Transcript: Autism and gender
There’s no recording of this talk to share, so this transcript is my script. What I said on the day may be a little different.
Introductions
We started with introductions, sharing our pronouns and a visual description of ourselves. That part isn’t in my script.
What autism is
There’s a lot of misinformation out there about autism, so I just wanted to start with a brief overview of what autism is, before we dive into the discussion about autism and gender.
In the UK, around 1 in 100 children and adults are thought to be autistic. That’s about 700,000 people.
Being autistic isn’t an illness or a disease. It isn’t a medical condition that can be treated or “cured”.
It means your brain works differently from other people’s. You’re born autistic, and you’re autistic for your whole life.
Autism is a spectrum, similar to a colour wheel, not a linear line. This means that everybody with autism is different.
Some autistic people need little or no support. Others may need help from a parent or carer every day.
Autistic people may:
- find it hard to communicate and interact with other people
- find it hard to understand how other people think or feel
- find things like bright lights or loud noises overwhelming, stressful or uncomfortable
- feel anxious or upset in unfamiliar situations, or at social events
- take longer to understand information
- do or think the same things over and over
Nobody knows what causes autism, or whether it has a single cause.
It can run in families, so it may sometimes be passed on from parents to children, but this hasn’t been proven.
Autism and gender
Okay, so let’s move on to autism and gender. This is a particularly important topic, as autism is diagnosed more often in men and boys. Men and boys are 3 times more likely to be diagnosed as autistic than women and girls.
There are lots of reasons for this, which can make it harder to tell you’re autistic if you’re a woman or a girl.
Autistic women and girls may be more likely to:
- have learned to hide signs of autism to “fit in”, by copying people who aren’t autistic
- be quieter, and hide their feelings
- seem to cope better in social situations
- show fewer repetitive behaviours
This doesn’t mean women and girls are less likely to be autistic, just that autism can show up differently. Diagnostic tests have always focused more on how autism shows up in men and boys.
Discussion
We then talked about our own experiences. That part isn’t in my script, and isn’t shared here.