In childhood, it's mostly boys who are diagnosed with autism spectrum discorders. In adulthood, it's mostly adult women who are diagnosed. Does that seem suspicious to anyone else?
Hans Asperger wrote in his original paper that many of the mothers of his autistic patients were high in "autistic" traits themselves (Kanner also observed this, but suggested they were low in maternal warmth and "cold", academically-preoccupied etc, as were most fathers and extended family) -- Asperger speculated that autistic traits might only become apparent in women at older ages.
There's a possibly neurobiological explanation here, first, that "autistic" traits tend to be less pronounced in women because there's partially linked to genes on the X chromosome (or to imprinting errors and something called lingering Lyonization, where genes fail to reset properly, loosely speaking), and women are thus protected from extreme presentations due to having two X chromosomes. As well, autistic traits tend to be linked to right hemisphere dysfunction, and the RH has two periods of strong development -- ages 0-3 and ages 11-25 (roughly). So you would expect diagnostic spikes in the early years and in the teen years / early twenties.
You know what else is suspicious? In my son’s class of twelve children, THREE have an official autism diagnosis. Out of the 120 children in his primary school, eight children from the younger classes are in the autism unit, and my son and I don’t know who else might have a diagnosis in the other classes. Statistically this is completely impossible.
Actually, it makes sense. Adult females have a much higher incidence of mental health issues. Add liberal women to the mix and kaboom! You got mental illness on parade.
I like your observations- why is no one asking these very astute & telling questions? “On the spectrum” has become a commonplace explanation for any quirky behavior. Does anybody remember the difference between quirky & autistic? I’ve known a number of truly autistic individuals and their communication skills were minimal, to say the least. They’re very non verbal and might fixate on one hobby but not with particular expertise. It’s become another “badge of honor” to the younger generation, who actually navigate fairly well, while those who are truly autistic struggle with every day skills. It’s dangerous for those who are actually autistic for more able people to claim to be autistic and thus discount, dilute or re-direct the help those who are truly disabled need.
My sister Catherine was born legs first, lacked oxygen, and became autistic. Her cognitive development stopped at the equivalent of a 5-year old. To this day she has no notion of time, can't cut her own steak, and is dependent on the rest of us to survive. THAT is autism.
Last weekend, I saw an astonishing set of complaints here on Substack, to wit, that RFK seeks to extinguish the neurodiverse, along with the familiar claims that autistic people can write poetry, can play sports. Tedious.
Yes, yes, yes 1,000,000 times yes! I work in mental health and people are positively obsessed with diagnosing themselves with autism, ADHD, OCD, GAD, you name it. Everyone is "neurodivergent." The newest absurdity is pathological demand avoidance (PDA). It's true, look it up. I would pay good money to see Josh Slocum do a deep dive into this newest pathology. Why are we insisting that every single human proclivity, eccentricity, or personality trait is a disorder requiring accommodations? I think we all know the answer.
The only disorder they do NOT see to want to diagnose themselves with is borderline personality disorder, which is actually what they have.
Churchmusiclady, there are days when I honestly don’t think I can bear it anymore; seeing that our entire society has normalized the Cluster B insanity that my mother created in my childhood home.
I grew up in the classic “domestic/child abuse” home, but people used to understand that that was not normal and abusive.
Now, Cluster B is not only normalized, it’s praised.
EXACTLY. So many of these fake self-diagnosed neuroses are bids for attention, or attempts to feel special, unique, or worthy of something. I think it is a crisis of meaning. Are people really this completely bereft of meaning in their lives? I'm with you, there are days when I just can't bear it, and I think if I roll my eyes any further back the cords are going to snap and they'll just stay that way.
Wow I didn't know about pathological demand avoidance. I remember feeling autistic children I met as a substitute teacher were rather spoiled and avoided doing things they didn't like to do (pretty much everything that required effort). This is how I saw it but spoiled and avoidant are kinda the same...
