Tag Archives: research

Aspie Traits

Gender and Autism: A Preliminary Survey Post

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I’ve been planning to write about gender and autism for a while now. Months ago, I wrote a personal reflection piece. It got two emphatic thumbs down in beta, so I let it languish in my drafts folder. Then, after some feedback from commenters here, I decided I would write a more informative companion post as context for the personal reflections, but that never happened. Then I cannibalized the personal reflections piece for something I was invited to submit to an anthology, which took me weeks to write because apparently everything takes me weeks to write lately.

Which left me still wanting to write about gender and autism here. As a first attempt, I’ve  surveyed some of the ideas that people have put forth about gender and autism over the years, starting with Asperger himself.

Note: I’ve linked to a bunch of articles in this post, many of which I don’t agree with. However,I want to share the background information that I used so you can make your own decisions. Also, most references here are to binary gender and gender norms because that is the way most of the research is framed.

The Original Gender Link

In his paper describing his case studies, Hans Asperger hypothesized that autism must be a sex-limited or sex-linked condition because he had only observed it in boys. However, he also noted that some mothers of boys at his clinic who had autistic traits, which he found puzzling given the lack of girls who fit his model. His explanation for why there might be autistic women but not autistic girls was to suggest that autistic traits develop in females only after puberty.

He went on to state that he’d studied over 200 additional autistic children and had concluded from his observations that the autistic personality is an extreme variant of male intelligence. It’s important to note here that Asperger’s model was developed based on case studies of 4 boys who had been referred to him for behavior problems in school. All of them were considered to be uneducable in the traditional school system, creating a very specific profile on which Asperger based his observations.

It’s interesting to contrast Asperger’s idea of male versus female intelligence with Simon Baron-Cohen’s male and female brain models. Asperger believed that females were better learners with a tendency toward concrete practical thinking and tidy methodical work. He thought that males, on the other hand, were naturally gifted with logical ability, abstraction, precise thinking and formulating, and were predisposed to excel at independent scientific investigation.  Continue reading Gender and Autism: A Preliminary Survey Post →

Monday Morning Musings

Monday Morning Musings (6/10)

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E-book Released

I Think I Might Be Autistic: A Guide to Autism Spectrum Disorder Diagnosis and Self-Discovery for Adults went live yesterday at Amazon.com. If you have a Prime membership and a Kindle, you can borrow it for free.

Thank you to everyone who helped me refine the cover art last week and cheered me on. That last mile was more difficult than I anticipated.  Now I need to do some promotion so I can get my giveaway idea off the ground. Strangely, I’m really good at promoting other people’s stuff and am probably going to be terrible at promoting my own.

Another Adult ASD Research Study

This week, I received information on two more research studies. If you live to fill out questionnaires, are over 18 and have an ASD diagnosis, read on. Both studies are by being conducted by Kathrine Birt as part of her Doctoral research at Deakin University in Australia. The goal of the studies is to better understand the impact of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnoses on intimate couple relationship development (in adulthood).

The first is a questionnaire that takes about 20 minutes to complete. To participate, you need to be over 18 and have an ASD diagnosis. You don’t need to currently be in a relationship to be eligible, but if you are in a relationship, you’ll be presented with additional and more detailed questions. (I’ve completed both questionnaires, because I like to be sure I know what I’m sharing information about.) More info about the first study is here.

Study number 2 is for adults with ASD and their intimate partners. Both partners must be over 18 and one must have an ASD diagnosis. The questionnaire for the individual with ASD takes about 30 minutes to complete. After completion, a link is provided for a second (10-15 minute) questionnaire to be completed by that person’s partner. More information about study #2 is here.

Note that for both studies, clicking the “continue to study” button on the first page takes you to a second page with more details about things like the type of information collected, how the information will be used and privacy protections.

Not Quite a Hippity Hop

This is my new exercise ball:

ball

I’ve been using the exercise ball at the gym after my twice-a-week workouts and decided I needed one at home. It’s a fun sensory toy and a good way to stretch and release the tension that I seem to perpetually carry in my upper back and shoulders. Once, a yoga instructor who told me that I carry my negative emotions between my shoulder blades. My slightly less interesting explanation is that I unconsciously put myself in awkward postures that create tension in my body, maybe as a kind of stim. The exercise ball is a good way to consciously check in with my muscles and release the tension so it doesn’t build up into nagging injuries.

