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This article was originally taken from the New York Times. I copied and pasted this from my GRASP e-mail newsletter. Warning, this article is long.

August 5, 2007
What Autistic Girls Are Made Of
By EMILY BAZELON - NY TIMES

Caitlyn & Marguerite sat knee to knee in a sunny room at the Hawks Camp
in Park City, Utah. On one wall was a white board with these questions:
What’s your favorite vacation and why? What’s your favorite thing about
yourself? If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Caitlyn, who is 13, and Marguerite, who is 16 (I’ve used only their
first names to protect their privacy), held yellow sheets of paper on
which they had written their answers. It was the third day of the
weeklong camp, late for icebreakers. But the Hawks are kids with
autistic disorders accompanied by a normal or high I.Q. And so the main
goal of the camp, run on a 26-acre ranch by a Utah nonprofit
organization called the National Ability Center, is to nudge them toward
the sort of back and forth — “What’s your favorite video game?” — that
comes easily to most kids.

Along with Caitlyn and Marguerite, there were nine boys in the camp
between the ages of 10 and 18. They also sat across from one another in
pairs, with the exception of one 18-year-old who was arguing with a
counselor. “All I require is a purple marker,” the boy said over and
over again, refusing to write with the black marker he had been given. A
few feet away, an 11-year-old was yipping and grunting while his partner
read his answers in a monotone, eyes trained on his yellow paper.
Another counselor hurried over to them.

Marguerite was also reading her answers without eye contact or
inflection. “My favorite vacations were to India and Thailand my
favorite thing about myself is that I’m nice to people if I could choose
any superpower I’d be invisible,” she said in an unbroken stream. She
looked up from her paper and past Caitlyn, smoothing her turquoise
halter top over the waist of a pair of baggy cotton pants. Caitlyn was
also staring into the middle distance. She has gold-streaked hair, which
was bunched on top, and wore a black T-shirt with a sunburst on the
front and canvas sneakers with skulls on the tops. The girls didn’t look
uncomfortable, just unplugged.

A counselor noticed their marooned silence and prodded Caitlyn to take
her turn. At first, she ran quickly through her answers, too. But
Caitlyn loves fantasy — she is an avid writer of “fan fiction,” spinning
new story lines for familiar characters from “Pokémon” and “Harry
Potter” — and the superpower question grabbed her. She looked at
Marguerite. “If I could have any power, I’d want to be able to transform
into an animal like a tiger,” she said, smiling and putting her hands in
front of her face, fingers tensed as if they were claws. Marguerite
smiled and tentatively mirrored the claw gesture. Caitlyn smiled back.
“I like tigers,” she said, her eyes bright behind her glasses. “Do you?”

It was a small, casual encounter and also an exceedingly rare one — a
taste of teenage patter shared by two autistic girls.

Autism is often thought of as a boys’ affliction. Boys are three or four
times as likely as girls to have classic autism (autism with mental
retardation, which is now often referred to as cognitive impairment).
The sex ratio is even more imbalanced for diagnoses that include normal
intelligence along with the features of autism — social and
communication impairments and restricted interests; this is called
Asperger’s syndrome (when there is no speech delay) or high-functioning
autism or, more generally, being “on the autistic spectrum.” Among kids
in this category, referral rates are in the range of 10 boys for every girl.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are about 560,000
people under the age of 21 with autism in the United States. (Adults
aren’t included because there is no good data on their numbers.) If 1 in
4 are female, the girls number about 140,000. The C.D.C. estimates that
about 42 percent of them are of normal intelligence, putting their total
at roughly 58,000 (with the caveat that these numbers are, at best,
estimates).

Because there are so many fewer females with autism, they are “research
orphans,” as Ami Klin, a psychology and psychiatry professor who directs
Yale’s autism program, puts it. Scientists have tended to cull girls
from studies because it is difficult to find sufficiently large numbers
of them. Some of the drugs, for example, commonly used to treat symptoms
of autism like anxiety and hyperactivity have rarely been tested on
autistic girls.

The scant data make it impossible to draw firm conclusions about why
their numbers are small and how autistic girls and boys with normal
intelligence may differ. But a few researchers are trying to establish
whether and how the disorder may vary by sex. This research and the
observations of some clinicians who work with autistic girls suggest
that because of biology and experience, and the interaction between the
two, autism may express itself differently in girls. And that may have
implications for their well-being.

