Autism in Girls

I’ve been reading a fascinating book OFF THE SPECTRUM about why girls have been missing from most definitions and studies of autism and asking the central question of if girls actually show autism differently than boys or not. It starts a bit slowly, with a history of autism research that I thought I’d already heard before, until we got to the part where Hans Asperger (yes, where Aspie and Asperger’s syndrome come from), the Nazi psychologist, studied eleven autistic kids (8 boys, 3 girls) and focused on the boys who were “little professors” and saved them from the Nazi camps. The girls? Went to the gas chambers. I did NOT know that part.

There are interesting studies about girls with autism showing a lot more masking traits and also being damaged more by the effort to mask or camouflage. This was absolutely my experience, although I also think that I showed plenty of signs of autism in childhood, from having no friends (I liked adults way more than kids—I thought this was because adults were more interesting, but it was probably just because they didn’t bully me, to they were safer) to my total clumsiness physically and being so far behind other kids developmentally to obsessing about working math problems and wanting to read series of books all the way to the finish. Classic autism problems, but no one recognized them at the time, partly because I was functional “enough” to make it through and party because a LOT of my family members also showed autistic traits, some worse than me.

There are also some interesting studies showing that girls tend to show fewer autistic traits in childhood and then suddenly a lot more in adolescence. Maybe my own experience isn’t universal, but I don’t think I suddenly had more autistic signs in adolescence. I just think that other kids were doing a lot more social stuff than I was capable of doing. I do think I’ve learned some social skills since then and I TRIED my damndest to figure out stuff at the time, but it was pretty rudimentary and I also was blind to so much. You can’t see what you can’t see.

I did a good deal of mimicry and I tried to focus my obsessions on some socially appropriate things like TV shows other kids watched. Music to a degree, though I honestly preferred country to rock. I wore clothes that other kids wore down to the size, when I could, but also wore sailor tops and striped shirts for no explicable reason. I got used to accepting that clothing was never going to be, you know, comfortable if it was also cute. I had a small circle of friends at this time and it made so much of a difference in bullying. In high school, I had almost zero of that experience. I really think children can be so cruel. People who said they wanted to go back to being children—the social aspect of childhood makes this sound ridiculous to me.

The final part I found really interesting was to think about autistic brains as being overactive and doing less “pruning” in early stages of development, which seems to be why autistic people in general get more sensory input from their brains, and in less useful ways. Girls in particular report far more sensory symptoms of autism than boys do. My own experience here is that as I’ve aged, some of the extra noise of my brain has died down a bit. Noise and perfumes bother me a little less than they used to and that may be one reason that I’m able to focus more on faces and body language in a way I couldn’t before.

But it’s also true that I simply refuse to do a bunch of things I spent decades making myself do, like wearing shoes and clothes that were uncomfortable and makeup and hair stuff that I’ve just given up on. How much of that is being a woman over 50 and not giving a fuck anymore about how society values me and how much of it is autism is unclear still.