Apparently there is childhood PDA and adult PDA. I watched this video about it and could barely believe what I was hearing. There is also a corresponding video with the same interviewer and "expert" where they interview an "adult" with PDA (and surprise, surprise all her kids also have PDA!) I just can't with this crap anymore. https://youtu.be/xLRxaQ1Th68?si=jd4Kd6I8rwwEGSy9
Hmm, so your take is that autistic kids were spoiled, etc. looking back on my grand child’s scholastic results it’s obvious where he succeeded; and it wasn’t with teachers that thought he was spoiled and selfish. Hopefully, your not teaching any more
I've been remarking to my husband, every time my toddler exerts a preference for something simply because that was the way it was done before, that it seems to me a lot of the behaviors we now call autism is just a toddler snit fit that we never disciplined out of them. My daughter seems to think that if you cut the food a certain way the first time you eat it, it must be cut that way all the time.
Sorry, no. I didn't set out to raise a spoiled brat; I set out to raise a functional human being that can survive adulthood. If you start to think that this normal habit preference behavior of a toddler somehow indicates that they have a neurological problem, you'll start indulging it until they actually have it. She learns to tolerate things done in different ways in different orders because that's how I'm going to do it, and I'm not going to spend any time indulging her mini-fit when she thinks it should be done the other way. I'm the parent. That's the whole point.
Even if the child does have a bit of a problem, teaching them to tolerate things being done not quite the way they'd like it will do wonders preparing them for the disappointments of adulthood. Every time I see a story about someone calling the cops because their takeout order was slightly wrong, I just know that their single mom cut their food up for them in the exact same little squares every single time.
Here in Ireland a man recently stabbed three five year olds because his social welfare payment was stopped. This man happened to be from a culture where men are overindulged and mollycoddled to the point of women having to cover themselves in black tents because of the entitlement and poor impulse control of these men. Men who have never been told no…
I agree! I had no idea until I had my own kids exactly how narrow-minded, judgemental and rigid young children are! The idea that they are little open-minded Buddhas is incorrect!
In all seriousness, it seems almost like Munchausen by proxy on the part of the parents. What kind of parent would let an autistic child emote online? Someone who needs to think the world needs to see how special their child is? Is this a child or trophy?
Or is the child aRtistic inspead?
If you've ever had autistic family members (I have, cousins) you'd know the difference.
Yes how many parents just brag about their special autistic child. And worse these parents make these kids super dependent on the parent. These kids can't leave. Always trapped.
My daughter is actually mid functioning medically diagnosed autistic. She's thirteen, reads at a second grade level, and is about 4 or 5 in her maturity level.
These people are like girls who once thought another girl had nice cleavage and start calling themselves "queer" vs a full blown not into men at all lesbians.
Oh, I can't stand that. I know a few straight, married women who call themselves queer because they think Sydney Sweeney is a smokeshow. What happened to just appreciating the beauty of the human form?
I think another thing that’s interesting is if you dive into the history of these people who claim to be autistic, also self-diagnosed.
People who are actually autistic don’t choose when to ‘flap,’ they just flap.
I say this as father to a girl who was diagnosed and there is a noticeable difference between her and other kids her age when it comes to emotional regulation.
All that to say, while autism is on the rise the likelihood of terminally online people actually being neuro-spicy is the same likelihood of trans kids being wholly an organic phenomenon. (PST, it’s not)
There are several women in their 40s that I have known for most of my adult life who are suddenly autistic now! Crazy coincidence! One of them posts gems on a daily basis- mostly lists of what makes her autistic that are just descriptions of the human experience. (I mean, what does she think “neurotypical” people actually experience? Are we gods?)
My favorite was
“Society: autistic people don’t understand hierarchies
Me: knows that hierarchies exist and understands how they operate but doesn’t value them and doesn’t believe that any human is more important than another or should mistreat/exploit those lower down the hierarchy”
(So all non autistic people are evil jerks? And hey, all practicing Christians are autistic!)
Also this one:
“Autistic people after putting lol or 🤣 at the end of every message even if there’s nothing remotely funny about it so they don’t come off as too serious”
All of us millennial women do that! We shouldn’t, but we do! We are all autistic!
