenatal testosterone, but rather the opposite. MORE testosterone in the womb was concluded to make males more likely to be gay. This s based studies where males who had more older male sibblings (obviously carried in the same womb) were more likely to be gay.

I think what you're talking about "feminizing the foetus" is kind of based on stereotypes of gay males being "feminine". Which is kind of baseless. I've never heard of this in conjunction with this study. 1) If the male hormone was something that the mother's body needed to "combat", why would it not combat it in earlier pregnancies with male foetuses as well? Why would it get stronger at doing this and "overcompensate" later on, in older age? 2) The woman's body is going to be less estrogenized in general at an older biological age (say 40) than at a younger age (20), so where is it going to get these testosterone-fighting superpowers all of the sudden, particularly as it is less estrogenized itself? This is counterintuitive.

It's the only testosterone based sexuality idea I've heard of. It was put forward during a television show featuring John Barrowman trying to find the root cause of his homosexuality.

I didn't suggest that it was correct, I was just unsure what you talking about. I know very little about biochemistry, so I'm not ever going to claim 'THIS IS TRUE, I KNOW IT'.

But, that television program also features analysis of child play and adult sexuality to try, and they did tend to re-enforce stereotypes which I don't necessarily agree with. But it should be noted while stereotypes are not accurate, nor do they paint a full bodied representative picture of the homosexual (or any) community I do think aspects of them should be acknowledged and investigated, if only to disprove them.

I feel unwelcome in this now, so I'll leave it.

I don't "know" either. I didn't mean to make you feel unwelcome--just trying to figure out these points and make sense of them. It's nothing personal at all. I'm probably being too analytical/argumentative and not really conversational or validating to people, which I tend to do. But what do I know? It's everyone's conversation. I will say that I do see all kinds of comments in threads here making baseless and stereotypical claims about gay people, which is pretty discouraging for me, and something I didn't expect to find in an autism-based forum--and this probably makes me defensive or hyper-sensitive to that. Which is unfortunate. Oh well, sorry for any offense. You should not feel unwelcome. Everyone has a perfect right to say what they want to say.

I appologise. I'm having a rough day, I probably took undue offensive to your post.

Don't worry though, most people here - myself included often - are too argumentative/non-conversational/validating. I hope you're not suggesting that I made baseless and stereotypical claims about gay people.

As a part of the LGBT community I hate to think that I myself propagated misinformation .

I enjoy the LGBT community, although I do take issue with some parts of it, it seems a good mirror, though not perfect, mirror for the 'Aspie'/Autistic community - just an aside, I hate the term Aspie but as if I were to be diagnosed I would be Autistic, or PDD-Nos as I had a speech delay I suppose my opinion is rather irrelevant.

Both are minorities, and both are mostly thought of through stereotypes, and face discrimination at times - though the severity of the discrimination varies by location. So, both experiences should lead to people that understand that stereotyping and discrimination are hurtful and mostly unfounded. Yet there's a surprising amount of discrimination and bigotry amongst both groups.

For instance, I'm a bisexual transman, and the bi and transphobia I've experiences has actually been markedly worse than from the LGBT community than it has by the population at large - mainly for my trans identity.

I have to say that the community that I've had least discrimination from for my trans identity is the Autistic community.

But, I've been discriminated and dismissed by the Autistic community a lot for not being officially diagnosed with an ASD, despite the fact that a lot of people in my life who know me, and know ASD very well say that it's painfully obvious that I am on the spectrum. I hadn't even considered it until they told me that I should get it checked out, although it explains a lot about my life, my interactions with people, and how I function generally.

The place where my ASD issues have been most accepted has been in the LGBT community.

But, that's just my experience, and not really relevant to the topic at hand.

I've wondered about the language/sexuality connection, and there's an obvious language/autism connection.

gay men score an average of two standard deviations higher on vocabulary tests than anyone else. they also are disproportionately represented in certain professions (the oldest documented gay couple in history were pharaoh's head manicurists, haha).

the standard theory for human language development is that it evolved as a substitute for the social grooming seen in other primates when our group sizes got larger, so seeing that gay men are sort of thick on the ground in personal grooming/fashion related work and also typically more verbal than straight people or lesbians, I have to wonder. the "gay uncle" theory whereby we're genetically viable because the offspring of our relatives have higher success rates when they have gay people there to babysit and teach and so on when their parents can't is sort of an extension of the socialization/grooming thing too. gay people exist as a sort of extreme version of the social support system that makes humans such a successful species, and in most indigenous societies that had roles for gay folks, we occupied support roles either caring directly for others physically or handling the spiritual/symbolic/artistic realm (again, tying back to the intensified language facility gay folks are statistically observed to have.)

