Comments by "AliceDiableaux" (@AliceDiableaux) on "The Japan Reporter" channel.

@commentarytalk1446 That's not true at all. When you actually take into account that autism looks very different in girls and women, and look for that, they're extremely easy to identify. Every single time in my life I thought another woman or a female student was autistic, I was right, because I actually know what it looks like. The psychiatrist who diagnosed me at 21 years old basically knew in the first 10 minutes of our first conversation because she too knew what to look for. There is absolutely still a very heavy bias towards male presenting autism in the general population because people simply don't know any better. One of those things is the fact that boys usually struggle more with the social aspect and girls with the sensory aspect, but that doesn't mean it's harder to identify. You just have to look for different things and then it's as easy to identify autistic girls as it is autistic boys.
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I'm an autistic woman, and I got diagnosed when I was almost 21. I know multiple other autistic women, including my mom, and literally not a single one of them was diagnosed before adulthood. It is slowly getting better though. I'm in school to become a teacher now, in part because I feel like it's important to make sure other kids that are neurodiverse don't have the same horrific experience I did in school, and there are some girls in my classes (I teach age 11 to 15) that have been diagnosed. But there are still tons of girls who slip through the cracks, because a lot of adults will just think 'ah they're a bit of a dreamer and introverted, that's not so bad' and the problems, without any recognition or help, usually only start to get really debilitating in their late teens.
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@SirChocula Eye contact is honestly on the border of physically uncomfortable and actually physically painful for me. But I know I have to do it, so it becomes an entire conscious effort the whole time the interaction lasts. I'll think 'okay, you have to make eye contact. I want to look away, but I can't yet. Let's wait a couple seconds, okay now I can look away for a few seconds, but I can't just randomly look up at the ceiling or the floor so pick a better spot to look away, aww shit now I've been looking away too long, look them in the eye again, okay... 9, 10 seconds, now I can look away for a bit again' and this train of thought keeps happening the entire time. It's exhausting and frustrating, because 10% of my brain will be entirely preoccupied by thinking about eye contact.
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@Eszoable Yeah, even 'direct' (you can certainly argue to what extent this is true) cultures like ours are just filled to the brim with assumptions and non-verbal cues that everyone is supposed to intuitively understand. People still often say things they don't mean or don't say things because they assume it's implied. A while ago I had gone to a party with some classmates, and one of them slept over at my house since she lives far away. We were both drunk and she said that we should totally hang out more often. My dumb autistic ass, of course, took that as is, and I was really disappointed that I didn't really hear much from her after that. Weeks later a friend told me that when people say things like that, especially when drunk, they actually mean they just liked hanging out with you and it's a more 'polite' way to tell you that, and they don't necessarily actually mean that they want to hang out more often. My first reaction of course was, then don't fucking say it, but that's not how neurotypical people operate unfortunately.
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