julia guimarães [珠丽雅]

Because we are taught to assume that people who are threatened will naturally run or fight (or imagine that is what we would do if faced with a dire circumstance), it confuses us to hear that somebody might instead freeze, dissociate, or shut down.

The problem with fear, and any type of threat to the self, is that awareness of the body becomes lost and replaced by the need to protect the self or to collapse. Suppression is the loss of our ability to feel ourselves. Suppression includes defenses of denial (I’m not really scared, just a little nervous!), intellectualizing (I don’t want to be a

we are definitely moving towards trying to generate a picture of how each autistic individual experiences the world and away from trying to match them to a preconceived (and possibly male-biased) picture of what they should look like.

‘You can’t be autistic, you’re female’; ‘Girls don’t get autism’; or ‘You’ve got friends and make eye contact, you can’t be autistic’.

think we need to be very careful about dubbing anything as ‘male’ or ‘female’. Not least because we would be short-changing any autistic males or gender variant individuals whose autism presents in more chameleon-like fashion, in exactly the same way that females were short-changed for so long.

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.

After ADOS administration, twenty-five of the community-diagnosed females (50 per cent of the original