I was reading an article in the "info" section earlier that talked about how we (on autistic spectrum) basically have heightened brain growth to the point that it makes it difficult to cope with the excess information we're getting. gay folks typically have abnormally high language capacity, autistics and aspies have their abilities augmented and limited simultaneously by abnormally high mental capacity in general.

I've also got temporal lobe epilepsy and geschwind syndrome (simple partial seizures are the main thing I get with the TLE, which for me manifest as intense religious experiences and borderline trance states as well as some other interesting but symbolically/lingusitically unrelated seizure symptoms. the Geschwind's results in hypergraphia and a tendency towards religious and ethical intensity, the later being augmented by the aspie black/white thing. van gogh, doestoevsky, and several long-winded old testament prophets are notable cases of TLE/Geschwind's.) and I think for me, personally, all of it ties together as being a person whose brain is abnormal in a way that tends to make me naturally good at dealing with other people's emotional and spiritual needs. it's kind of an identity thing for me, since a lot of ancient cultures and groups like various native american tribes had clearly defined and often fairly prestigious, (or at least fairly comfortable) social roles for people like that. most social animals have role differences, some of which are in-born. I consider both gay people and people on the autism spectrum to be support-role variations for human society that aren't quite as obvious as the difference between, say, soldier and worker ants, but are similar in terms of evolutionary function. gay people tend to be over-represented in music, which is not all that different from the prototypical aspie being good at math. I definitely think there's some sort of parallel social specialization thing going on here, though what the mechanism is or whether or not it's two types of the same thing I can't say.

(dealing with emotional stuff seems counter intuitive for an aspie, but I do very well in situations where people tell me what they're feeling and why rather than leaving me to guess, so I end up more comfortable with intense, private, emotional confessions than other situations. these are relatively unambiguous since once you've been established as good listener, people just tell you what they're feeling outright. once I learned the proper set of responses to people in pain and trauma I did better there than in normal conversation, since people with psychological conditions and heavy emotional issues tend to react and respond to situations in predictable patterns I can look up and read more about. I thought I wanted to be a therapist for a long time because of this.)

Wow, you present a lot of great info here, Ca2MgFe5Si8O22OH2.

This strikes me as probably not having to do with the fact that they are gay, per se, but rather because of the fact that their particular difference has traditionally forced them into a kind of seclusion and hidden internal isolation, involving a lot of internal questioning and dialog fairly early-on which non-gay people don't so much encounter. The difference with gay people is that often in societies it was a secret or taboo sort of thing--and since it could be concealed unlike other more overt differences, it very frequently was. This puts the gay person in a unique position of traditionally not having the same kind of support system for external discussion and validation, which I think internalizes this function a lot. So as a result, gay people learn more to debate and "discuss" things with themselves. Hence they become more adept at doing it in general. Something to think about anyway.

Also, bear in mind that Aspies typically similarly have unusually good language skills (if bad "communication" skills because of the the connecting factor).




I don't think I so much accept this; it seems fairly far-fetched to me. I'm not referring to "gay people" as a particular overt subculture--which throughout much of history and in many parts of the world simply didn't exist. I'm talking about gay people as simply people who have a homosexual orientation--and these people were most frequently NOT recognized throughout history, but rather lived as heterosexual people--married, had children, etc, and never were publicly acknowledged as "having the gay". Such people did not necessarily gravitate toward "hairstylist" or "florist" etc. type professions and I think that's kind of an unfortunately stereotypical thing to advance. They might have done anything. They might have been soldiers, and were. They might have been, essentially anything anyone else was. And they were. I think the issue here is that the sub-set of gay men who are particularly effeminate is actually a minority--but it is what people simply SEE. Most gay people--now and throughout history--simply aren't recognized as "different" precisely because they are NOT particularly different from their heterosexual counterparts in terms of being unusually feminine (for men) or unusually masculine (for women).