The typical image of the autistic child is a boy who is lost in his own
world and indifferent to other people. It is hard to generalize about
autistic kids, boys or girls, but some clinicians who work with
high-functioning autistic children say they often see girls who care a
great deal about what their peers think. These girls want to connect
with people outside their families, says Janet Lainhart, a professor of
psychiatry and pediatrics at the University of Utah who treats Caitlyn
and Marguerite. But often they can’t. Lainhart says that this thwarted
desire may trigger severe anxiety and depression.

Other specialists are not sure that girls struggle more in these ways.
“This is a profile of both boys and girls,” Klin says of the wish to
connect that some people with autism have. But he agrees with Lainhart
that it is easier for Asperger’s boys to find other boys — either on or
off the autistic spectrum — who want to spend hours on their Game Boys
or in a realm of Internet fantasy. Klin and Lainhart also say they think
that the world is a more forgiving place for boys with the quirks of
Asperger’s because, like it or not, awkwardness is a more acceptable
male trait.

This gender dynamic doesn’t necessarily affect girls with Asperger’s
when they are very young; if anything, they often fare better than boys
at an early age because they tend to be less disruptive. In 1993,
Catherine Lord, a veteran autism researcher, published a study of 21
boys and 21 girls. She found that when the children were between the
ages of 3 and 5, parents more frequently described the girls as
imitating typical kids and seeking out social contacts. Yet by age 10,
none of the girls had reciprocal friendships while some of the boys did.
“The girls often have the potential to really develop relationships,’
says Lord, a psychology and psychiatry professor and director of the
Autism and Communication Disorders Center at the University of Michigan.
“But by middle school, a subset of them is literally dumbstruck by
anxiety. They do things like bursting into tears or lashing out in
school, which make them very conspicuous. Their behavior really doesn’t
jibe with what’s expected of girls. And that makes their lives very hard.”

No doubt part of the problem for autistic girls is the rising level of
social interaction that comes in middle school. Girls’ networks become
intricate and demanding, and friendships often hinge on attention to
feelings and lots of rapid and nuanced communication — in person, by
cellphone or Instant Messenger. No matter how much they want to connect,
autistic girls are not good at empathy and conversation, and they find
themselves locked out, seemingly even more than boys do. At the
University of Texas Medical School, Katherine Loveland, a psychiatry
professor, recently compared 700 autistic boys and 300 autistic girls
and found that while the boys’ “abnormal communications” decreased as
I.Q. scores rose, the girls’ did not. “Girls will have more trouble with
social networks if they’re having greater difficulty with communication
and language,” she says.

And so girls with autism and normal intelligence may end up at a
particular disadvantage. In a new study published in May, a group of
German researchers compared 23 high-functioning autistic girls with 23
high-functioning boys between the ages of 5 and 20, matching them for
age, I.Q. and autism diagnosis. Parents reported more problems for girls
involving peer relations, maturity, social independence and attention.

The difficulty may continue into adulthood. While some men with
Asperger’s marry and have families, women almost never do, psychiatrists
observe. A 2004 study by two prominent British researchers, Michael
Rutter and Patricia Howlin, followed 68 high-functioning autistics over
more than two decades. The group included only seven women, too small a
sample to reach solid conclusions about gender differences, Rutter and
Howlin caution. But 15 men — 22 percent of the sample — rated “good” or
“very good” for educational attainment, employment, relationships and
independent living, while no women did. Two women rated “fair,” compared
with 11 men, and the other five women were counted as “poor” or “very
poor.” None had gone to college. None reported having friends or living
on their own. Only one had a job. Undermined by anxiety and depression,
women with autism appear to be more often confined to the small world of
their families.

When Caitlyn started kindergarten and didn’t play normally with other
kids, her mother, Juli, thought it was because she hadn’t gone to
preschool. The first warning of real trouble came from the first-grade
gym teacher, who told Juli that Caitlyn exposed herself to the class.
Caitlyn is overweight, and she has always been private about her body.
Juli couldn’t imagine her daughter taking off her clothes in public, and
when she asked what had happened, Caitlyn said another girl had pulled
down her pants. “Caitlyn stood there mortified,” Juli says. “But she
couldn’t express that to the teacher.”

