Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article is one in a lot of very long overdue research on autistic women. The scientific term is "sex differences" which might weird out a more general audience. In biology, "sex" can refer to the physical organs and characteristics. In psychology and sociology, this differs from "gender" which is the person's experience of their masculinity, femininity, both-ness, or neither-ness.
In this research, the focus is just specifically on the physical, which makes me wonder if they've accidentally thrown monkey wrenches into their work. The transgender and autistic communities overlap quite a bit (hi, that includes me!). Since transgender people also tend to have different brain scan readouts than cisgender folks, I'd kind of assume this would complicate any potential findings...
At any rate, potential flaws in the researchers' methods aside, they did find differences between male and female autistic brains. This is maybe not surprising if you've met a decent number of male and female autistics. The latter tend to learn more camouflaging behaviors and to be quieter due to societal expectations, while the former aren't expected to manage such nuances and can thusly be far more visible.
If I'm reading this summary I linked, and the main research paper correctly, the data shows autistic brains are more similar to each other, regardless of maleness or femaleness, than they are to neurotypical brains. There were differences based in maleness or femaleness, such as how well the visual parts of the brain communicated (wonder what that corresponds to in actual life? Poorer imagination skills?).
Mostly, I'm just glad to see research prioritizing figuring out what differences there are between male and female autistics. In the very recent past, the focus has pretty much exclusively been on male autistics, to the point that the autism criteria was written around them. Thusly, to "qualify" as autistic medically, you were judged on "how male you are" to quote a fellow autistic from the show Love on the Spectrum.
This isn't the first research to examine female autistics, but it might be important in establishing a more generally applicable autism diagnosis. And it's definitely relevant to recognize that distinctive challenges and differences exist between the sexes.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
This is so interesting. Thanks!
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