Lona's Reviews > Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism

The essays were interesting, but they read like they were written for neurotypicals to understand what autism is. They were also all written by white cis women. There was a slight mention of the lack of help for autistic people of colour but it was 1-2 little passages.

Positive feedback: Since I saw myself in almost every chapter reading this book backed up my desicion to find out if there is an overlap, after my ADHD test in 2 months, so this was kinda helpful. In regards of the autistic traits, struggles and thoughts the essays were good, I resonated a lot with them.

What I did not like were most statements about gender specific topics, here and there it was mentioned that "women tend to be more XYZ" without clarifying that this is not because of differences in the brains of men and women but because of socialisation. Also Baron-Cohen was quoted, his wikipedia page says:

Autism research
In 1997 Baron-Cohen developed the "empathizing-systemizing (E-S) theory" which states that humans may be classified on the basis of their scores along two dimensions (empathizing and systemizing). The E-S theory argues that typical females on average score higher on empathizing relative to systemizing (they are more likely to have a brain of Type E), and typical males on average score higher on systemizing relative to empathizing (they are more likely to have a brain of Type S). Autistic people are predicted to score as an extreme of the typical male (they are more likely to have a brain of Type S or extreme Type S

Today we know that there's more solid science to debunk the myth of the male and female brain (I recommend reading some Gina Rippon here) than to back it up. Confusing was, that in some essays the authors wrote about how women are typically XYZ, but they don't feel like they have a "male brain", so it's kinda sad that Baron-Cohens theory is seemingly the most known among the authors of this book, who seemed annoyed by the stereotyping themselves.

There was one passage about gender dysphoria though, and it was even said that "a common therapeutic resolution for girls on the spectrum is to consider themselfes gender-neutral, or non-binary" and that gender confirming surgery also can be the solution in many cases - the phrasing of the quoted sentence is unfortunate in many ways, but given that many neurodivergent people are nonbinary I'm glad that this was at least mentioned once. It was not part of the essay though, but part of one of the comments by the neurogoloist who commented after every chapter (this one was about self care if I remember it right).

Now people may say "this is a book about autism and not about gender issues" and they may be right, but intersectionality is so important and the lack thereof is a big disadvantage in this book. Also gender was a big topic in here, especially that many of the women did not feel like the clichés about women applied to them, so there could've been at least one whole essay about this topic, but to be honest, the cis only selection felt intentional.

Anyway, if anyone needs a recommendation with PoC voices and without the whole talk about male and female brains "Stim: An Autistic Anthology" by Lizzie Huxley-Jones would be my recommendation.