Eccentric

And now Susan Boyle.

Actually, this was a chain reaction to my mistake, putting into this thread a response meant for another thread, which I acknowledged above.

Yes, I'm also sceptical about these supposedly Aspie people. I also have very mixed feelings about the whole diagnosis. Some people have said that being diagnosed is like being found 'not guilty' in court, which is good, but if any of those famous people had been diagnosed as having AS when they were kids, would they have ever become famous? Of course, they might - there's Stephen Wiltshire and Temple Grandin, who were both diagnosed long ago, but there is a tendency for people found to be autistic to be written off as useless unless they show obvious savant abilities before being diagnosed.

Sorry, wrong thread, the above post belongs in my own 'How we see it' post.

Thanks for those replies. Tanya, when I say AS people find it difficult to reach out and touch their environment, no I don't mean they can't learn from experience. I mean you are aware of what's going on around you but find it difficult to feel part of it. Thanks for that Patsy Roden video, but I'm not clear what she's talking about really. Gina, on your bit about not identifying with groups, I'd be interested to know what you mean when you say you had an 'aversion' to groups. On the psychiatric point of view (and I'm no expert on that either), what I'm trying to say is they look at AS very much from an outsider point of view without much effort to identify how we see the world. If I'm not making myself clear, that's because it's not an easy thing to explain.

I'm quite well read on the subject of Asperger's Syndrome - the 'trio of impairments' etc, but do people find they disagree with what the psychiatrists say? I mean about AS generally, not you as an individual if you've had a diagnosis. I think there are important things they tend to leave out. One of these is that AS people, including me, tend to see the world as just a lot of images, sounds etc, without being able to feel part of it, as if you are in the cinema watching a film. The nearest to this I hear about is the 'glass cylinder' effect: the feeling that you are trapped inside a glass cylinder, so you can see and hear what's going on around you, and talk to people, but you can never - metaphorically - reach out and touch your environment. Another thing I find is I can never identify myself as part of any group like non-AS people can. Humans have a natural inclination to identify themselves as group members according to what they have in common: family members, age groups, national or ethnic groups, religious groups etc. I can accept on an intellectual level that I have things in common with certain other people, but only like the set theory in mathematics, which categorises and sub-categorises things. I don't have that sense of 'togetherness' that other people have - not even with family members who I have known all my life. And if someone sees the world like that, it's perhaps not surprising that they have problems with that 'trio of impairments' - social interaction, social communication and social imagination (or social adaptability, as I prefer to call the last one). Instead, psychiatrists concentrate on trying to explain our differences through complicated technical analyses of how our brains are structured. I think this would be a useful thing for the psychiatrists to learn.

Tony Attwood is a psychiatrist who specialises in AS. He's not autistic himself. Andy Warhol is thought to have had it. He once said he sees the world as if on television - not really there. (I find that as well - do other people here?) And though I've never known anyone else to suggest this, I think the writer and performer Quentin Crisp was Aspie as well. Although he had a lot of friends and socialised regularly in cafes, he wasn't socialising in the conventional sense, it was more like an improvised performance. And he once said, "I am never with people, I am always in their presence. I am never in conversation, I am always being interviewed." That sounds very typically Aspie to me.

Thanks for your replies. Gender dysphoria, or being transgendered, is nothing to do with sexual orientation, nor is it linked to gender stereotyping. This is a very common misconception. Transgendered people might be attracted to males, females, both or neither, just as other people are: there's no connection. I'm bisexual (attracted to both men and women), but that's incidentally - nothing to do with my gender identity. Lots of people have suggested that I consider myself female because I'm not a stereotypical male, but I know they're wrong. Whether you're stereotypical of one gender or the other is completely irrelevant. As I said in my OP, my conviction that I'm female, which I've had since I was about six, isn't based on any reasoning at all. I don't have to think about it - I just know. It's generally thought that the condition, like autism, is innate. Nor is it anything to do with social conditioning. My brother, who is just a few years older than me, grew up in the same social environment as me, and he's never had any problems with his gender identity. Nor has anyone else in my family. But no one has ever put me under much pressure to be masculine - thank goodness - and it may be partly for this reason that I feel able to tolerate living as a male. I don't like it, but for me it's the best of the available options. To try to put you in the picture of what it's like, imagine that, through a freak of nature, you looked exactly like a man (if you're a woman) or a woman (if you're a man) - even when undressed. So everyone mistook you for the wrong sex all the time, and you had to permanently pretend to be that sex because you knew if you told them the truth, no one would believe you - there'd just think you're mad. Think about how it would feel. You would especially feel uncomfortable about having the wrong genitals, and having to use the wrong toilet all the time. It creates problems with sexual relations as well. If I have a girlfriend, I want to relate to her as another woman, not as a man; and if I have a boyfriend, I want to be his girlfriend, not his gay lover. I hope I'm putting across the message clearly. And all this on top of being autistic. If you want to find out more about this subject, there are plenty of websites about it. Just type in 'gender dysphoria'. And one last thing - don't confuse it with being a transvestite - men who like to cross-dress. There is some overlap between the two, but it's not the same thing - most transvestites identify themselves as male and are the first to admit they are only pretending to be women. From that video clip posted by Science Geek, the evidence of a connection between ASD and gender dysphoria doesn't seem to be very strong. As far as I know, that one Dutch study is all that provides any concrete evidence.

