zlacker

This is anecdotal but I strongly disagree with "likely a deeper connection." I really do think girls are just severely under diagnosed. I have several adult women and AFAB friends who all display autistic traits and, to me (an autistic man), are very obviously autistic but it's been so hard for them to get a diagnosis even when they want to. The system is really set up to diagnose young boys with rich families only. Getting diagnosed as an adult is expensive and arduous and most people in the field appear to be biased against diagnosing women. Granted, autistic traits are presented slightly differently in women due to cultural norms but I do believe they're easy to spot with practice.

>>63+(OP)
Wouldn’t being autistic yourself make it harder, not easier, for you to notice autism in others?

>>WendyT+r1
Can you explain your reasoning for this? I've found that neurotypical people are pretty bad at identifying autistic people who are masking (that is after all the point of masking) whereas it's relatively easy for me to recognize it because I'm so familiar with my own mask. I'd also like to believe that I have more knowledge about autism in general than your average allistic person. They might be able to recognize that something is "off" about a person but I don't think they could reliably point out when it is or isn't autism and I think they'd have a pretty hard time justifying it if they do guess correctly. Maybe the close family members of autistic people could do well at it though.

>>63+rc1
Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder often associated with an inability to speak, serious intellectual disability, and similar issues. The less extreme cases have dramatically more contact with the wider population introducing an odd form of social survival bias.

At the same time the term has been more widely applied over time to include people with minimal intellectual or linguistic impairment, but that doesn’t mean people with such profound issues no longer exist.

Thus, if you’re talking about the full autistic population overall they are going to on average be worse at basically any task.

>>63+rc1
My understanding of autism was that those who have it are often less able to accurately evaluate others’ emotional states, which I extrapolated to identifying autistic behaviors. I don’t doubt you have a ton of knowledge on the topic, I asked in order to better understand from you if this idea is accurate, but didn’t want to put in a whole explanation if you weren’t interested in engaging.

>>WendyT+Dk1
Yeah I can see how that makes sense. All I can say is the old cliche "autism is a spectrum" line. Some of us are better at evaluating emotional states than others and it definitely requires some degree of self awareness that not everyone has. I'm not totally sure that emotional state carries over to behaviors anyway. Also if we're sticking to the popular perception of autism, autistic people are also supposed to be good at pattern recognition and I think that applies here. In sum, I think because of specialized knowledge and personal experience, the average autistic person would be better at spotting other autistic people than the average allistic person, but certainly there's a lot of wiggle room there.