#People are just socialized different and amab are more quickly identified

[scatteredsculs]

Falin has girl autism because she has the manic pixie dream effect.

Laois also has girl autism in that he went undiagnosed for years and people find him annoying and off putting but he doesn't get it

Thats it that's my first post.

[parentsnevertoldus]

PMDD AND AUTISM: SENSORY OVERLOAD BY LAURA MULLEN

From SeeHerThrive

October 01, 2018

I’m Laura, a 34 year old, neurodiverse mother of two beautiful neurodiverse girls and wife to a wonderful neurodiverse man. I have struggled with PMDD, Post-partum Depression and Psychosis, and Menstrual Psychosis in my life. I’m passionate about learning and advocating for others who are suffering menstrual related disorders and advocating for the autistic/neurodiverse population. I talk openly about my own experiences through out my life, including my suicide attempts due to my menstrual related disorders.

I have two passions in life, which both relate to myself and my kids: autism and menstrual mood disorders.

I’ve been part of the Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder scene longer than I have been part of the autism scene, but both felt like home immediately. We talk about finding our tribes, our homes, with people who immediately understand us without questioning what we are going through, without invalidating our thoughts and feelings. Imagine my surprise when upon finding my autism crowd that many struggled with PMDD or other menstrual/hormone related disorders too. See, in the neurotypical world, PMDD is little known and talked about. However, in my autism support group, it’s not uncommon to see it in discussions.

I’m not formally diagnosed autistic. I self-identify and after a few years of research (which started because of my daughter’s diagnosis) quickly became a special interest of my own when I started to relate so much myself.

Women and AFAB individuals often experience autism differently than male/AMAB counterparts. We are often discounted or ignored because we are more social, and we tend to mask our struggles.

Women as a whole are expected to mask their struggles in life, neurodiverse or not.

Classic theories of emotion posit that awareness of one's internal bodily states (interoception) is a key component of emotional experience (Jamil Zaki, 2012).There is talk in some autistic groups I participate in of PMDD or hormonal mood disorders being more prevalent in those that are autistic. This leads me to believe that this sensitivity to hormone fluctuation may be part of the interoceptive sense. When a person has a sensory disorder, we think most commonly of touch, auditory, taste, sight, and smells. Sometimes vestibular and proprioceptive sense is included.

What is rarely discussed in sensory disorders is interoception sensory issues/processing and just how it can affect a person and what it can actually mean for mental/emotional health when its processing is disordered. Yes, for a sensory avoidant person such as myself who shies away from bright light because it hurts or loud noisy areas because those too are painful and overwhelming, my interoception sense is also avoidant and extra sensitive to overwhelm.

But what is interoceptive sense and why in the world would there be a connection to PMDD?

For a long, medical definition of interoception you can read more here. For a simpler definition I am borrowing a passage from www.inspiredtreehouse.com:

Interoception refers to our perception of what is going on inside our bodies and is responsible for feelings of hunger, thirst, sickness, pain, having to go to the bathroom, tiredness, temperature, itch, and other internal sensations. What’s even more interesting about interoception is that it goes deeper than physical sensations because – as with all of our sensory systems – when our brains receive these internal signals, we interpret, attend to, and analyze them. So interoception is also associated with our sense of well-being, mood, and emotional regulation. (Heffron, 2017)

We know that the interoception sense is often part of a sensory processing disorder. We also know that under stress or overwhelm that our interoception is affected, often greatly. Think of our heart rate increasing during a panic attack or irritable bowel issues due to anxiety. And these also affect our emotions, maybe our heart rate is faster than normal, so we become anxious, creating a more rapid heart rate.

”Influential theories suggest emotional feeling states arise from physiological changes from within the body.” (Hugo D Critchley, 2017). Now, we know that PMDD has a physiological response system. The rise and fall of hormones within the body triggers a physical response from several systems in our body, not just ovaries and uterus, but deep within our gut, adrenergic systems, our cardiovascular system, and our brain.

Compare the response of a sudden surge of progesterone in the late luteal phase to that of an individual with sensory processing disorder being overwhelmed by a sudden shove into a noisy gymnasium, with bright lights, many bodies, smells and a cacophony of sounds. Said individual would likely go into either shutdown or meltdown mode, as they were unprepared for such an assault on their system and may even have difficulty regulating their emotions; in fact their temper may become frayed quickly, they may find themselves having a panic attacks, anxiety may overwhelm them, their body may start producing pain signals to the overloaded senses, they may even collapse under the weight of it all.

A person without the sensory issue may find this environment exhilarating. I would certainly be huddled in a corner until I felt that I could safely slip away unnoticed. Or, I would start to snap at those around me because of a desperate need to get away.

