Autism in girls - I was wrong

many of you may have seen this video making the rounds at some point stalking you in your recommendations perhaps and i know that many of you found my channel because of this video so of course i'm eternally grateful for it and the algorithm gods for promoting it so much but i have to admit coming up to two years after it was first published i think i was wrong this video is sponsored by teemo the visual planning app developed specially for autistic and adhd brains teemo helps you manage your day set routines keep track of the time spent on tasks and remember things freeing up space in your day to concentrate on the bigger stuff with a unique focus on visual processing teemo is completely customizable and can be shared with up to five family members on one account if you want to learn more please check out the link in the description box below now i don't want to set a dangerous precedent i wasn't wrong about everything in this video but i think it is important for us to revisit earlier work with a critical eye especially if you've moved on in your opinions beliefs or awareness since then this video is a very low-key collab with purple ella who i was talking to about this topic and the video that i was going to make and she was like let's do let's do something together we'll do the same topic and release it at the same time so if you want to check out her thoughts on this topic uh the link is in the description box below but back to the video that i made in uh july 2019 i had less than a thousand subscribers you know like my idea of high video production was dodgy green screening not much has changed to be honest and it was about six or seven months after i received my official autism diagnosis so as a woman use your imagination if you're not you get your diagnosis and you learn about the under diagnosis of autistic women and maybe you read the checklist that's written by samantha kraft which is a list of a lot of less commonly known autistic traits that are presumed to be more a female presentation of autism so the conclusion you i ended up coming to was that i have a more female presentation of autism and this is something that's missed a lot and it's basically like another subtype of autism the problem is as my channel grew and i started getting to know some of the viewers other members in the community and as i started educating myself more on gender and gender identity this idea of female autism stopped holding up so well i talked to men who were diagnosed in their 30s or 40s even who said to me things like oh well i have the female type of autism i talked to autistic women who said that they related more to the male type and i talked to autistic non-binary people who were like well what about us and in the original video i had a disclaimer but i kind of skirted over the whole issue of trans and non-binary autistics like i don't know anything about this so i'm going to mention it once and then completely ignore it recent research has shown that there is a huge crossover between the lgbtq plus community and the autistic population we don't know exactly why but we know that a high proportion of trans people are autistic i think they are six times more likely to have an autism diagnosis as the cis population and therefore a high proportion of the autistic population are trans non-binary or otherwise gender non-conforming but i think the reason that this idea of female autism has taken off as much as it has is because historically and in the present day there is a huge imbalance in diagnostics because it was originally thought to be a male condition so doctors would attribute women's traits to and symptoms to other things and so we've started from this big place of imbalance and because the expectations about what autism looks like are still based on stereotypes the early research and media portrayals up until probably the last five years are all based on predominantly white cis men or more often boys and the diagnostic criteria were written around this so those whose autism presented like the white cis boys were diagnosed and those who presented autism in a different way were not diagnosed that kind of makes sense doesn't it but the question is why would autism present differently enough in different genders to create such an imbalance in the first place there is something to be said for sure about the way that different genders are socialized within society not to mention all the unwritten expectations that we have regarding gender and behavior in many societies women are expected to shrink themselves literally physically verbally and we know from the nature nurture debate that both nature and nurture are important but the influence of society can't be escaped because we don't raise children in a vacuum literally or figuratively we know that nurture plays a big part in brain development and we know that girls and boys are treated differently even from the womb we place our expectations on them based on the on the sex of the baby so when it comes to diagnosing people there is a benefit to this idea i'll come back to that later but i think the only real benefit is that it seems like more cis women are being diagnosed and that's good but it's not good enough because we are excluding everyone in between when we simply don't have to we can broaden our idea of autism without resorting to more stereotypes or creating another binary autism is a spectrum after all a spectrum is not one end to the other end male to female severe to mild a spectrum encompasses all the colors of the