Has anyone heard of the theory that there may be a link between being autistic and having problems with gender identity? By 'gender identity', I mean what is known variously as being gender dysphoric, having Gender Identitiy Disorder or being transsexual or transgendered. It means you strongly feel that you are the opposite gender to the one everyone else thinks you are: that you're physically male but consider yourself female, or the other way round. Contrary to popular belief, not all gender dysphoric people seek gender re-assignent treatment (the common name is 'sex change', but this term is now unacceptable). The various television documentaries on the subject that have been shown paint a rather misleading picture, because they sensationalise it - as do documentaries on autistic people. In a Dutch survey, a high proportion of people with gender dysphoria were found to also have "autistic traits", and this was mentioned to me by a psychiatrist I saw a few years ago when I was seeking gender re-assigment treatment. (Since then, I've decided against this, finding it was more trouble than it was worth: I continue to live as male but privately I know I'm a woman.) I can't prove I'm a woman - I just know, intuitively - and have known this since I was a child - this is usual for transgendered people. I've talked to lots of other transgendered people, and quite a lot of them have said they also have Aspergers. There's no evidence that one condition causes the other, it's just that both are often found in the same person.

Going back to what you were both saying earlier about coverage of autism generally focussing too much on young people, I suspect the reason for this is a common misunderstanding, even amongst professionals who work with autistic people, about how subtle the symptoms of autism can be. I think the concept of autism in adults tends to be ignored because people wrongly assume that if you're autistic, the symptoms when you were a child were so obvious that you must have got some help then. Which certainly isn't the case, especially if you were a child at a time when very little was known about autism (in my case, the 1970s). At home and at school, I was seen as merely a rather shy, nervous child who had difficulty making friends but was well behaved in class and good at my work. The first time it occurred to me that I might be autistic was less than ten years ago when I watched a documentary by Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who works with animals and has written a number of books and given many talks on autism. The cliches about autism, such as being brilliant at one thing at the expense of everything else (which certainly doesn't apply to all autistic people, and not to me either) paint a misleading picture. The various TV documentaries on the subject, while reasonable informative, tend to dramatise it, focussing on the most exciting cases, simply because it makes better television than the more mundane reality that most of us experience.

Cheap? Maybe. But nutritious? Hardly. As a cookery writer, Mrs Beeton has always been hugely over-rated. According to her biographer, Katherine Hughes, the original book, Beeton's Book of Household Management, was written more to make money than to teach people how to cook.

I watched the first episode of Young Apprentice, having watched the adult version earlier this year - the first time I'd watched it properly. The youth one is basically the same as the adult one, except with younger candidates - brasher and more arrogant. In that first episode, Sugar said, "This isn't reality TV - this is reality!" Well, it might seem like that to him and the contestants, but to those of us watching, all the evidence is to the contrary. In real business, no one would be expected to learn in a couple of days a business they've never tried before, and the boss doesn't deliberately whip up an argument like Sugar does. Anyone wanting to run a business wouldn't learn anything from watching the programme - it's just the X Factor with a business setting instead of a music one. And all this macho gesturing you get from both Sugar and the candidates (including the women) is very 1980s.

It's like trying to balance on a tightrope. I tried waving it over his face but it made the mouse pointer get stuck, and I didn't want to risk crashing my computer.

Newbie, while I accept that having Asbergers makes it difficult to understand social relationships - and I tend to struggle with them as well - after reading your posts I'm going to have to give you a bit of a telling off. If you want to find a girlfriend, you'll have to stop being so judgemental about people. You have a problem about women because you think the ones you have met in the past were "superficial, aesthetically driven and had no ambition." You later describe them as "idiots". What makes you think that? Similarly, you accuse Leeds Demon as knowing nothing about Asbergers. There is no evidence that that is the case. If you continue to take that attitude towards people, even if you don't actually say to them what you have said to us, they will think you are very rude - and women tend to be more sensitive to this than men. Start taking people as they are, and make some effort to see the positive in them.