I watched today a video (in german) by Tom Harrendorf, a youtuber, who himself is a diagnosed (formally) autistic and he works in the area of autism 15 years and is also a leader of a local support group.
He brings various studies in his videos. Today I watched a video from him, where he put together (according to the study) - reasons, why women so often get diagnosed later in life. It turns out, that it's not masking, at least not to high degree - the reason why it happens.
Girls and women are naturally more social than men. It applies to both, allistic women and men, and autistic women and men. So if the diagnostic setting involves one diagnostician and one autistic woman, the diagnostician alone may not be able to catch the difficulties, the woman has. So then she might be false diagnosed as not autistic, because she is able to have a conversation with the diagnotician. So as Tom Harrendorf says, in order to be able to pick up on an autistic high functioning female, her social difficulties, tgere should be more, than one person in the setting and then it would be visible, how much that autistic woman struggles to stay on track.
He also mentioned the bias, although the symptoms between males and females are similar, there are still more men diagnosed. Not sure if autism truly affects men more often than women, or girls and women just go undetected for years. Or entire lifes. An autistic girl is more likely to be labeled shy, lazy etc. I was labeled shy, obsessive and stubborn. Tge author also says, that "masking" in autism is actually very doubtful and hard to perform. Why? It's because of the nature of autism- difficulties reading social, non verbal cues, facial expressions, difficulties understanding anything ambiguous etc. So I relate to it - I'm mostly unaware or very little aware of my body, my stimming, that's why I can't just stop it, so it happens, that someone changes their seat when they see my weird movements with my hands. Also when it comes to my behaviour and interests, I may try to modify it only when someone tells me directly, what I should change and that they find it weird or wrong (whatever about me). Otherwise I just don't know it. I always wanted to be like others, but had no idea how to do it. I still can't practically do it, but this man's videos help me understand how autistic minds differ from allistic minds. I don't have a formal diagnosis, I can only say I relate a lot to the autistic experience.
Here is the link to the video:
https://youtu.be/mkJ0vl0YjT4?si=R7nmCUeZmIp2Lz1P
I'm curious of any thoughts and experiences in this topic.
At tge end of the video Tom asks if ladies on tge spectrum or with suspected autism fear or feared being not taken seriously and not recognised because of masking. He also mentioned, that women are more likely to get other diagnoses. Also my case- depression and tourette in the past. Tourette turned out to be false.
