Gender Differences In Autism Perceptions with Paige Layle

It's important we continue seeing Autistic people beyond the narrow image of 'young white males,' which the original criteria were designed around. 🙄 How wonderful it is that we are actively breaking these stereotypes simply by showing up as our unapologetically Autistic selves ✨😌

In case you haven't checked it out yet, you can listen to my full podcast feature with Financial Feminist (episode 178), wherever you listen to podcasts 🎧🩷

#AutismInGirls #AutisticWomen #ADHDinGirls #AuDHD #ActuallyAutistic #PaigeLayle #GenderBias

[meimaraa]

I wish people payed attention to girl’s symptoms and were like: “okay, she shows symptoms of autism. Lets take her somewhere where that can get confirmed.” Rather then brushing them off as “weird”.

[LailaSkye]

My psychiatrist who I saw from age 3 to 12 said when he first met me during my evaluation he thought I just had learning delays in speech delays but a female colleague of his said to keep looking because I portrayed classic girls autism. 11 years later and I wonder what my life would have been like if she never told him to take a closer look. I am very lucky that I got diagnosed with autism at 3 though I was diagnosed with adhd until I was 10

[beckee]

I think it’s because of medical gender biases mainly. When a boy shows signs of autism, he’s studied and treated. When a girl shows the same signs of autism, she’s blamed and told to “stop acting like that.” Our external symptoms are almost always seen as personality defects or misbehaviour. It’s also the way girls and boys are socialized differently

“Act like a lady, ” “sit still, girls don’t act that way, ” “stop fidgeting.” But with boys it’s just “he’s just being a boy.”

[inspectre]

As former little white boy, i can say that the problem exists there, too. Not nearly as much as for girls and minorities, of course, but it's there. In fact I'm a 51 year old white man and I'm still not diagnosed. "High-functioning, " "Low Support Needs, " "Invisible Illness, " Whatever, Captain Excuses. But the signs WERE all there, it's just easier to ignore a problem child than it is to figure out the problem.

[Hemi_Ca]

Finally! 😊
A period in time where women can speak openly about symptomology, draw attention to the utter lack of value & worth women have been regarded with in medicine/DSM's ect.
I'm grateful and so excited to be a late dx Audhd person who is turning 50 tmrrw, because I get to witness & be part of this.
30yrs ago as a DSW, my educ around autism was vastly skewed - girls weren't even a consideration, being mislabeled as so many other things.
Thank you both for speaking openly about this. I admire your courage and voices & action! 🎉❤

[AutumnisBroken]

Yeah, I am trans or whatever and even though I am amab, I did not show the typical traits as boys so they didn't diagnose me when I was a kid. Diagnosed as an adult woman tho since I heard other women's stories

[mcuggetmeal]

i also think its just based in misogyny how we overlook girls struggles

[goatkiller]

I was diagnosed with autism at 40. But I present as male, so I’m not the point of this comment; I just say that for context. My wife had pretty extreme bouts of depression her whole life. After none of the SSRIs helped her, they tried Wellbutrin. And the sudden mental clarity she felt shocked her. Nobody knows exactly why Wellbutrin does what it does, and while it’s a pretty good antidepressant (not great, but solidly in the bell curve) it also helps with ADHD.

And only then did ADHD experts start telling her that often, girls with ADHD are shamed and/or punished into masking their symptoms. And that while pretending to be neurotypical, she also felt like a failure for not being able to just understand stuff like her peers did. In effect, she didn’t have “your brain chemistry is slightly off, so you feel this way even if you have no actual reason to be unhappy”, she was just understandably unhappy that she couldn’t do all the things. Once she could focus her thoughts (especially when they moved her to more ADHD-specific medications) she stopped being unhappy, because the cause of her unhappiness went away.

Misdiagnosis sucks. I went through all the antidepressants, mostly never helped. Took some Xanax to help with sleep after a surgery, and not only did I sleep, but I could act. Make decisions and execute them. It turns out I never had crippling depression, I had crippling anxiety. Hard to tell the difference, when the symptoms are “you want to do stuff, you know what that stuff is, and then you don’t do it”. But the depression meds didn’t work, while the anxiety meds did. Kind of.

[mollykinsh]

We like to make words for everything and categorize and make systems to make sense of things... I don't know if someone is ever going to diagnose me with anything but I do feel that my brain doesn't belong to the normal pool of people.... lol we are all different in different ways and it is fun to see that across the globe. It can be upsetting and very distructive that we don't all see each other for what we truly are, but that's part of the game I think! How fun

[SeeingBackward]

I think maybe another factor is, as I've seen others note, part of the rise in diagnosis of autism might be attributable to the phasing out of "formal" teaching of culture that used to take place.

For instance, community dances played a large part in this, from the reels of the middle ages to the square-dances the 20th century.

Vestiges of these systems have continued in the socialization of young girls in our culture much longer than they did for young boys, which could factor in to why autism was even being noticed in boys first, and then all the research being done against that backdrop.

[BonesMcoy]

It’s important to note that a lot of autistic people aren’t diagnosed or can’t get an adult diagnosis. This applies to both men and women, my sister has a diagnosis, I do not. Despite clearly being stuck in my head all of the time it got ignored, my sister had language issues so they noticed that. Homeschooling is probably why I didn’t get noticed.

[chrismaxwell]

As kid this is what i noticed. As boy is daydreamed in class that was noticeable. Something wrong with that boy. Girl did in class, she is being creative and using her imagination. That actually happened to me. I got in trouble for day dreaming and but girls can do it with no consequences.

[esotere]

I unwittingly bottled it all up, tried to mask, and burnt out later to the point of getting diagnosed with depression and social anxiety 🙃

[Dayglodaydreams]

Sticking out like a sore thumb doesn’t always feel like an advantage.

[BipolarCourage]

Autism these days doesn't seem to have any communication difficulties