Female Autism

Actually amazing resource on female autism… It’s considerably underdiagnosed in AFAB people (note: the data lacks a distinction between sex and gender), so this is a really interesting and educational read.

https://taniaannmarshall.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/moving-towards-a-female-profile-the-unique-characteristics-abilities-and-talents-of-asperwomen-adult-women-with-asperger-syndrome/

The stigma around autism is, like most stigma’s, incredibly pointless. Life is a spectrum and we all have traits, and autism is just a name for having this particular group of traits, to some degree, and that is okay, because we are not all the same, and it definitely doesn’t mean there is, or has to be, a hierarchy involved. In fact, the talents of autism are often hidden or shamed, because of needless stigma.

One of my major pet peeves is people who make distinctions between “high” and “low” functioning autism, which is particularly influenced and elegantly explained in this post, by actually autistic and “low” functioning adult autistic woman with an amazing educational blog.

Another very important factor to remember is that, even in the images in the blog post about symptoms, it’s illustrated with only white women, and that is reflective of the general norm. Alongside the higher male-coding of autism, it is also massively under-diagnosed and recognised in black and latinx people, often mistaken for Borderline Personality Disorder or psychosis. (More on that in its own post later.)

More information (US-based) of diagnosis trends can be found here, in the CDC website (though autism is not a disease of any form, only a neurotype, so this is a misleading site name.)