Maybe, but alexithymia is the inability to recognize emotions. I literally have no idea what I’m feeling the vast majority of the time. It doesn’t matter if I can express it or not, I can’t even recognize what I’m feeling. I have no idea how it compares to anything else I’ve felt, except maybe in magnitude… maybe.
Something like that, assuming there actually is a slight difference in analytical vs emotional behavior in men vs women. I’m not even sure there is. I just think it’s bred into us, and the difference between socially-acceptable analytical behavior and socially-acceptable emotional behavior is very slight, considering the entire range of human behaviors both possible and observed. But yeah, saying that some behaviors that are associated with autism are (in smaller doses) considered “male”* is not helping anyone.
*I would say they are culturally imposed to be male, not inherently male.
My intention in raising it was more as a basis for discussion rather than a suggestion that it was accurate. Rather than looking at how men and women act differently from each other (which could be explained in part by different cultural expectations), it’s interesting to see how the behaviour of individuals changes with different hormone levels at different stages of development, including in the womb – culture is a big part of it, but there are also innate bases for behavioural differences. It’s true though that this can be exaggerated to a claim that men and women are very different, whereas it’s more that it explains in part why the overlap isn’t greater. Incidentally, there doesn’t seem to be any link between testosterone levels in the womb and autistic traits, which had previously been a theory.
Non-neurotypical people also provide some indication of the gendered behaviours that are more innate and those that are more socialised. Autistic men and women tend to have different typical traits – but that would make me more of a typical autistic woman, since I probably fit all but 3 of these traits (and two of those are partially true):
There are theories that there are more autistic girls than are currently diagnosed, but they are more able to mask their traits, they are more susceptible to social pressure or more social pressure is placed on them, or that their behaviour seems more normal because they might be interested in similar things to NTs, but more intensely.
Alternatively, there may actually be fewer autistic girls for different reasons – one is the idea that autism is carried on the X chromosome and the fact that girls have two protects them to some extent. In support of this idea, fragile X syndrome has some similarities to autism and affects more males, while males who have it are more likely to have more serious symptoms like learning disabilities.
I’m the same, although I wouldn’t know how to say whether I feel gender dysphoria or more general dysphoria that includes gender. As I mentioned, my earlier comments weren’t with any knowledge of specific possible diagnoses like autism, but the medication I was on brought a number of these issues to a head. I don’t think transitioning would change this for the better in any case, and I like being in more neutral environments where it really wouldn’t make much difference where you are on the gender spectrum, if you even knew.
I’m well versed in not knowing how I feel. I have the advantage that I’m very good at social cues and interpreting emotions so I can look at my own actions objectively and say, “Oh, I’m doing X, so I must feel Y.” More recently I consider how my body feels, like thinking about my shoulders and my stomach to see if they feel tight/upset and using that to judge if I’m stressed.
After doing that for a while I’m more prone to notice those feelings without actively checking for them, and then to make the immediate connection. I figure after a while I’ll probably eventually identify the two things in my brain, so instead of going, “I have that uncomfortable feeling at the top of my stomach. Oh, right, that means I’m stressed.” I’ll just say, “I feel stressed.” I think this is what kids do when they are toddlers and preschool - learn the rules about how to express their emotions, attach those expressions to emotions, and then use those expressions to identify their emotions. Then they grow up knowing what it feels like to feel angry, happy, sad. Well, at least some do.
Maybe it’s more saying that women tend to be better at reading emotions and following social cues. I’m not sure about the connection between autism and analytical thought? One thing that’s very hard about autism is that we know that some people with autism are largely or entirely non-communicative. So there’s a risk of conflating the thing that is autism with the traits that allow a person with the thing that is autism to participate in neuro-typical society.
I think what feels wrong to me is that I am just one person, that I am going to experience life just one way. I feel like I’m supposed to be more than one person. I can’t find any word for that.
Autism is underdiagnosed in women and girls. I don’t think it’s really four times as likely to be in men. Maybe twice at the most, and equal at least. I don’t think women intentionally mask their traits, but that these traits both look different and are perceived differently.
Most of the traits on that chart generally describe the outward manifestations of autistic behavior. I fit all of these except for three in the social column,* and the couple of other ones where it compares women to men. For example, “less likely to be a trainspotter” may mean still a trainspotter, but technically less likely to be one. It also indicates that there is an overlap.
This chart is also as awkward as my attempts to explain neurotypical behavior.
*One is a partial, but the other two are definite strong no’s for me. Also the verbal instructions thing in the second column is a partial. I don’t technically need nonverbal instruction, but it sure helps a lot, and it also doesn’t necessarily need to be in the form of a picture or diagram.
