I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my 40's. Doctors are still, in 2016, mostly in the dark about how autism presents in females, it’s still little researched or understood, etc. So in my personal experience (and from what I have learned from other women of my generation), there likely are thousands and thousands of…

Thanks! Look up Rhett’s syndrome, an exclusively female autistic trait.

This is a credible explanation, but hard to pinpoint definitively of course. It’s such a shame we can’t go back a hundred or two hundred years and see what the rate was then, as autism didn’t even have a word until 1911.

We also have been renaming and rediagnosing. Anyone other than “normal” used to just be called retarded and shuffled off to be ignored. Now we have autism spectrum and some other things. We teach them, do occupational therapy, etc, and try to help them.

Do not tell parents whose lives have been devastated by this disorder that there is no connection.

For example, recently I was talking about Taylor Swift with a coworker. She was speaking positively about Taylor, citing how she gives gifts to her fans, and made the news recently for sending a check to cover a fan’s next student loan payment (700 bucks or something like that).

I pointed out that

so true. I lost a friend over this. I think she just never accepted that her daughter, who is lovely and very high functioning, was not the daughter she wanted/expected. She was looking for any reason for her life not turning out the way she planned. I posted a reminder on FB about getting whooping cough vaccinations…

These anecdotal tales like Dinero’s wife are the worst. Correlation is not equal to causation! Autism is most often detected in children at around or after the time they are vaccinated, therefore autism is caused by vacinations! Using that logic, maybe autism is caused by emerging teeth, or bone growth....

Why can’t more of them not be like Beyonce. Just perform, go home, pull down the blinds and worry about you and yours

Undoubtedly yes. Also, better doctors, more sophisticated ways to diagnose, and PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified being added to the spectrum.

Think I’ve read that according to epistemological estimations just as many girls/women are autistic but more boys/men are diagnosed as having autism.

I’m no expert, but could it be the “spectrum” has broadened? I have a friend who wasn’t diagnosed as being on the spectrum until she was in her 30s, likely because she’s: