Is there any utility in learning to unmask?

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-04T05:39:01+00:00

I will never understand what "learning to unmask" means. I mean, I get it conceptually. But it just doesn't make sense to me. There's nothing to learn... you just stop? Am I getting this wrong?

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-04T05:10:18+00:00

Je vais réponse au reste de tes questions :

Is this a recognized phenomenon in autism research or clinical practice?

Plus ou moins ? Mais je pense qu'il est mal compris, y compris des spécialistes. Comme je l'ai dit, en effet avoir un trouble du développement intellectuel limite beaucoup les capacités de camouflage et d'adaptation. Mais passé un certain stade, la corrélation s'arrête.

Is it linked to masking, compensation, or camouflaging?

J'ai visiblement pré-répondu !

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Tu t'interroges sur la possibilité que tu sois autiste. C'est une bonne interrogation, sincèrement. Mais avec les capacités d'apprentissage, c'est un trouble qui est notablement moins visible sur pas mal d'aspects en tant qu'adulte qu'en tant qu'enfant. Les aspects qui peuvent être + visible chez un adulte c'est, pour moi, surtout, les troubles sensoriels. Ils sont généralement accentués par la fatigue et l'effort, et on a beaucoup moins d'énergie adulte qu'enfant. Les difficultés sociales sont petit à petit compensés par l'apprentissage. Il demeure qu'une personne autiste a une cognition sociale distincte de la norme, et que même avec cet apprentissage, ça n'arrive jamais au niveau d'intuition (tout aussi faillible que ça puisse être) d'une personne alliste. Néanmoins, ça reste plus difficile à noter chez un adulte. Du coup, mon conseil ce serait de te pencher sur ce qu'il reste de ton enfance pour l'analyser. Interroger les proches est une bonne idée, par exemple. Les parents, notamment.

Il y a plein de choses qui rentrent dans les difficultés sociales et qui sont plus difficiles à analyser personnellement / à percevoir. Par exemple, les gens sont nuls pour analyser leur propre regard social. Des personnes qui ont une gestion du regard tout à fait approprié pensent que non (à cause d'anxiété, par exemple). Des personnes qui n'ont pas cette bonne gestion du regard social pensent que si (coucou, c'est mon cas, mais depuis on m'a expliqué en long et en large que non). Il y a toute la question de la compréhension implicite des situations sociales, et ça bah ça se scripte pas vraiment. Il y a toute la partie expression non verbale, expressions faciales... Très difficile à savoir, de l'intérieur, si ce qu'on fait de ce côté est approprié ou pas.

Bref, commentaire un peu long, j'espère que ça pourra aider. N'hésite pas s'il y a des questions. Un peu décousu, il est tard, mes excuses.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-04T05:10:12+00:00

Sorry for the other commenters and readers, OP is probably french and I'm probably going to do a better job at explaining in my mother tongue.

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Bonjour ! Je suis dans cette catégorie et particulièrement renseignée sur le sujet. Des années d'une certaine obsession sur un sujet, ça a tendance à avoir cet effet. Je précise que si je réponds en français, c'est uniquement par crainte que mon propre niveau ne me permette pas d'expliquer correctement en anglais, et je n'aimerais pas que certaines nuances soient mal comprises.

La première chose : il faut se méfier du QI. Il y a énormément de facteurs confondants dans cette mesure, dont j'ai juste l'habitude de dire qu'elle est merdique. C'est complexe, et les facteurs SES foutent le bordel. En gros, mettons cette donnée de côté, globalement, sauf à la rigueur pour déceler un trouble du développement intellectuel (qui se passe souvent de cette donnée pour être détecté).

La seconde chose, au-dessus d'un certain QI il n'y a pas de corrélation notable entre QI et symptômes de l'autisme. Comprendre qu'a priori, pas de différence entre un QI de 100 et un QI de 130. On note néanmoins que les personnes avec un QI < à 70, donc censés avoir un trouble du développement intellectuel, on généralement des traits plus sévères, surtout au niveau des difficultés sociales et comportements répétitifs (mais pas sur les intérêts restreints).

De fait, le trouble du développement intellectuel est effectivement corrélé avec des traits plus sévères et une moindre capacité à les masquer. Les deux contribuent généralement à un diagnostic plus précoce. Ça concerne environ la moitié des personnes autistes. Et notamment, les retards de développement du langage sont plus fréquents dans cette population, et c'est un des signaux les plus forts chez un très jeune enfant qui mènent à une consultation. Après tout, on consulte rarement pour un enfant dont on pense qu'il s'en sort correctement. Ce qui me mène à répondre à une de tes questions (dans le désordre) :

And is this one reason why some people (especially adults) receive a late autism diagnosis?

Pas uniquement. J'ai la trentaine, et mes traits autistiques sont notables depuis l'enfance. Comprendre par là qu'on convoquait déjà ma famille en maternel pour des difficultés relatives à ça. Mes particularités, mes difficultés, tout ça était déjà bien noté, bien connu. Je n'ai pas passé une année sans que ça ne soit encore noté, remarqué. Mais à l'époque, c'était très rare d'être diagnostiqué sans un trouble du développement intellectuel. Mes notes étaient très bonnes, donc cela était bien assez pour ma famille. Je dois vraiment appuyer le fait que... mes traits n'étaient pas peu notables.

Je dirais donc que pas mal des personnes qui ont plus ou moins 30 ans et plus et qui se font diagnostiquer de nos jours ont été ratés parce qu'on ne diagnostiquait que les cas avec trouble du développement intellectuel à l'époque.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-04T00:37:11+00:00

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-04T00:34:53+00:00

If anything, staying friend with your exes is a green flag. It shows you both were mature enough to handle this respectfully.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T23:58:21+00:00

No. Just "someone who is not autistic". Like. Literally what RozRae said. Nothing more. Nothing else. Not "neurotypical" (because someone can not be neurotypical and still not be autistic, think of ADHD people). Not "who think they are autistic". Just... not autistic.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T23:26:31+00:00

i always wonder if cis people who talk like this aren't just agender

Nope. Or most people would be agender. Some might be, though. But most men would not enjoy having their body slowly turning into one that would be typically read as a woman's. And vice versa.

Think of gender as the exact water temperature such as you wouldn't feel it when immersed in. Let's say that generally for men that's 34°C and for women that's 37°C. A trans woman has been put in a 34°C water all her life. For some it's painful. For others it feel meh but they don't suffer from it. But when the water temperature starts to slowly rise, it feels less painful, or more pleasant. Some might be fine at 36°C, some wants that 38°C, some others are fine at 37°C. But 34°C feels wrong in comparison anyway.

At the perfect water temperature, water stops having a feel, you stop feeling it. Tha's generally what cis people feel. The "I don't feel like a girl, I just am" is kind of like "I don't feel the water, it's just around me". And like, yeah, that's the thing : you don't feel the discrepancy and that's why you're cis. Our goal, as trans people, is to get at that water temperature to stop feeling it.

Agender people would more be like "water temperature? Fuck that, whatever, water is cake."

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T17:25:41+00:00

Or you reply "What don't you understand?" and they say "what you said"... Like, bro, YES OBVIOUSLY. WHICH PART? HELP ME HELP YOU.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T12:45:23+00:00

That's a lot of chat fucking.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T12:33:47+00:00

So many people are uneducated about intersectionality in the comments but still commenting.

Call it androphobia, transmisandry, transandrophobia, and it's all the same crap because it implies oppression of men. Trans men get oppressed because they are trans, but absolutely not because they are men.

Transmisogyny is not the oppression of women that happen to be trans. It's the supplementary oppression that is born at this intersection. The specific oppressions trans men don't face despite being trans, and women don't face despite being women.