rainbow and everyone has a slightly different flavor of autism different traits here or there from all around the spectrum but in terms of diagnostics the thing that you have to realize is that sexism has been embedded into psychology from the very start and i'm considering like the 19th century as the birth of the discipline and this problem is is endemic in the field of psychology itself even today i think gender differences in the brain have been studied for years going back to when women's smaller brains were evidence for our reduced intelligence or mental capability i personally like to think of women's brains as simply more efficient but remember the so-called father of psychology freud we all know freud he devoted research to hysteria which was first considered a physical and then later on a mental condition obviously only affecting women because men don't get hysterical not just sexism but racism and eugenics were built into psychology from the start and women and men were treated fundamentally differently from the start now if you think about how disciplines evolve although we now know that freud was largely full of his successors didn't just scrap his work and start again it was progressed and refined upon after freud came young after young we get pavlov and skinner who was of course the forefather of behaviorism not my favorite psychologist and you also have to remember that eugenics was not just something the nazis did it was the professional working culture of that time even the beloved maria montessori believed in eugenics if you don't believe me check out i think her first book where she talks about it it was widespread throughout the western world so psychological diagnostics in the early 20th century were based very heavily upon societal expectations and conforming to societal and gender norms so for example a woman who would not marry was considered to be disordered and eventually many of these diagnoses evolved and were renamed and reclassified um things got a little bit better but maybe what we needed to do was actually scrap everything and start again from first principles because they got things so wrong in the beginning if you think of psychology as a discipline like a chain a chain of different bodies of research information and beliefs get passed along and things do change and they can change but you also end up heading in certain directions because of where you started and if you assume that the knowledge came that came before you is something to be built upon rather than something to be criticized which science does both builds and criticizes but if you assume that it is largely unbiased in the basic assumptions then there is no need for sweeping changes to the way that psychology is constructed and i don't believe that to be true i think psychology even today is very biased and i just don't think you could start from the place that it did and can edit your way to the truth and and then come up with something that makes sense so i personally kind of think that psychology is broken you don't have to agree with me here this is just my opinion you know we can keep the knowledge about how our brains work we've come a long way in understanding how the brain works but we maybe need to shed a lot of the assumptions and and rebuild some of the ideas around um conditions such as autism but that's enough paradigm shifting for one video um even today we have a lot of autistic women who are misdiagnosed with things like borderline personality disorder is a very common one anxiety disorders some women have received every diagnosis under the sun before anyone will even consider an autism assessment because they can make eye contact or because they're married they can't be autistic and it doesn't fit the stereotype you may have heard of simon baron cohen the psychologist at cambridge university who has been the proponent of the so-called extreme male brain theory of autism he's been in research for several decades he's somewhat backed down on this on this theory in recent years but i would argue that the damage has already been done he's been such an influence on autism research that when i did my psychology degree which was 15 plus years ago now i didn't recognize autism in myself because i didn't see my brain as being particularly male and i don't really see it as being female either but to believe that autism is an exaggerated male brain means that you believe that men are somehow biologically hard-coded to be less nurturing less empathetic more systemizing more logical better at 3d or spatial manipulation and worse languages because it's like biology in it after all women have these babies to look after and mother's meetings to have sex and gender differences in the brain is a way bigger topic than i have time to discuss in this video i can hear your size of relief through the screen but if you are interested in the sort of evidence behind gendered brain theories i highly recommend cordelia fine who has written several excellent books on the subject but back to autism and the effects that these stereotypes have on autistic people today the reason that female autism traits have become a thing is because in the last five to ten years it's coincided with the release of the dsm-5 the dsm is the diagnostic manual for psychologists to use in order to make diagnoses so it's standardized and the changes in the dsm-5 got rid of all the sub-categories of autism like asperger's and on all that and put everything underneath the banner of autism spectrum disorder or autism spectrum condition but the