I’m probably legit autistic and I struggle with understanding hierarchies not in the sense I oppose them, because I don’t oppose them. Hierarchy has to be formal and explicit, otherwise I just run into invisible walls
Years ago, I had a friend who used to bring his wife over to my house when we used to host a Game Night for friends. She cornered me one day to tell me something important, and she told me that she had "decided" that she was "autistic". I was skeptical, of course. I asked when she was diagnosed with autism. She told me she wasn't, so I reminded her that autism is a medical condition that a doctor diagnoses. She was immediately emotionally wounded, and told me, "I can't believe you don't believe I'm autistic."
In addition to that behavior (this was around 2016, so it was new and weird to me at the time), she also exhibited these behaviors:
- Rocking back and forth when she was seated
- A wholly unnecessary wheelchair that she used constantly
- Cutting (which she admitted to me in the autism conversation)
- Coming out to me as "gender queer" (which was another one on one conversation with me)
- Changing her name to the name of an animal
I told her to ask her therapist about BPD. In a later conversation, she told me "My therapist didn't think I had BPD". I immediately understood that her "therapist" was just another human that I (in 2025) would describe as a human pretending to be an LLM: a person who responds with nothing but sycophantic affirmation, which is what this Cluster B dipshit was expecting from me. Instead, I told her, "Why is it that every time I talk to you, you want to tell me about some new way how weak and broken you are?"
Complaint: Josh, please please put space between „-„ when you use it in other purpose that making 2 words into 1. Entire paragraph from „recasting” was illegible, because you made „interest-storm” into one word. Idk if you’re doing it to distinguish yourself from AI written texts, but it really negatively impacts your articles.
There's a huge overlap between the traits we call "autistic" and the traits we call "Cluster B", Josh, I've pointed this out before, but I think in a lot of cases, people are having what feels like an "autistic" experience from the inside, and what is experienced as "narcissism" from the outside. If you read Kanner and Asperger's original papers, their clients were more high-functioning as well as socially isolated, and the parents of clients were described as having traits that could be considered BOTH "autistic" and "narcissistic", depending on your lens. When the autism spectrum was expanded, it was also expanded at the lower end, to include kids who previously would have been diagnosed as "mentally retarded."
This isn't to excuse narcissistic behaviours, but these labels are all nonsense. "Autism" isn't a condition, it's a cluster of traits, and those traits can be caused by any number of interacting factors -- parenting, toxin exposures, pharmaceutical exposures, diet etc. It gets convoluted because a parent who is emotionally absent is also more likely to feed a child poorly or default to popping a pill in them when they're sick instead of more time-consuming and effective remedies etc.
I have an (ex) friend that I ran into 2 summers ago. Her son, whom I knew from ages 3-7, was now 12 and "autistic." So autistic, that he's in the super duper autistic class at school because he has "fits" where he throws chairs and whatnot. He hits his mom too.
However, HE IS NOT AUTISTIC. He wasn't AT ALL when I was friends with the family. What he did have, was a chaotic family life with a mentally unstable mom and an absent and shady dad (they're divorced now and it's messy as heck--I heard her side, which I'm not sure I believe of course). He never had consistent discipline and their life was just chaos (example: they lived on top of a mountain and the mom was in the car with the 2 boys when one of them popped the car in gear and it rolled backwards down the mountain and they almost rolled off a ridge. Many such cases!). I think the autism diagnosis gives her something to blame other than her inconsistent parenting.
I didn't get very close to her as my intuition told me not to. Our friendship, such as it was, ended when she wouldn't come to a mutual friend's baby shower I was hosting during COVID (even though it was outside) and she told me to tell the friend she was sorry she couldn't come. I told her (kindly) to let our friend know herself. After that she raged at me over text for 2 days. Bye, Felicia!
In childhood, it's mostly boys who are diagnosed with autism spectrum discorders. In adulthood, it's mostly adult women who are diagnosed. Does that seem suspicious to anyone else?
Hans Asperger wrote in his original paper that many of the mothers of his autistic patients were high in "autistic" traits themselves (Kanner also observed this, but suggested they were low in maternal warmth and "cold", academically-preoccupied etc, as were most fathers and extended family) -- Asperger speculated that autistic traits might only become apparent in women at older ages.