During the monthly cycle, my sensory system would be overwhelmed by the rise and fall of hormones and I felt completely out of control, emotionally.

Because I was out of control. My sensory processing could not keep up with both the physical and emotional toll of what my body was going through. I see so many sad stories of young girls starting menses and the emotional outbursts and meltdowns make absolute sense if you think of hormones as overwhelming a sensory system that just cannot handle it. Any homeostasis change in our environment is difficult to cope with, especially drastic hormone fluctuations during the menstrual cycle.

It’s not that there is anything abnormal about the menstrual cycle itself, but rather how our body processes the sensations and systems that cause a rise and fall outside of the comfort zone.

I believe that this can explain why women are affected by PMDD and how it all works. We found out in the last couple of years that there is a genetic link to PMDD. We also know that it is a sensitivity to hormone fluctuations, not the hormones themselves. Putting two and two together is what led me to this thought process, that it is part of the sensory systems and a processing disorder that causes a severe response, or meltdown, to our hormonal cycle. Obviously, not every woman who experiences PMDD or PME or other menstrual related disorders is autistic or has a sensory processing disorder; however, many are highly sensitive, both physically and emotionally.

Sources

Heffron, C. (2017, February 27). What is Interoception. Retrieved from The Inspired Treehouse: https://theinspiredtreehouse.com/what-is-interoception/

Hugo D Critchley, S. N. (2017, October). Interoception and emotion. Retrieved from Science Direct: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X17300106

Jamil Zaki, J. I. (2012, 05 12). Overlapping activity in anterior insula during interoception and emotional experience. Retrieved from Science Direct: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811912005009

[screambirdscreaming]

I think a lot about how kids interact with gender, and how I would deal with gender if I were ever to raise a kid. I don’t talk about it a lot, in part because it’s very hard for me to express, and it part because i’ve learned the hard way that it’s something I get really easily upset about, and easily hurt by.

But I also see a lot of writing about trans kids, and almost all of it upsets me deeply. I feel very strongly that this is something that needs to be talked about in queer circles, even if I’m not always capable of talking about it myself. So.. I’m gonna try, because I just read something well-meaning that bothered me a lot, and I haven’t really seen anything remotely like my own thoughts out there.

I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who is agender, informed by what I understand of the experiences of my trans and nonbinary friends. I have a hard time understanding and perceiving gender, it’s so alien to my personal experiences. And I find myself being hurt not just by being misgendered directly, but by being reminded that I live in a strongly gendered culture. Going clothes shopping, discarding almost everything because it would force a gender on me, or because it is cut in such a way that I couldn’t raise my arms without first getting top surgery, or in such a way as to make my chest ostentatiously obvious. “Boys vs Girls.” “Oh, you know, women are like that...” “Boys will be Boys.” Choose a bathroom. Watch the changes in how people react to you, defer to you, flatter you, expect something from you, based on how they perceive your gender. And if you work in a classroom full of children, even for just a day, you see how much more intensely this is pressed into children.

Why? Literally why do we expect children to behave differently based on latent traits in their genetics that have not even started to express? There is no average difference in height, in build, in muscle mass, in hormone levels. Kids, biologically speaking, have no difference in gender or sex traits. But very quickly differences emerge in confidence, experience in physical skills, expression of anger, and so on and so on. Because different things are tolerated - a girl is punished for an angry outburst very different than a boy is. Because different things are rewarded - little boys are not complimented for their kindness or pretty handwriting. Because different things are asked for and expected and encouraged - I have seen people, with no apparent irony, ask in a room full of 10 year olds for some boys to come help them carry things. Literally any difference in physical strength before puberty (and the vast majority of difference after) is based on who has been taught how to use their body. And boys get taught. Girls, unless they outright insist, usually don’t.

Give me literally any gendered trait you’ve ever seen in a child, and I will tell you a dozen ways adults around them have taught and encouraged that behavior because of the gender the adults believe they should be.

And it’s hard, as a parent, to fight this. Because it comes from almost everywhere, from teachers and family friends and strangers in the store and the marketing of their clothes and toys and toothbrushes, and in a secondhand way from all the other kids who suck these rules up like a sponge and use them against each other with the particular cruelty only kids can manage. I love kids, but they can be brutal. My aunt and uncle actively tried not to force gender roles on their three kids, to encourage them equally in everything they tried. To some extent it worked: their son took up singing and violin, and their middle daughter took up several sports. But my aunt recounts the upsetting epiphany she had when cleaning up their toys, that the two girls had dolls and plastic horses while their brother and cars and fighter planes. Because that was what their friends had, and the packaging had pictures of kids like them, and that was what everyone expected them to want so that was what they wanted.

