Comments on: Men, women and autism

By: Simon Baron Cohen, autism and empathy | Indigo Jo Blogs

Simon Baron Cohen, autism and empathy | Indigo Jo Blogs — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:48:40 +0000

[…] eluded this writer (there was an article to this effect in the Guardian in 2008, which I answered here), but the suggestion that girls with Asperger’s (let alone more severe forms of autism) do […]

By: lea

lea — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:55:40 +0000

Autism is let’s just say a bit hard for the family. But it’s the choice of a parent if they wanted it to be a burden or they wanted it to be a challenge.

By: Layla

Layla — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:44:03 +0000

I’m a young women and have Asperger’s Syndrome. I was diginos when I was 13 years old and re-diginosed when I was 20 years old. Which the diginoes, my behavor made sence to me. When I tell people I’ve got AS, they are so surprised. I was put on mediction for a while to controle my behavor in my early 20’s but I hated it as all I wanted to do was sleep or vegitat in frount of the TV. Now with moving house and being off the medication, I’m a lot happier.

By: Thersites

Thersites — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 03:53:26 +0000

Autism is a set of behavioural traits and can be caused by many things. To include intelligent loners and severely brain-damaged people as comparable in kind is misleading. Until recently, the term autistic was nearly always appplied to the latter rather than the former. As for Asperger’s Syndrome, is there any way of diagnosing it except behavioural observation? Is the medicalisation of a way of behaving a wise way to handle it?

By: George Carty

George Carty — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:23:45 +0000

I wonder if Aspies are especially hard-hit in the employment stakes by the fact that the less a job requires social skills, the easier it is to export to a cheap-labour country?

By: Yunus Yakoub Islam

Yunus Yakoub Islam — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 08:29:36 +0000

The picture of the Asperger male supported by an understand wife etc is probably true of ‘Aspies’ who fall outside the diagnostic criteria of Asperger Syndrome (AS), but are nonetheless on the autistic spectrum - the so-called “Loners” (c.f Sula Wolff, 1995). That’s where I located myself, but ‘Loners’ make up almost 1% of the population, whereas AS is considerably less common. The level of disability associated with full Asperger Syndrome is evidenced in National Autistic Society statistics for unemployment rate for people with Asperger Syndrome, which is around 90%! (Yes, NINETY).

By: Selina Postgate

Selina Postgate — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:34:07 +0000

I was officially diagnosed last summer by a clinical psychologist who specialises in autism. I’d known about Asperger syndrome for years, but hadn’t considered it might affect me until a tutor at a dance course suggested back in 2002 that I might be “high-functioning autistic”.

By: M Risbrook

M Risbrook — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:18:22 +0000

How do you know you have Asperger Syndrome? Have you been officially diagnosed? When did you first find out about Asperger syndrome?

By: Selina Postgate

Selina Postgate — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:34:20 +0000

Matthew, I didn’t only say that my words had been cherry-picked, I also said that I agreed with you, and that in talking about how my life might have been as a man I was talking about what might have have become of me if I had been a boy brought up identical middle-class circumstances.

The particular invisibility of autistic women surely is a feminist issue, but in my opinion autism at large is more of a class issue. Some, and I repeat some, autistic men have “successful” careers, and so do a much smaller number of autistic women - but very few of them are working class. At the risk of generalising further, working class autistic women get wrongly diagnosed with mental health problems, and working class autistic men end up on the streets or in prison.