There's a possibly neurobiological explanation here, first, that "autistic" traits tend to be less pronounced in women because there's partially linked to genes on the X chromosome (or to imprinting errors and something called lingering Lyonization, where genes fail to reset properly, loosely speaking), and women are thus protected from extreme presentations due to having two X chromosomes. As well, autistic traits tend to be linked to right hemisphere dysfunction, and the RH has two periods of strong development -- ages 0-3 and ages 11-25 (roughly). So you would expect diagnostic spikes in the early years and in the teen years / early twenties.
You know what else is suspicious? In my son’s class of twelve children, THREE have an official autism diagnosis. Out of the 120 children in his primary school, eight children from the younger classes are in the autism unit, and my son and I don’t know who else might have a diagnosis in the other classes. Statistically this is completely impossible.
Not really impossible. Improbable maybe, but the distribution in a data set could potentially have the numbers
Actually, it makes sense. Adult females have a much higher incidence of mental health issues. Add liberal women to the mix and kaboom! You got mental illness on parade.
I like your observations- why is no one asking these very astute & telling questions? “On the spectrum” has become a commonplace explanation for any quirky behavior. Does anybody remember the difference between quirky & autistic? I’ve known a number of truly autistic individuals and their communication skills were minimal, to say the least. They’re very non verbal and might fixate on one hobby but not with particular expertise. It’s become another “badge of honor” to the younger generation, who actually navigate fairly well, while those who are truly autistic struggle with every day skills. It’s dangerous for those who are actually autistic for more able people to claim to be autistic and thus discount, dilute or re-direct the help those who are truly disabled need.
Is there a word that means "bingo!" but infinitely stronger? Excellent call. BONGO!!!!!
My sister Catherine was born legs first, lacked oxygen, and became autistic. Her cognitive development stopped at the equivalent of a 5-year old. To this day she has no notion of time, can't cut her own steak, and is dependent on the rest of us to survive. THAT is autism.
Yes. But not all children afflicted are at that level. Being on the spectrum is a thing
Last weekend, I saw an astonishing set of complaints here on Substack, to wit, that RFK seeks to extinguish the neurodiverse, along with the familiar claims that autistic people can write poetry, can play sports. Tedious.
Yes, yes, yes 1,000,000 times yes! I work in mental health and people are positively obsessed with diagnosing themselves with autism, ADHD, OCD, GAD, you name it. Everyone is "neurodivergent." The newest absurdity is pathological demand avoidance (PDA). It's true, look it up. I would pay good money to see Josh Slocum do a deep dive into this newest pathology. Why are we insisting that every single human proclivity, eccentricity, or personality trait is a disorder requiring accommodations? I think we all know the answer.
The only disorder they do NOT see to want to diagnose themselves with is borderline personality disorder, which is actually what they have.
Keep telling the truth, Josh! You're a gem!
Churchmusiclady, there are days when I honestly don’t think I can bear it anymore; seeing that our entire society has normalized the Cluster B insanity that my mother created in my childhood home.
I grew up in the classic “domestic/child abuse” home, but people used to understand that that was not normal and abusive.
Now, Cluster B is not only normalized, it’s praised.
EXACTLY. So many of these fake self-diagnosed neuroses are bids for attention, or attempts to feel special, unique, or worthy of something. I think it is a crisis of meaning. Are people really this completely bereft of meaning in their lives? I'm with you, there are days when I just can't bear it, and I think if I roll my eyes any further back the cords are going to snap and they'll just stay that way.
Their audience is massive, not so 30 years ago.
Wow I didn't know about pathological demand avoidance. I remember feeling autistic children I met as a substitute teacher were rather spoiled and avoided doing things they didn't like to do (pretty much everything that required effort). This is how I saw it but spoiled and avoidant are kinda the same...
