Gender
Gender is a very ambiguous word, which leads to people talking at crossed purposes an awful lot. There are actually several distinct things known as gender and sex, not even including the obvious.
Types of gender:
- Gender orientation, also called gender identity, may or may not be the same thing as your neurological sex and/or internal body map. This is innate and immutable, although for some people it's apparently fluid. Don't try to change anyone else's, that would be ridiculously entitled of you. Examples include woman, man, and nonbinary.
- Gender presentation is the various culturally specific ways of hinting at your gender orientation (and likely sexual orientation too), by fitting in with other people with the same one. For example, femme, butch, and futch.
- Gender roles are a big mess of cishet stereotypes that largely don't apply to anyone in real life, let alone queer people or autistic people who don't have time for such nonsense.
Types of sex:
- Neurological sex, your internal body map, as in your sense of what sex your body should be. This may or may not be the same thing as gender orientation.
- Primary sexual characteristics are your genitals, including gonads.
- Secondary sexual characteristics are your hormonal sex. These include breasts, facial and body hair, and fat distribution over your face and body.
- Legal sex is determined by the documentation that may or may not match your actual internal body map. This seems more like a gender than a sex, but governments take a while to catch on.
Note that intersex people exist (whose primary sexual caracteristics may or may not be mismatched or ambiguous, and whose secondary sexual characteristics may or may not also be mismatched or ambiguous, either separately or with regards to each other). Also note that transgender people exist, including but not limited to people whose gender orientation and primary and sexual secondary characteristics are similarly mismatched.
Needless to say, it can get pretty complicated, something that a lot of cishet people don't want to think about... which would be fine, but they often want their lack of thinking about it to be aided by everyone else not existing, which is not fine.
There seems to be a trend that Autistic people either don't pick up on stereotypes as easily, or simply don't give them much weight, considering that they're bunk. We generally tend to think more in terms of concrete examples of, say, individual people, rather than a nebulous idea of what a generic woman or man "should" look and act like.
Overlap between Autism and being LGBT
There appear to be more LGBT Autistic people per capita than LGBT allistic people, although this is likely due to us not having as much of a desire (or ability) to fit in. In other words, more Autistic than allistic people may appear to be LGBT because we're more honest with ourselves, and therefore more often correct.
Another hypothesis is that autistic people tend to have relatively low social status. Hence, they have less to lose by coming out as members of the LGBT community, which is still a marginalised community.
Yet another hypothesis states that, to autistic people, all social rules seem to be "made up" and often do not make sense anyway. Social norms about gender expression and who you can date may seem just as weird and arbitrary to autistic people as the "How are you?" greeting, for example. Hence, it may be the case that autistic people simply don't bother with sticking to these arbitrary rules, and hence will more readily express their gender however they want, and date whomever they like.
Gender bias and "female autism"
As society treats people differently based on their various assumed genders and sexes (with a particular disregard for people with mismatched combinations), autistic traits may present differently based on which gender you were raised as, and which gender you actually were.
For example, people assumed to be girls and raised as such tend to be coerced into masking more than people assumed to be boys and raised as such, because society gives boys more leeway than girls. Combined with allistic doctors' misapprehension that autism is a "very male brain" neurotype (it isn't), and that it affects men more than women (it doesn't), this resulted in a lot of women being unaware they're autistic until they reach burnout.
Another example is the interpretation of typical Autistic traits like special interests. Due to gender bias, people will more easily believe that a boy who is "obsessed" with trains or radios is autistic, than a girl who is "obsessed" with horses or make-up. He is a "possibly genius autistic boy", and she is a "girly girl". The "obsessive" behaviour is the same. Because the gender is different, the object of the "obsession" is different, and society is sexist, the interpretation of the behaviour is different.
