Yes, I seem to have inherited most of my traits from my father's side. He wasn't as overtly autistic as me, but had traits and his father was probably diagnosable, he was an engineer and inventor.
Yes, I would probably be seen as having less overt traits and that'll be why I wasn't diagnosed until my 50s. But I'm mortified to see the same issues repeating in the next generation as the one before me. I only have sisters and they're "less overt" too, so we were thrown off the scent of there being a genetic factor. The generation before and after are mainly male.
The talk was showing that the way genetics works is the same in males and females, but that diagnosed females have more autistic-related genetic traits on average. Though it wasn't spelled out, this seems to me to be just a reflection on the lower rate of diagnosis of females with less overt traits.
Hmm... Interesting. And for me deeply troubling. Several members of my family have excelled academically, only to break down later on and then find that they're unable to resume life in the same way. The individuals to whom this happened are/were all male.
Some of the most interesting things raised in the talk are a correlation between common genetic variants linked to autism and high academic achievement, and that the parents of autistic people often have genetic variants linked to autism, though they are probably sub-clinical in displaying autistic phenotypical traits. Additionally, that the phenotypic spectrum of autistic traits reflects an underlying genetic spectrum of variation.