Caitlyn lives with her mother, her older sister, the girls’
great-grandparents and a pair of poodles in Farmington, outside of Salt
Lake City. (Her father died before she was 2.) Until second grade,
Caitlyn had a neighborhood friend with whom she went to school. Other
than that, she was often alone in class. Her teachers were frequently
frustrated with her inability to work and play in groups. But she
connected with a few adults — in fifth grade, one class aide took her
horseback riding, and the school librarian gave Caitlyn her own copy of
“Spindle’s End,” a retelling of “Sleeping Beauty,” “because she said I
helped her so much,” Caitlyn remembers.

Contrary to the Asperger’s stereotype, Caitlyn struggles in math but
tests in the highly gifted range in reading and writing. This is another
sex difference that Lord sees among her patients. “I don’t have any real
data, but a lot of high-functioning girls are real readers — not great
on subtleties, but they like fantasies and the ‘Baby-Sitters’ series,”
she says. “The boys are much less so.”

In elementary school, Caitlyn went to special-education classes for math
and social skills. At 11, as other girls began to slip out of reach,
Asperger’s was diagnosed. The shift a year later to junior high for
seventh grade was a jolt. By the second week of school, a few boys were
mocking Caitlyn’s weight and calling her weird while other kids laughed.
“No one would sit by me at lunch,” Caitlyn says. Girls told her that
they didn’t want her to be in their reading group. Caitlyn did her
homework, but she was too anxious to walk to the front of the room to
turn it in. At home, her neighborhood friend no longer came out to play.

In the winter, Caitlyn switched from a special-education math class into
a mainstream one, and the kids in her new class made her miserable. For
days she refused to go to school. She told Lainhart: “No one likes me at
lunch. I’m very sad.” (With Juli’s and Caitlyn’s permission, I read
Lainhart’s notes on Caitlyn’s treatment.) After a huge outburst of anger
at home, Caitlyn told her mother that she wanted to die. At her next
appointment with Lainhart, she said: “I listen to people’s conversations
during free time in science. They talk about live games, R-rated movies,
outfits. I feel left out.” Caitlyn told Lainhart about two dreams. In
one, her school had a bridge running through it, and she kept falling
off. In the second, she was in the lunchroom throwing a party; no one
came. Lainhart says that while boys are aware of rejection and bullying,
in her experience they are not hurt by it to the extent that some girls
are. “I have rarely had a male patient with autism become suicidal or
express such intense emotional pain,” she says.

Caitlyn has never hit another child. But at school, her retorts to her
peers — “I yelled at a . . . little bimbo. They yelled at me,” she told
Lainhart during one appointment — pushed them further away. With
Lainhart’s help, Juli persuaded the school to let her daughter eat lunch
in a classroom rather than in the cafeteria. Still, Caitlyn’s grades
dropped from A’s and B’s to D’s and F’s. Her anxiety level spiked, and
her sadness bloomed into depression.

Lainhart has seen the same blend of anxiety and depression in other
female patients. Like Caitlyn, Marguerite’s serious problems date from
middle school. In sixth grade, she moved to Salt Lake City and away from
a couple of strong friendships, and she couldn’t replace them. “She
found it increasingly difficult to do the things necessary to maintain
friendships with ‘normal’ kids,” her father says. Last fall, at 15, she
withdrew further. An olive-skinned girl with thick brown hair — she was
adopted from Guatemala as a baby — Marguerite has always liked to go
shopping and wear pretty things (not a typical trait for a girl with
autism, though not unique either). But she stopped dressing herself,
washing her hair and going to school. For months, Marguerite spiraled
into one of the worst bouts of depression Lainhart has ever seen.

Since 1990, when she was recruited to work with autistic children by
Susan Folstein, a prominent Johns Hopkins researcher, Lainhart has been
interested in the relationship between autism and depression. In a 1994
paper, Lainhart and Folstein pointed out that despite the 4-to-1
male-female ratio for autism, females made up half the autistic patients
with mood disorders described in the medical literature. The case
reports may not represent the population as a whole; still, the
overrepresentation is suggestive. Lainhart is currently looking at the
relationship between autism and depression in boys and girls and the
potential link to depression in their parents and siblings. “We know
that anxiety and depression are co-morbid,” meaning that they occur
together, Lainhart says. “And we know that depression is worse for women
in the general population. But what’s the link to autism? And is it
worse for girls?”