I think very few of us choose our genders, really. I see often in queer theory the question, “why are so many more people cis than trans?” I can’t claim to know for sure, but to me it seems like most people don’t really have strong gender feelings, and they internalize the gender they are taught to be without thinking too much about it. Some people feel a strong enough conflict between that gender and who they are as a person that they identify as trans, or nonbinary, or third-gender, or some other form of not-cis. Some people feel strongly that the gender they were assigned synergizes with who they are, and is part of their identity. Everyone else just... kinda goes along with it. One of the most persistent challenges I’ve faced in explaining to cis people why being trans is a thing is getting them to understand that gender could possibly be a thing someone feels strong attachment to - that it’s not just this trait you go along with but don’t care about much and don’t think to change, like your hair color but with more social impact. A fair number of these adults, when I explain that I decided to just opt out of gender entirely because it’s exhausting and doesn’t feel like part of me, express that the option appeals to them - “maybe if I knew about that when I was younger,” they say, or “it seems like so much work to explain all the time, but if it was easier it would be nice...”

So when I see people advocating that you should tell a child who says they want to be a girl that “boys can wear dresses and paint their nails too,” because you think they’re too young to understand gender or what being trans means, I’m just overwhelmed with - which of us ever understood gender or the choices we were forced to make? Why no one trusted us to lift things but our classmates could?Why we got laughed at for wearing certain things or for not wearing other things? Why suddenly in third grade we couldn’t be friends with certain other kids without being teased maliciously? Which of us actually chose to go through puberty the way we did? Or to take part in sports or princess games or cooties or cliques or kid-crushes we faked because we didn’t actually like boys and didn’t know how to tell yet? Or maybe the crushes were real and we just didn’t talk or think too much about the fact that we felt that way for some girls, too. Or maybe we didn’t feel that way about anyone, but we though maybe the boys we wanted to be friends with but couldn’t, because cooties, must be crushes - because we didn’t know better. I’m just saying, who actually explained to kids why clothes and toys and what people expected you to be good at had all these hidden rules? Who taught you to notice when someone was being unfair to you, assuming you couldn’t lift that, ignoring your raised hand? Who taught to notice when boys got away with things girls didn’t, but also that boys didn’t get to cry when they were hurt?

I’m just saying it’s absurd that people claim kids are too young to understand gender, when gender is being forced on them from all sides and the least you could do to shield their hearts from it is to explain it.

I’m just saying that to an eight year old, long hair and pretty dresses are what being a girl *is*, and if you tell a little amab kid that “he’s probably just a boy who likes dresses,” and toss them to the mercy of their peers as a boy in a dress, there’s good chances the kid’s gonna get hurt. You owe it to them to sit down and explain that being a boy or being a girl are these things people made up but care about a lot. That everyone is expected to be one or the other, based on some things about their bodies when they were born. That you can chose, and you don’t have to pick just one, or either of them, but that sometimes this is hard to explain to people. That some people are mean about it for no reason. That if they pick a different one than the one people decided when they were born, some people will be mean about that too. That they can explore, and change their mind, and they don’t have to choose yet. They don’t have to choose ever. That when they get to puberty, a lot of things will change about their bodies, and they can choose which way they want to change when they get there - but they don’t have to know yet. That even when it starts to happen, there’s medicine they can take to put it off for a while and have more time to decide.

I’m saying every kid deserves at some point for you to sit down and explain that people have all these ideas and opinions about what sort of person they’re gonna be, based on a few small details of how they look and how they dress. That these things don’t have to be true, that you get to choose who you are. That people keep trying to split them into one category or another, but if you want you can mix and match. Or do something totally different. And sometimes it gets hard and exhausting to keep proving them wrong all the time, but you always can. You always have the choice. And also, if they want, they can pick one gender to dress up as even if they don’t feel like it’s who they are. Gender can be like a disguise, or like make-pretend, or whatever makes them comfortable. They can be a girl at school all day and come home and change clothes and do boy things. Or vice versa.

And all kids deserve to be taught how to be strong if they want to be strong, and artistic if they want to be artistic, and to chose their clothes and toys and hobbies in any sort of mish-mash they want. And they all deserve to be taught to be thoughtful and kind, and to express their emotions, and deal with their anger, and be allowed to cry, but also to not shut themselves down or put other’s emotions above their own. That kind of thing shouldn’t have anything to do with gender at all.

And of course, they deserve to be told that if anyone is being mean to them or making them feel bad because of their gender, be it teacher or classmate or strangers in the store or anyone, that you will do everything you can to defend them and make them feel safe. Because that’s what parents are for.