Published on 12, July, 2020
Since my diagnosis, one woman at work has gone out of her way to seemingly belittle my condition.
She constantly says that I am 'getting away with things' and that as a woman she suffers far more and has far more problems than me. She says that period pains and the menopause would make my autism seem very trivial.
Not being a woman, I do not know how these things are. My attitude in the past has always been that trying to have a battle between conditions as to which is worse is pointless. But perhaps some of the female autistics here could tell me whether their autism has a greater effect on them than their 'womens problems' or vice versa. I certainly do not want to belittle the things that women have to put up with and never would.
I think my work colleague is somehow 'jealous' of the fact I have a support worker and have had my work changed in order to accommodate my autistic tendencies. Could this be the case?
It's not as simple as autism vs women's problems unfortunately because we can only tell you about asd women not NT women and research has shown that it's different. So an Asperger woman's puberty, menstruation, menopause is affected by the ND. Just as Aspergers isn't just a physical thing neither is a woman's cycle of life so I would find it quite difficult to separate or compare one to the other. They are an integral part of us in both cases and individual to each person.