Social anxiety affects Lainhart’s female patients into adulthood. Liz
Lee, who is 43, is studying for her master’s degree in electrical
engineering, yet she cannot cope with going to lunch with the other
graduate students at the lab where she works. Ash Baxter, who is 22,
spends hours making art, sewing dolls with wild yarn hair and
macramé-edged suits; she created an extraordinary blue-and-gold octopus
mask out of a three-foot gourd she found in the garage. She is talented
and would like to attend art school, but Baxter can’t master her anxiety
well enough to learn to drive or live in a dorm, so college art classes
remain out of reach. Another patient, Charlotte (she asked that I not
use her last name) is 23 and goes to a social-skills class that Lainhart
runs for her patients in their late teens and early 20s. Because of the
dearth of females, the class is mostly male, and Charlotte often leaves
in the middle saying she’s “stressed out.” “She can only take so much,”
her mother told me. Lainhart says, “You see these incredible areas of
anxiety in Liz and Charlotte and Marguerite that don’t seem to have a
parallel in the boys and men.”

There is preliminary evidence that girls and women also vary from the
male Asperger’s profile in terms of their interests, as Catherine Lord
suggests. David Skuse, a psychiatry professor at the Institute of Child
Health at University College London, has analyzed data from 1,000
children, 700 of them on the autistic spectrum. “Girls with autism are
rarely fascinated with numbers and rarely have stores of arcane
knowledge, and this is reflected in the interests of females in the
general population,” Skuse explains. “The girls are strikingly different
from the boys in this respect.”

With her high aptitude for reading and writing and her difficulties with
math, Caitlyn fits Skuse’s model. Even as she was failing school last
year, she kept up her fan fiction, posting stories she had written on
the Web site Gaia Online. On the 40-mile drive home from camp, she told
me about her plan to write an original eight-book fantasy series about a
werewolf, to be called “Midnight Wind.”

One of the best-known theorists on sex difference and autism, Simon
Baron-Cohen, comes at these questions from another angle. A psychology
professor and director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge
University, Baron-Cohen has characterized autism as a condition of the
“extreme male brain.” His research shows that in the general population
men are more likely than women to score low on a test of empathy and
high on a test of recognizing rules and patterns, or “systemizing.” High
systemizing together with low empathy correlates with social and
communication deficits and, at the extreme end of the scale, with
autism. Baron-Cohen is currently studying whether elevated levels of
fetal testosterone — a prime driver of masculinity — are linked to
autistic traits.

Baron-Cohen says that he believes that autistic girls are strong
systemizers. That quality may manifest itself in letters rather than
numbers. But in his view, the thought processes for Asperger’s girls
mirror those of boys. He explains, “These females often feel more
compatibility with typical males simply because typical males may be
more willing to adhere to the linear, step-by-step form of thinking and
conversation — more like debating or playing chess or doing logic.”

To Lainhart, Baron-Cohen’s extreme-male-brain theory is an apt
description for a subset of her female patients, for example Liz Lee,
who in pursuing electrical engineering is training for a classic
Asperger’s profession. Lee is socially aloof: she usually sits on the
floor with her back to Lainhart during their sessions, twirling the
propeller of a toy helicopter. Eye contact makes Lee angry, and she says
she would like to live alone in the desert.

But based on their clinical experience, Lainhart and also Skuse see
autism as a heterogeneous disorder. Its profile may change and expand as
more is understood about girls, whose autism, they worry, often goes
undiagnosed. That is partly, Skuse posits, because girls’ general
aptitude for communication and their social competence helps some
Asperger’s girls “pass” — they pick up on their difference and carefully
mask it by mimicking other girls’ speech and manner and dress. In a
sense, their femaleness allows some girls to seem less autistic. It is
as if they start off with a social advantage — Skuse sees this as a
20-point bonus on a scale of 100 — that helps counter the disorder. This
idea isn’t necessarily at odds with the findings that show girls to be
more seriously affected by autism, Skuse says, because the girls who
succeed in masking their deficit wouldn’t be included in studies. And so
they are missing from the picture. “There is no doubt in my mind that
the way we have defined autism currently biases our assessments strongly
in the direction of identifying a male stereotype,” he says. The C.D.C.
agrees and says that as a result the estimate for the number of girls
with autism and normal intelligence may be low.