So this part doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I can only speak from experience. Of the gay men I know, to say that they were particularly fond of being maternal, caring for children, petting and reassuring people, etc is simply not substantiated. Of course some probably are. Again I think this has more to to with the masculine-feminine spectrum rather than the straight-gay spectrum. I think these things, though often conflated, are entirely distinct. I'm gay, and I don't particularly like children, identify with them, want to take care of them, etc. They tend to be irritating, burdensome and uninteresting to me. Neither do I have any particular interest in helping anyone pick out clothes, giving them relationship advice, consoling them, doing their hair, etc. I like mechanical things. I don't talk or move in feminine ways. Does this mean I'm "less homosexual"? Ha! Absolutely not--it has nothing to do with that. It is unrelated. I personally resent it when people, knowing I am gay, expect such things from me because these things don't really have anything to do with me. Again, I think this is an unfortunate conflation of "gay/straight" with "feminine/masculine". Probably historically "out" gays were "out" in usually repressive societies precisely because they were the ones who were least able to "hide it"--which would necessarily mean the most effeminate ones (for men). They were out as gay and were visible in repressive societies largely because they simply were extremely obvious to the rest of society being unusual in terms of their gender expression. Since this is what people saw as "gay", this is the concept of "gay" these societies developed. Naturally these feminine gay men would be more likely play the nurturing, feminine roles you describe. But that isn't a "gay" thing per se. It is just a particular subset that has traditionally been highly visible. My 2 cents.

*nods* yeah I'm not trying to say that all gay men are like that. you're definitely right. not all gay men fall into these sort of third-gendered "support role" stereotypes, just like not all aspies rock back and forth under stress. that said, if you're trying to understand some sort of physiological basis for the presentation of homosexuality as a sort of "syndrome" with a hormonal/neurological basis, analogous to aspergers, you'd be remiss if you failed to note these traits, as they are not culture-specific and can be shown to have cropped up independently again and again in isolated places throughout time. if you're trying to understand the mechanism which causes certain people to present with certain behavioral tendencies, you want to look at the most extreme and obvious version to start with, and then see if less obvious cases follow the pattern in predictable but less intense ways.

I feel like these kinds of gay men have been historically more visible in the same sense that full-blown autism is more obvious than aspergers, and I've been subconsciously classifying the other gay men I meet into the "two-spirit/born eunuch/priest-y type" and "just a dude who likes dudes for whatever reason" for years. I personally identify strongly as the former, even though I consciously "butch up" most of the time to avoid harassment and violence (I live in the bible belt.)

it's worth noting that studies have shown gay men can identify each other purely through phermones and also are better at detecting subtle differences in color (the gatherers in hunter-gatherer societies needed to be better at telling if fruit was ripe or not than the hunters did. women also tend to be better with color distinction, especially with shades of red.) there is a definite biological component to homosexuality and I don't think things like our linguistic prowess are just to do with modern social conditions. we were disproportionately represented in scribe/clerk classes before homophobia even existed in many societies.

I recognize that sexuality and gender identity are two separate things, and I'm not trying to say that not being femme means you aren't "truly gay" or anything like that, just that there is a (as you said) visible, historically observable sub-group of queers who most likely did not end up remarkably similar to each other across dozens of cultures and centuries without there being some sort of physiological component to these behaviors. (I could go on about Roman documents in which cross dressers run around calling each other "puella" (girl) and talking about how cute pretty young athletes were, or various other ancient primary sources that describe some extremely stereotypical gay behavior in cultures that have had absolutely zero influence on modern western gay culture, but I think you get what I mean.)

honestly I feel like there's a strong case to be made that these social roles were what was selected for and evolved, and that the same-gender attraction was just sort of incidental, and is a more common, sort of vestigial trait than being whatever culture's version of full-on Bakla (Filipino homosexual/transvestite/hairdresser/nanny-uncle person. one word. every Filipina I know was raised by one, and they've been accepted there for centuries without controversy.)

to go back to the hair-cutting thing (I know I'm harping on it) I was reading a book about human genetics that points out that no other primates have to cut their hair. we likely evolved this entirely because it makes signalling our social status and fitness as mates easier. human sociality has had an obvious, observable impact on our evolution, and there are numerous examples of other social animals having specialized non-breeding members, so I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say we do too. honestly it's the only way to make sense of the twin-studies that have been done on gay men.

I personally suck at cutting hair and couldn't give less of a damn about fashion, (being feminine is not the same thing as being vain or materialistic) but I'm still willing to bet that a lot about my brain and resulting personality is the product of this sort of specialization-by-gender. haha, I'm going to wave my nerd-flag high and admit I think about it a lot in terms of DnD: the sub-class of gay I am gets a +2 bonus to socialization and access to Bard-specific moves without having to be that character type.

ymmv. *shrug*