Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls

If sounds and smells and lights are more attention-grabbing, it is difficult to focus on the more subtle social niceties. This would fit in with the traditional picture of autism, where sensory information is much more likely to grab the autistic person’s attention (or sensory overload much more likely to elicit social avoidance behaviour).

there have often been references to gendered differences in socialization, speculating that a greater emphasis on social niceties – on compliance and conformity – produced the ‘quieter’ form of autism allegedly more characteristic of autistic females. So much quieter, indeed, that it often fails to register as autism at all.

Being more socially sensitive and socially aware in a world in which you are different or not welcome might not always be beneficial. It might just sharpen any social rejection that you face.

In their 2015 paper decrying the lack of recognition of Sukhareva in the history of autism, Swedish psychiatric researchers Irina Manouilenko and Susanne Bejerot pointed out the astonishing similarities between Sukhareva’s descriptions of her child patients and DSM-5’s criteria for the diagnosis of ASD.

First of all, there is the motivation, the need to fit in. What do you have to do to make the right impression and not stand out as different?

Wenn Lawson, a psychologist who is both autistic and transgender, has long focussed on issues for autistic females. He has noted that terms such as ‘camouflaging’ and ‘masking’ carry rather negative connotations of deceitfulness, or the need to hide something because it is somehow shameful. Instead he has suggested a rather unwieldy term, ‘adaptive

anomalies associated with autism.22 For example, some autistic people show less susceptibility to visual illusions, high levels of performance on visual search tasks, and a stunning memory for visual detail.

The arrival of each stimulus activated a rather exaggerated ‘what’s that?’ response that in turn continuously activated the brain’s error logging systems. A highly efficient switch-on response unfortunately matched with an inefficient switch-off one. The study showed that the brain of an autistic individual could pay highly focussed attention to ju

Or could it be that girls are exposed to specific socialization processes that train them to be compliant and conforming, to not ‘act out’ or rock the boat, to fly beneath the radar? Of course, it could also be an entanglement of the two – another version of the ‘biological script playing out on a social stage’.