Why would autism express itself differently depending on sex? The short
answer is that no one knows. Genetic researchers, however, have just
begun to hint at possibilities. In the last two years, new data-pooling
efforts have yielded two major genetic-linkage studies — attempts to
link autism to specific chromosomes — that suggest that some of the
genes underlying autism may be different in males and females. By
isolating sex as a variable, scientists are seeing potential genetic hot
spots for autism. “By comparing males and females, we will have a much
better chance of discovering the causes of autism,” says Geraldine
Dawson, a psychology professor and director of the University of
Washington Autism Center, who was a co-author of one of the studies.

Studies that use the latest brain-scanning tools — magnetic resonance
imaging and diffusion tensor imaging — generally focus on boys. But a
single study of M.R.I.’s of both boys and girls found differences in
their brain anatomy. Published in April in The Journal of the American
Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the study compared nine
girls and 27 boys who were matched for age, I.Q. and severity of autism.
Other research has established some correlation between abnormally large
brain size and autism; the April paper reported that the brain volume of
the autistic girls deviated from the norm more than the volume of the
autistic boys. Lainhart, who is a member of the University of Utah’s
Brain Institute, has measured head circumference as a proxy for brain
volume. (The two are linked.) In a 1997 paper, she reported that the
mean head circumference of eight autistic girls at birth was
significantly greater than the norm, whereas the mean head size of 37
autistic boys was not.

These are small and preliminary studies, but their findings may relate
to a puzzle of autism: while overall, there are more mentally retarded
autistic boys than girls, a greater proportion of autistic girls are
retarded — 58 percent compared with 42 percent for boys, according to
the C.D.C. As for Asperger’s girls, Lainhart, who continues to conduct
brain research, says she hopes eventually to shed light on the deficits
of girls like Caitlyn and Marguerite and suggest new treatments for
them. “In children with dyslexia, scientists identified where the basic
cognitive deficits were,” she says. “Then they intervened to go after
those deficits, and they saw the brain change in those areas.”

In the meantime, girls with autism and normal I.Q.’s pose a particular
challenge for schools. Though mainstreaming has its benefits, autistic
kids risk becoming outcasts in a regular classroom. Yet if girls go to a
special-education program or a separate school, they are often swimming
in a sea of boys. Lord pointed to this as a factor in girls’ lack of
friendships in her 1993 study. When the girls in her sample were shifted
to specialized programs, “their opportunities to meet girls and women
with some common interests were even more limited than those of the boys
and men,” she wrote.

The Harbour School in Baltimore has tried to address this predicament.
The school has 120 students, all with learning disabilities, speech
impairments, attention-deficit disorders and autistic-spectrum
disorders. Only 19 of them are girls, which leaves one or two in each
class from first to 12th grade. (More boys than girls are also diagnosed
with the hyperactive form of A.D.D. and some learning disabilities.)
Along with the playful Baltimore street scenes that decorate the walls
of the hallways at Harbour, the predominance of gangly male bodies and
loud voices was the first thing I noticed on a recent visit. The school
felt like a haven — for boys.

And so I wondered whether the girls would feel overwhelmed, as Charlotte
often is at her mostly male social-skills class. In the school
auditorium at about 9 a.m., there were 13 sixth graders — 12 boys and a
single girl, Krissy, whose clinical designation is pervasive
developmental disorder on the autistic spectrum. She was sitting on the
floor playing Connect Four with one of the boys. She won her game,
smiled without looking at her opponent, then got up and walked across
the room to another of her classmates.

“Hi, Michael,” she said. He didn’t look up. Krissy sat down next to him
and watched him play on his Game Boy. They talked quietly about his
progress; she knew the game. A few minutes later, she found her Connect
Four partner again, and they decided to play Operation. They talked
about the rules, but when Krissy tripped the buzzer, he let her finish
taking out the body parts she was maneuvering. Krissy declared victory
and moved on again, this time to lie on the floor next to a boy who was
building with metal rods and blue glass balls.

“Do you need help?” she asked him.

“No,” he answered.

“Can I at least play with you?” Krissy persisted. The boy grunted.
Without talking more, they each built a structure.

Krissy has been at Harbour since first grade, and the small size of her
class means that she knows the boys well. Her teachers say she is at
ease with them because she shares their Game Boy enthusiasm and watches
the same movies. But sometimes Krissy’s interests seem entirely girlish.
She was excited about straightening her hair and then styling it into
corkscrew curls for her interview with me and showed off pictures she
had drawn of princesses, covered with hearts.