I have to actively check, and even then it’s more of a hit or miss.
I was under the impression that this was an automatic process for most people.
I thought it was both. As in, men are more analytical and less emotional/social, and autistic people are more analytical and less emotional and less social.
I feel that I have to be more analytical because the intrapersonal and interpersonal stuff does not come intuitively to me at all. It’s true that I’m naturally very analytical, but it’s a strength I have to play to, because if I don’t play to it I get nowhere.
The stereotype is that all Aspies are computer geniuses It’s always computers, unless it’s math or science or engineering. In the stereotype it’s never art or music or literature… it’s rarely even something like chemical engineering or biology, because even those subjects are seen as too fluffy.
I was nonverbal until age 8. I have known many who are nonverbal as adults. However, I have never known any autistic person who was entirely noncommunicative.
We have a saying: all behavior is communication. We may be trying to communicate even if the average neurotypical isn’t set up to recognize it.
I think analytical ability is both, in my case. It’s an ability that I have because of how I’m wired, but also an ability that society values. It’s very precarious. Maybe we don’t care about autistic musicians and artists because we as a society value the arts less. I have also developed a lot of coping mechanisms that play to my strengths, but my particular pattern of strengths and weaknesses is caused by autism. The strengths are very strong and the weaknesses are very weak. At any rate, autism is ingrained in me to a point where I can’t separate the autism from the person.
I think it’s automatic because they started to practicing it when they were one-and-a-half, not because it’s automatic.
Very true!
All the autistic people I’m intimately familiar with (I’m big on sample sets of size two today) are extremely analytical. They are also very successful at getting along in a world of neurotypical people (as professors in STEM fields).
When I think of people who are like me (hypersensitive to other people’s emotional states, unable to tolerate rejection, deep fear of abandonment, tendency to catastrophize negative emotions), I tend to see people who have trouble holding down jobs, keeping friends, maintaining good relationships with family, and otherwise interacting with people. I do a very good Willy Loman (liked but not well-liked) at work, have a couple of friends, and get along pretty well with my family. I feel like my hypersensitivity to other people’s emotional states would have made it very, very difficult to do these things if I wasn’t also hyper-analytical. It turns out I developed some major techniques of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and applied to them myself at least as early as six as a way to cope. I need that kind of thinking to get to a feel-terrible-but-get-by state.
That’s what makes me wonder if we don’t tend to see a lot of neuro-atypical people as being very analytical. We don’t know about other people’s internal worlds unless they can go at least part way to describing them to us, so we don’t hear from people who can’t describe them in ways we can understand. That skews towards analytical people being overrepresented in our understanding of groups of people even if they aren’t overrepresented in the actual group. But, of course, they may indeed be overrespresented in the group as well.
And my interests are more to do with linguistics, languages, relationships, communication, psychology etc. - all pretty fluffy, but I find people interesting. My theory is that it can be helpful to see people like dogs - not in a disrespectful way, but to recognise things that are influencing their emotions on a very basic level, and why they act the way they do. I also find that this helps me to understand myself better.
I don’t know about other autistic people, but I seem to find it easier to adjust to a new culture than many NTs, partly because I assume less and ask more. It doesn’t mean that I’ll be mistaken for a native, but relying less on intuition at the start can sometimes be a good thing when encountering a new culture. I don’t have a strong sense of identity either, so I’m willing to take on slightly different personalities in different contexts.
I heard one expression that what normal people learn intuitively, we learn scientifically/analytically. That makes sense to me, although not in the sense that I’m necessarily more logical than others - more that I don’t have a strong intuitive or empathetic side to rely on.
Speaking of empathy, it’s kind of like other aspects that are affected by alexithymia - I can be strongly or overpoweringly affected by people around me, but it often isn’t a clear signal at all, and not one that I find useful in helping to understand a situation. Asking questions and reasoning give me better results, IMO.
ETA: I would also add that at least in my case, quite a few problems in gender and elsewhere can come down to over-analysis. Many of these are far too vague to be able to nail down as bullet points; if you try to grasp the concrete reality behind gender, it just evaporates. However, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, it’s just realised and performed in a more intuitive and socially informed way.
Are there people who wouldn’t take the deal? I mean if you are in a good relationship and your partner’s heterosexual, I can see the issue, but aside from that… seriously? People reject the deal?
Huh.
$10 million would buy a lot of malaria nets with a nice chunk left over for all the books I could ever want to read and all the time to read them in.
