Thanks for your detailed response and sharing your experiences.

>> I say this as an autistic person with a combined type having some generally male exclusive and some female exclusive traits.

Are you referring to non-exclusive "traits" when describing how you have both male and female traits? I was a bit confused about the "female phonotype" part of your response as it implies having traits through genetics at birth.

Or am I misunderstandings and such gender-specific traits are developed through environmental/societal conditions?

Hi! I've been checking back often and was happy to see a question! Thank you for asking, and thank you for the thank you! :)

It's a bit hard without going into explicit detail, but to set the stage, generally speaking, my brain tends to effectively operate in two different parts. There's still decent physical coordination and such, but there are a few external signs of that. One is that if I'm listening to music that sends shivers down my spine and gives me goosebumps, maybe 70% of the time it'll be exclusively on the right side of my body, while the left is completely normal.

Additionally, if I relax my face muscles from "social face" to "comfortable resting face", if you took a picture and looked at each half in isolation, you can see a variety of differences in my comfortable resting face that seems to have stayed consistent across a variety of conditions.

I once had a massage therapist, extremely confused, pause, then comment on how my left side seemed relaxed and normal, and on my right, the muscles were tenser, I apparently jumped when she touched me (I hadn't noticed it but believed her), and was shaking. That part of me had had some bad experiences when I was very young. But, stress aside, it was cool to me as a kind of confirmation of something I'd felt was too "weird" for me, to be true.

Now, the above is a setup for a comment on phenotypes. In this case, I'm using the definition of phenotype as "Phenotype...refers to the individual’s inherited physical characteristics, which are a combination of genetic and environmental influences", from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-psychology/chapte... .

Whether or not autism as well as gender differentiation (a diversity common in autistic individuals) is genetic, I can't say. I'd personally lean towards early life developmental factors (especially neonatal) with genetically predisposing factors as well.

Now on to the combined factors. I was becoming more confident about having male autism, but when the other half of my brain had more of a say in things, in addition to a much more generally feminine identity, I saw a lot of prosocial and seemingly nonautistic traits. This I felt was baffling and uncomfortable, because autism tends to have a very strong physiological component, and maybe this would mean it was something else that looked like autism. How else could something like that be partitioned? I felt distressed.

Learning what feminine autism looks like was a breath of fresh air and relief to me, as so many oddly specific things apply to that side of me. It also answered a lot of questions and removed barriers to letting go of some shame that I didn't know was there. I've had problems with social things at times, but I can be very sociable and well-liked, similar to how the feminine autistic phenotype is (and how they fly under the radar). I'm finally able to start getting past my denial of having these intrinsic limitations that seemed to clash with what I thought was my capability. It's also a hole I felt was there but didn't know what the question was to get there.

I hope this answers your question, you can see this (among other things) is something I feel passionate about. You can check my post history or ask any follow-up questions if you're interested in more like this.

As a side note, most of my friends are girls or feminine/femme-leaning individuals, because the male side of me likes people but is content to be introverted and keep doing neural network stuff or voraciously studying some new or esoteric like I have for a while.

By the way, all of the above is a good example of a number of elements of the male autistic phenotype. In my first message, you can see hints of both.

What's NT?

neurotypical