Apparently there is childhood PDA and adult PDA. I watched this video about it and could barely believe what I was hearing. There is also a corresponding video with the same interviewer and "expert" where they interview an "adult" with PDA (and surprise, surprise all her kids also have PDA!) I just can't with this crap anymore. https://youtu.be/xLRxaQ1Th68?si=jd4Kd6I8rwwEGSy9
Hmm, so your take is that autistic kids were spoiled, etc. looking back on my grand child’s scholastic results it’s obvious where he succeeded; and it wasn’t with teachers that thought he was spoiled and selfish. Hopefully, your not teaching any more
I've been remarking to my husband, every time my toddler exerts a preference for something simply because that was the way it was done before, that it seems to me a lot of the behaviors we now call autism is just a toddler snit fit that we never disciplined out of them. My daughter seems to think that if you cut the food a certain way the first time you eat it, it must be cut that way all the time.
Sorry, no. I didn't set out to raise a spoiled brat; I set out to raise a functional human being that can survive adulthood. If you start to think that this normal habit preference behavior of a toddler somehow indicates that they have a neurological problem, you'll start indulging it until they actually have it. She learns to tolerate things done in different ways in different orders because that's how I'm going to do it, and I'm not going to spend any time indulging her mini-fit when she thinks it should be done the other way. I'm the parent. That's the whole point.
Even if the child does have a bit of a problem, teaching them to tolerate things being done not quite the way they'd like it will do wonders preparing them for the disappointments of adulthood. Every time I see a story about someone calling the cops because their takeout order was slightly wrong, I just know that their single mom cut their food up for them in the exact same little squares every single time.
Here in Ireland a man recently stabbed three five year olds because his social welfare payment was stopped. This man happened to be from a culture where men are overindulged and mollycoddled to the point of women having to cover themselves in black tents because of the entitlement and poor impulse control of these men. Men who have never been told no…
I agree! I had no idea until I had my own kids exactly how narrow-minded, judgemental and rigid young children are! The idea that they are little open-minded Buddhas is incorrect!
In all seriousness, it seems almost like Munchausen by proxy on the part of the parents. What kind of parent would let an autistic child emote online? Someone who needs to think the world needs to see how special their child is? Is this a child or trophy?
Or is the child aRtistic inspead?
If you've ever had autistic family members (I have, cousins) you'd know the difference.
Please hear this in a tone of good will (I mean good will): It doesn’t “almost seem like.”
It very obviously is Munchausen by Proxy. Just like “transing” your kids is.
I hope to move us all in society past the hedging and deniability.
You’re seeing something true and real. Not “like that thing,” but “an example of that thing.”
Yes how many parents just brag about their special autistic child. And worse these parents make these kids super dependent on the parent. These kids can't leave. Always trapped.
My daughter is actually mid functioning medically diagnosed autistic. She's thirteen, reads at a second grade level, and is about 4 or 5 in her maturity level.
These people are like girls who once thought another girl had nice cleavage and start calling themselves "queer" vs a full blown not into men at all lesbians.
Oh, I can't stand that. I know a few straight, married women who call themselves queer because they think Sydney Sweeney is a smokeshow. What happened to just appreciating the beauty of the human form?
Seriously, I can tell a man is handsome without wanting to touch him.
I think another thing that’s interesting is if you dive into the history of these people who claim to be autistic, also self-diagnosed.
People who are actually autistic don’t choose when to ‘flap,’ they just flap.
I say this as father to a girl who was diagnosed and there is a noticeable difference between her and other kids her age when it comes to emotional regulation.
All that to say, while autism is on the rise the likelihood of terminally online people actually being neuro-spicy is the same likelihood of trans kids being wholly an organic phenomenon. (PST, it’s not)
There are several women in their 40s that I have known for most of my adult life who are suddenly autistic now! Crazy coincidence! One of them posts gems on a daily basis- mostly lists of what makes her autistic that are just descriptions of the human experience. (I mean, what does she think “neurotypical” people actually experience? Are we gods?)
My favorite was
“Society: autistic people don’t understand hierarchies
Me: knows that hierarchies exist and understands how they operate but doesn’t value them and doesn’t believe that any human is more important than another or should mistreat/exploit those lower down the hierarchy”
(So all non autistic people are evil jerks? And hey, all practicing Christians are autistic!)