Sadly, it doesn’t have a handle so I can’t hop around the living room on it.

Some Girl Stuff

Last week Asparagus Girl wrote a blog post about perimenopause and Asperger’s. Not much has been written about menopause by women on the spectrum so I was excited to see her tackling the subject. The post mainly focuses on mood swings, which should be called mood slingshots or mood boomerangs or something more violent and dangerous and in line with reality.Think PMS on steroids.

I’ve noticed an uptick in meltdowns over the last few years as my hormones become more wacky. I’m definitely more irritable, too, and sometimes I find myself in a strange, unpleasant moods for no obvious reason. There’s other stuff–some that’s TMI even for me–and taken together all of these changes have me wondering if women on the spectrum experience perimenopause differently from typical women. Not necessarily if we have worse symptoms, but if our funky brain wiring creates unexpected side effects of the hormone fluctuations that precede menopause.

Predictably, this isn’t any substantial research on autism and menopause. Like a lot of aspects of being an autistic adult, I’m finding the best source of information is other women who are going through or have done through the process already.

Monday Morning Musings

Monday Morning Musings (5-20)

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This might be a new regular or occasional feature. How’s that for a commitment? There are a lot of little things that come up during the week that I’d like to share but they’re too small to make a proper post about. Instead, I’m going to roll them all up into one hot mess of a post on Mondays.

News from the Melatonin Front

I accidentally bought 3 mg melatonin tablets rather than my usual 5 mg tablets. Cue three nights of bizarre dreams before I realized my mistake (followed by a frantic midweek trip to Target). Yikes. Now I see why some people can’t take melatonin. I didn’t have nightmares but I did have some freaky dreams and woke up feeling like the night had been about a week long.

Hey Target, think you could possibly make these bottles look anymore alike?
Hey Target, think you could possibly make these bottles look any more alike?

Research on Using the Internet as a Communication Medium

Amy Woodham, a masters student in psychology in the UK is doing a study on how women with Aspergers and High Functioning (ack!) Autism use the internet for communication. It’s a short, mostly multiple choice survey that took me about 15 minutes to complete. To participate, you need to be a female over the age of 18 with an official diagnosis of AS or HFA (I know that rules a bunch of you out, sorry). If you’re interested, you can find details here.

**Updated to add that you’re welcome to participate in the study if you are self-diagnosed/suspected AS/HFA. See the comments for the source of this additional information.

A-dar is an Actual Thing

I live next to an elementary school now. It has a giant playground with a forest of colorful plastic playground equipment, as playgrounds do these days. Last Tuesday when I took the dog out for our midday constitutional, I saw just one girl on the playground. She was walking around the paved play area, making loud vocalizations while looking at the numbers and shapes painted on the ground (for playing hopscotch and such). There were four adults nearby, chatting and paying no mind to girl’s unusual behavior.

“Wow,” I thought, “best recess ever.”

As I rounded the corner of the playground and headed out into the nearby field, I noticed another girl, hunched over at the end of a slide, scraping up and sifting through the bark mulch. Then a boy, kneeling under another slide, doing something in the dirt I couldn’t make out. Oh, and a second boy, sitting in the middle of yet another slide, flapping his hands, which were hidden in his shirt sleeves.

This seriously looked like the best recess ever to me.  As I walked by the fence, feeling happy for these kids who were getting to whatever they damn well pleased on the playground, the flappy boy slid down the slide and ran over to the chain link fence to watch me. I waved. He licked the fence.

My tribe. 🙂

Cool New Comic Series on Tumblr

If you haven’t seen Par-la-fenetre’s web comics about being autistic, check them out. They make me smile and sometimes they’re like a punch in the gut. In a good way, of course. I especially like the one about breaking routines and the one that started it all.

Got Something to Share?

This would be even more fun if you all had things to share too. What’s going on with your week? Find anything new or exciting or interesting you want to tell everyone about? Could be ASD-related or not. I have no idea how this might work, except that we should do what makes us happy.