Harbour makes a concerted effort to give its girls the chance to develop
relationships with one another. The girls’ lunch periods coincide to
give them time together. A social worker, Kelli Remmel, runs a regular
“girls club” for a group of about half a dozen. “There are some things
the girls don’t want to discuss in front of their male peers,” she says.
“It’s a chance for them to talk about boys, how to handle hormonal
changes, other girls, their bodies, dating.”

Krissy seems to be getting the social opportunities and support that
Lord and Lainhart want for the girls they treat. Salt Lake City has good
schools for kids with Asperger’s, Lainhart says, but the catch is money.
School districts in Maryland, Washington and Virginia pay Harbour’s
tuition for more than 95 percent of the students. But districts in many
parts of the country — including Utah — don’t pay for private-school
placements for kids with Asperger’s. Caitlyn doesn’t go to a school like
Harbour because her family can’t afford it; her experience, not
Krissy’s, is typical.

Lord and Lainhart try to help by setting up social-skills groups for
their patients. But families must pay for the classes out of pocket
because medical insurers generally don’t pay for treatment and services
that focus on autism — a terrible problem for her patients, Lainhart
says. So the groups tend to meet only a couple of times a month for a
few hours. Charlotte doesn’t know the boys in her group the way Krissy
knows her classmates. At the University of Michigan, Lord runs co-ed
groups for younger children and then tries to put together groups of
older girls that mix autistic and nonautistic kids. As the girls get
older, it is harder to find normally developing girls who want to
participate. Twenty years ago, as a clinical psychologist in Canada,
Lord started a group of four Asperger’s girls who stayed in touch into
adulthood. They called themselves the highest-functioning autistic women
in Canada, she remembers, and treasured their solidarity. “It’s striking
how much girls with autism can care about each other and other people
and develop friendships that are really a source of joy for them,” Lord
says. “But when I think of the teenage girls I know, many of them have
no shot at forming those relationships.”

At the Hawks Camp in Utah, Caitlyn and Marguerite didn’t become friends.
A week earlier, Marguerite and Lainhart had made a list of conversation
starters, but Marguerite didn’t really use them. Caitlyn didn’t try to
talk to her much, either. The camp lasted only a week; for these girls,
not long enough for bonding. Still, Caitlyn said it was the best week of
her year. One day after lunch, the Hawks campers drove in two minivans
to a nearby lakefront to go tubing and Jet Skiing. Caitlyn changed into
her bathing suit, then wrapped herself in a towel despite the strong hot
sun. “Do I look O.K.?” she asked a counselor. “It’s just that there are
so many people.”

But the other kids were paying Caitlyn no mind. This wasn’t a group that
Caitlyn had to fear. She balled her hands into fists, visibly holding
her anxiety at bay. “Sometimes I feel like I’m weird and ugly,” she
said, “but I’m not going to today. I’m confident!” She strode out to Jet
Ski and later returned with a description that she planned to use in a
future story: “It was like riding a dragon through the storm.”

Back at camp, the Hawks poured onto the playground. During the school
year, Caitlyn had been excused from gym class because she was so nervous
about changing her clothes and running around in front of her
classmates. As she sat on a swing and watched kids play tag, a counselor
named Claire came over. As she and Caitlyn talked, Caitlyn did all the
tiny things that people do to engage one another, smiling, laughing,
gesturing, looking Claire in the eye. Claire urged her to join the game
and called out, “Caitlyn’s playing!” Caitlyn protested. But Claire
persisted, and finally Caitlyn yelled, “O.K., where’s the base?” A
teenage boy pointed to the monkey bars, and Caitlyn ran for it. Her
glasses slipped off her nose, and her shorts slipped a bit, too. She
hiked them up and kept running, surrounded by other kids. Sweating and
laughing, she yelled, “Safe!”

Emily Bazelon is an editor of the online publication Slate. Her last
article for the magazine was about the grass-roots pro-life movement.

Thanks for posting the article, it was interesting, and it's hard to find information on autistic females, specifically.

Reading that article reminded me of my childhood. All the times I just couldn't connect with people. If you work at it things to get better though. But you have to want it to work. I am engaged to be married, I went through college, and I had a job for a while that I chose to leave.