OT, but I do too.
I have never met another person to admit it.
With youtube, I sometimes slow the playing speed down, not that I have to do it all the time.
For me it's that I have to process what's said immediately and make a semantic memory of it, as it happens as I forget what was said at the start of the sentence (never mind the previous sentence).
It's not too bad when I already know what's being said, or it's so intellectually trivial it takes little effort, but those tend to be the conversations less worth having (from my p.o.v.) otherwise it's a constant battle to process things while not missing what's being said. My CPU has only one core, no multi-tasking going on here! And the RAM is far too volatile too! And as for my backups - well, don't even ask!
"We accept that girls can present differently, but we've never diagnosed any boys like that so they probably don't exist"
I think this goes back to definitions of autism itself and needs a new look at it from the benefit of hindsight (including gender distortions). We've constructed this thing called autism which isn't a condition but rather a collection of related symptoms apparently caused by certain cognitive conditions and differences, starting with a filtered and biased view (unsurprisingly given the nature of the beast), and built on top of that for decades without knowing about and/or addressing all these misconceptions.
I don't have 'autism'. I have a number of cognitive conditions that result in, among other things, the symptoms chosen to indicate autism. In the end though these were simply the symptoms in a previously unrecognised group of people that could be seen to be common to most of them and provided a marker to determine group membership or not. But that rather wobbly marker seems now to be treated as the condition itself, while the actual cognitive conditions that result in these symptoms are treated as co-morbidities, as though they are only incidental to being autistic, while I believe
they are what makes us autistic.
I presented as an extremely able masker from a very young age, that got me through 60 years without a clue of it even despite my knowing things were not right, or anyone else realising (even a psychiatrist father or a mother who was a school teacher, presented with an educationally failing yet extremely intelligent (according to tests at the time) son, never even considered I was anything but lazy and demotivated). Subsequently no doctor, psychologist, therapist, whatever picked up on anything beyond anxiety and depression etc.
I suspect females may mask better than males, especially considering social impacts probably tend to be worse for woman than men, so they have even more discrimination to tackle and are more ostracised for not fitting the social ideal for women (I believe this is known as systemic sexism?
)
As for why they do, I wouldn't be surprised if high intelligence has a big impact (gives the ability), while I suspect girls at school tend to show more sophisticated social interactions much younger than boys, who seem to lag behind in that aspect (among others like educational attainment).
) at home, but the catch 22 is that he can't keep up the pace, or afford rent. So it's tricky.