Yeah, I think the point of the thought experiment it to realize that most people actually are made uncomfortable by it. It seems like it should be obvious that they would take the $10M, but they have this feeling that they wouldn’t or couldn’t. There are obvious exceptions (there are clearly a small minority of people who would pay $10M to switch genders) but the point is to realize that most people are cis, not just not-trans. That there are people who aren’t very cis without being trans either isn’t surprising, they are just a minority in the middle of a bi-modal distribution.
As a guy who doesn’t fit well into male gender roles… I would sure as Hell reject this deal.
I have enough issues without adding gender dysphoria to them.
I am not, by any means, at maximum happiness and/or contentment, but my current lifestyle is comfortable enough that I don’t think the influx of more money would make me any happier at all. When people say, “Everyone has a price,” I am always reminded of the “We’ve already established what you are; we’re just negotiating over price” joke. The amount of money that would put me over the $75,000 / year threshold (where more money doesn’t make you any happier) is insufficient to incentivize me to do anything that would cause me long-term physical or psychological damage. Any money past that threshold is, by definition, not going to make me any happier, so it isn’t an effective incentive either.
Now, if the question were, “How much societal improvement would it take to convince you to switch genders permanently as payment for that?” (your “mosquito nets” idea), that’s a different story. Past a certain threshold, it becomes immensely selfish to say no to that, and I would eventually make that sacrifice for the greater good. I’m not saying becoming a woman would be a sacrifice; I’m saying that having to make the psychological adjustment from being a cisgender male to being the same person in a female body (with the gender dysphoria that would likely accompany it) would be. However, I don’t think that money (especially in my own hands, when I don’t have the foggiest idea how best to invest it for maximum societal improvement) would be a good metric to determine where the threshold for “Would you be willing to do this to make the world this much better?” would lie.
I may be an outlier here, but while I have no interest or inclination towards any of the sorts of technological sex change options available today, if you offered me a magical perfect and painless swap option I’d take it in a second. No money required.
I’m not particularly bothered by being male, but I’m not particularly attached to it either. Swapping would be interesting.
I’m sure you are an outlier, but I’m out there with you. If I was offered a magic deal where every day I’d wake up in a different body in a random sampling representative of the population, I’d love to take that deal (there would be a lot of details to check on how that would work). The most frustrating thing in my life is that I’m just one person.
Well that puts things in a different perspective, doesn’t it? I’ve suffered a lot of gender dysphoria in my life and I suppose no amount of money would be worth resetting to the wrong gender and staying there. So maybe people agreeing to this deal are underestimating how bad dysphoria can be? Or are they rightly supposing that they personally wouldn’t feel that dysphoric?
I think, in theory, the people quickly agreeing to this deal are supposed to be those who are already gender dysphoric (or not tied strongly to one particular gender). In practice, there’s also going to be people that fit into both of the cases that you describe, as well as people who understand the consequences but think the benefits would be worth the dysphoria.
That is, if they even thought through this experiment that far; my impression was that the experiment was designed to elicit a strong negative response from cisgender people, as they mentally imagine themselves in a body of the opposite gender and feel a mild echo of the dysphoria such a change would produce. As @anon50609448 said:
I think some of us feel that we wouldn’t be dysphoric and we’ll never find out. With no money on the table at all I would definitely want to switch sexes just like @wanderfound if the technology were in the right place, but I don’t have enough sex-related bad feelings about my body to go to the effort and suffer the side effects of such a change as things are.
I do also think there are some people who underestimate how bad dysphoria is. I once saw this comedian do a bit about depression, and how no one gets it and people think you are lazy or whatever, but when people hear you have diarrhea they are sympathic. “No one kills themselves because they have diarrhea.” So if anyone doesn’t think gender dysphoria is a lot bad, think of that “joke” (which isn’t even a joke) and remind yourself that gender dysphoria is a lot worse than diarrhea.
This sounds like a model where experiencing emotion is dependent upon having a basis for categorizing it.
It relates quite closely to discussions I have had with queer people who feel frustrated by a need to be able to categorize their gender. My take on it is that you ARE your emotions, genders, etc - that one automatically embodies these things and is free to classify, define, and express them however they choose, or to choose not to. But what bothers many is a lack of a shared cultural framework for communicating about them. That seems to me like free people grasping for stereotypes to box themselves into.
Then again, I meet some people who become insecure and agitated if they can’t decide what genre a piece of music represents.
It’s always computers, unless it’s math or science or engineering. In the stereotype it’s never art or music or literature… it’s rarely even something like chemical engineering or biology, because even those subjects are seen as too fluffy.