important thing here is it redefined autism in a way that allowed those who masked to be diagnosed and this is a critical point because masking is very heavily tied up in the idea of the female autism phenotype even though we know it's not just women who mask so the results of the changes to the dsm-5 mean that a lot more autistic adults are being diagnosed in adulthood myself included because by definition if you mask and you mask well it's something that can go undetected until adulthood the final thing i want to talk about which is certainly not the least important is the effect of gendering autistic traits on the trans and non-binary population don't forget that the gender non-conforming also have a history of being thought of as if mentally ill by the medical community just like the autistic population has which means that this population of trans or non-binary autistics kind of gets a double whammy from medical professionals calling non-stereotypical presentations of autism female is exclusionary and it makes it seem like trans and non-binary people don't exist or like they do exist but like these are the main ones and they're just the others and they exist rather disproportionately among the autistic population so we just can't we can't brush them to the side like that any theory of autism has to encompass everyone otherwise what good is it at worst it encourages healthcare professionals family friends whatever to misgender for example telling a trans man that he has female autism may provoke gender dysphoria and still doesn't provide us any useful information other than perhaps he has a similar autistic profile to other autistics who happen to have been socialized as girls growing up my main point is that it conveys no actual helpful information to gender a specific trait it's just completely irrelevant because every trait can be found every autistic trait can be found across the gender spectrum for example i have a very systemizing brain as simon baron cohen would call it give me a lot of information and i can make sense of that in a very short amount of time and categorizing it in a way that maybe not a lot of people can do and that's one of my talents and one of the parts of my autism and my autistic brain that i really enjoy having but how is it helpful to categorize that trait as male when it's happening in a woman even though it might be slightly more common in autistic men than women although i'm not sure there's evidence for that but so what if it is it's an autistic trait and more interestingly you never hear about trans autistic traits or non-binary or autistic traits if gendering traits was a thing based in science then you would expect that wouldn't you like i said the the benefit to the idea of female autism is that cis women are being increasingly recognized and diagnosed and the only other one that i can think of is that people's understanding of autism is broadening it is becoming a little bit wider people are becoming more accepting of the idea that oh okay autism might look like this might be a girl kind of autism not just this sort of stereotype that i had in my head people are searching for this online people are looking up autism and girls on the internet why do you think that video did so well people are becoming slowly aware that the stereotypical white cis boy is not the only presentation of autism and that is good which so i wanted to keep my video up because it is helping people it is reaching people and helping people get diagnosed and not just women um but i don't want to further perpetuate this idea by continuing to talk about female presentations female traits that these traits are themselves intrinsically female because they're not i have been meaning to make this video for a very long time i think i started it in september so it's been like six months over six months i hope i have articulated my thoughts well enough it is a very complicated topic and i could have probably made it a very long video but i wanted to get it done because done is better than perfect i hope i've shown you that it's a great deal more complicated than this is what autism looks like in boys and this is what autism looks like in girls gendering autistic traits really adds no value as long as psychologists and the people working within psychology can shed their old-fashioned ideas of what autism looks like but when people like simon byron comb are receiving knighthoods which he did um and you know the extreme male brain theory is still very widely accepted and has a huge influence over the paradigm and over what research gets done it is really important to push back against this but without further perpetuating things that have no basis in research or science or creating another false dichotomy even if they are helping more women get diagnosed there are different ways of doing it so i'm sorry 2019 sam that you were a bit wrong that these are girls traits but on the bright side you can still leave the country as much as you want let me know your thoughts on gendering autistic traits down below in the comments and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Yo Samdy Sam

Views: 179,992

Keywords: autism in girls, autism symptoms in girls, autism traits girls, autism in women, female autism symptoms, female autism traits, yo samdy sam, yo samedy sam, yo sammy sam, autistic girls, autistic women, signs of autism in girls, female autism, autistic spectrum, autism in females, autism in girls symptoms

Id: YAhQJ08bzgs

Length: 15min 39sec (939 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021