Also this one:
“Autistic people after putting lol or 🤣 at the end of every message even if there’s nothing remotely funny about it so they don’t come off as too serious”
All of us millennial women do that! We shouldn’t, but we do! We are all autistic!
I’m probably legit autistic and I struggle with understanding hierarchies not in the sense I oppose them, because I don’t oppose them. Hierarchy has to be formal and explicit, otherwise I just run into invisible walls
Years ago, I had a friend who used to bring his wife over to my house when we used to host a Game Night for friends. She cornered me one day to tell me something important, and she told me that she had "decided" that she was "autistic". I was skeptical, of course. I asked when she was diagnosed with autism. She told me she wasn't, so I reminded her that autism is a medical condition that a doctor diagnoses. She was immediately emotionally wounded, and told me, "I can't believe you don't believe I'm autistic."
In addition to that behavior (this was around 2016, so it was new and weird to me at the time), she also exhibited these behaviors:
- Rocking back and forth when she was seated
- A wholly unnecessary wheelchair that she used constantly
- Cutting (which she admitted to me in the autism conversation)
- Coming out to me as "gender queer" (which was another one on one conversation with me)
- Changing her name to the name of an animal
I told her to ask her therapist about BPD. In a later conversation, she told me "My therapist didn't think I had BPD". I immediately understood that her "therapist" was just another human that I (in 2025) would describe as a human pretending to be an LLM: a person who responds with nothing but sycophantic affirmation, which is what this Cluster B dipshit was expecting from me. Instead, I told her, "Why is it that every time I talk to you, you want to tell me about some new way how weak and broken you are?"
We are no longer friends. Good riddance!
Complaint: Josh, please please put space between „-„ when you use it in other purpose that making 2 words into 1. Entire paragraph from „recasting” was illegible, because you made „interest-storm” into one word. Idk if you’re doing it to distinguish yourself from AI written texts, but it really negatively impacts your articles.
There's a huge overlap between the traits we call "autistic" and the traits we call "Cluster B", Josh, I've pointed this out before, but I think in a lot of cases, people are having what feels like an "autistic" experience from the inside, and what is experienced as "narcissism" from the outside. If you read Kanner and Asperger's original papers, their clients were more high-functioning as well as socially isolated, and the parents of clients were described as having traits that could be considered BOTH "autistic" and "narcissistic", depending on your lens. When the autism spectrum was expanded, it was also expanded at the lower end, to include kids who previously would have been diagnosed as "mentally retarded."
This isn't to excuse narcissistic behaviours, but these labels are all nonsense. "Autism" isn't a condition, it's a cluster of traits, and those traits can be caused by any number of interacting factors -- parenting, toxin exposures, pharmaceutical exposures, diet etc. It gets convoluted because a parent who is emotionally absent is also more likely to feed a child poorly or default to popping a pill in them when they're sick instead of more time-consuming and effective remedies etc.
Sounds more like narcissism
I have an (ex) friend that I ran into 2 summers ago. Her son, whom I knew from ages 3-7, was now 12 and "autistic." So autistic, that he's in the super duper autistic class at school because he has "fits" where he throws chairs and whatnot. He hits his mom too.
However, HE IS NOT AUTISTIC. He wasn't AT ALL when I was friends with the family. What he did have, was a chaotic family life with a mentally unstable mom and an absent and shady dad (they're divorced now and it's messy as heck--I heard her side, which I'm not sure I believe of course). He never had consistent discipline and their life was just chaos (example: they lived on top of a mountain and the mom was in the car with the 2 boys when one of them popped the car in gear and it rolled backwards down the mountain and they almost rolled off a ridge. Many such cases!). I think the autism diagnosis gives her something to blame other than her inconsistent parenting.
I didn't get very close to her as my intuition told me not to. Our friendship, such as it was, ended when she wouldn't come to a mutual friend's baby shower I was hosting during COVID (even though it was outside) and she told me to tell the friend she was sorry she couldn't come. I told her (kindly) to let our friend know herself. After that she raged at me over text for 2 days. Bye, Felicia!