Published on 12, July, 2020
In order to hook up autistic people with non-autistic people a service has to either
In case 1 the question is
In case 2 the question is
Re 1: With waiting list delays for autism assessments often stretching into years rather than months, wouldn't requiring a diagnosis unfairly discriminate against those who are actively seeking their diagnoses, whilst "only" being self-diagnosed in the meantime?
1. It's an issue if the service is designed to give autistic people an advantage. which is what we are talking about here, giving autistic people an advantage to componsate for the disadvanteges they face. People would have an incentive to pretend to be autistic for that advantage.
3. I think there is a not of evidence that they do in such rare cases when those matches occure. But there simply aren't enough auistic women to go around. It's even worse when you consider that a disproportionat number of them are gay / asexual.
I apreciate that. But that reserch still shows 75% (3 in 4) autistic males are straight and only 8% are homosexual. Homosexual dating runs through very difrent chanels and has difrent culture to hetrosexual dating. In short I'm not aware of any evidence that gay autistic people strugel relative to their NT counterparts. If you have some I'd be keen to see it. I think that answers question 2?
Related info re one of my questions:
Autistic individuals are more likely to be LGBTQ+ - University of Cambridge
"the study found that autistic adults and adolescents are approximately eight times more likely to identify as asexual and ‘other’ sexuality than their non-autistic peers. And there were sex differences in sexual orientation: autistic males are 3.5 times more likely to identify as bisexual than non-autistic males, whereas autistic females are three times more likely to identify as homosexual than non-autistic females."
Peter said:Autistic men (diagnosed) outnumber autistic women by orders of magnitude
1. Why do the women - or the men, for that matter - need to be diagnosed? Isn't self-diagnosis sufficiently valid?
2. Your posts give the impression (to me, at least) that you are only discussing how to facilitate straight / heterosexual pairings. Is that intentional? If so, is it appropriate?
Peter said:It is not practical to attempt to address relationship difficulties in autism by assisting (diagnosed) autistic people in forming connections with each other only.
3. Conversely, couldn't it be argued that two autistic people would make better matches? (eg higher likelihood of mutual loyalty, etc).
Not arguing - just asking. :)
We can help structure these questions by categorising dating services by type:
1. dating apps / web services (also to some degree covers telephone clubs and lonely-hearts columns).
It's difficult to see what inducement could encourage volunteers to use these services as the main utility of a dating service is finding other users. However, as a service open to neurotypicals and autistic people it’s very easy to confer an advantage on autistic people simply by putting them at the top of search results. The attraction to neurotypical people in this case would presumably be that the service offers features that are often pay walled on other sites / apps.
2. Match making services that arrange dates.
It's easy to see why neurotypicals might be interested in volunteering for this service if dates are 'all expenses paid' and at reasonably nice venues. However, this renders to program open to abuse. Potential ways to address this would be to exclude volunteers who do not swap contact details with someone after 3 dates or who autistic users complain about ghosting them. This service is expensive to provide.
On the other side opening the service to autistic and neurotypicals there is no longer a need pay for dates to attract users. You can even charge a small fee. Again, advantage can be conferred to autistic users by giving them priority for matches.
3a. Services that run in person dating events involving pairing.
Since demand from autistic men can be expected to out match autistic women the simplest approach is simply to have a dating event where men entering the event must all be autistic but women may be either autistic or neurotypical. Most likely you would have a list of autistic men and women and fill up the deficit with neurotypical volunteer woman. It's difficult to see what advantage NT women would derive from this. Hypothetically beverages could be offered at a free or reduced rate. However again you would need a system to discourage abuse. Perhaps by excluding NT women who never exchange contact details.
3b. services running in person dating events without pairing.
Effectively what you are talking about is running a party or outing for a particular activity. It might be a club night or laser tag or any number of things. But the basic principle is as before you make up low numbers of autistic women with NT women. The attraction here is exclusivity. NT women still need to pay fees but fees or not coming to this event full of autistic people is the only way to join in the activity in this particular time or place.
pros and cons:
An interesting idea.