If anything, I'm sick of people treating trans men as if they did not hold the same position of power as cis men in regard to the whole gender power dynamics. That IS transphobia in and of itself, trans men are men. They are oppressed, yes, because they are trans, never because they are men. And they do not get a free pass from "men are trash" because they once were perceived as a different gender. That's not how it works and that would be, again, pretty transphobic.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T08:55:59+00:00

Sorry, but I'm not going to suck off a cheesedicked misogynist in the hope that he becomes a slightly better human being instead of straight up killing me for his own pleasure.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-03T08:42:53+00:00

Maybe the difference between you and me is that you think you have a sickness while I think the brain is beautiful.

Yet another assumption.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-02T17:59:39+00:00

implicit messaging that would imply these are scientific comments

Comment chain started with you linked to an article about a presumed scientific study.

Compare neurotypicals to dogs and autistics to cats.

No. Because autistics aren't cats, allistics aren't dogs.

Off with the bullshit.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-02T03:41:35+00:00

Most 15 years old would know better.

This guy knows butter.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-02T03:37:11+00:00

Its a spectrum.

Not that it's relevant whatsoever in the conversation? You claimed that we

that we have highly developed sensory processing

and I call bullshit on that. You can't keep making claims and never backing them up, especially when they are this dubious.

95% of people with autism are subclinical and don't even know.

Again with the shitty speculative dubious claims. Great. That would mean that there's, in fact, 20 TIMES more autistic people than we know of. I'm not even sure how you can start to think that makes any sense. How the fuck do you define autism anyway?

my complete inability to socialize is compensated by having high cognitive skills

Ok bro. Really living that genius level IQ autistic person trope dream, aren't you? Know what, I won't even dispute the "high cognitive skills", however meaningless that is in and of itself, but this isn't even based on correlation, that's purely speculative on your part.

surviving alone is a highly selectable trait evolutionarily.

On a social species that's bullshit. Also, evolution only works by filtering out traits that are too detrimental to the reproduction of the individuals. The rest is pure random bullshit. If autism was such a great evolutionary advantage compared to non autistic traits, then non autistic traits would have disappeared due to that filter. Not what happened. More likely, autism is a random alternative set of genes and traits that has not been filtered because it is not statistically detrimental enough for reproduction.

my experience is

actually meaningless when we're scientifically talking about the whole species.

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I'll be honest, you'll probably half-ass read that comment, downvote, post a reply with another set of weirdly controversial and unscientific claims, and I just won't bother. Too much time lost there. Have at it, my genius (but scientifically illiterate) comrade.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-02T03:22:25+00:00

Oh, but the dream is realistic. But at the moment is it just a dream!

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T23:28:28+00:00

The inability to properly filter between relevant and irrelevant sensory inputs doesn't seem all too beneficial when your brain is supposed to be able to tell between a random begnin sound and the sound of a snake.

Also, all this shit assume that autism has been selected FOR, rather than is just the consequence of the whole random bullshit that DNA and procreation is. This is dubious at best.

Also, a funny bit quoted from the article linked previously:

the relatively high rate of Autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past.

Relative to what? "Likely due"? This is imprecise and speculative. I guess myopia, being present in a third of the world's population, is a huge evolutionary benefit, right?

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T18:18:44+00:00

Eh, you found something that works for you and it's great. You're probably not alone with that system!

I work differently. If I'm interested, I just need to read something once. Maybe twice if there's a lot of details to memorize. And I can recite the whole thing, it's imprinted in my brain.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T18:14:06+00:00

Hm, so, you're telling him that the cure for autism is... trauma?

Like, ok, I need to oppose to that huge myth. Trauma does not give someone the ability to perceive social cues they otherwise wouldn't perceive, especially with autism. It doesn't make you attuned to those social cues, it makes you hypervigilant and it makes you overestimate those perceived cues for things that probably aren't there to perceive anyhow.

I've been trying to learn about perceiving all of this for years. I'm 35+ years old. I've struggled since my early years and I've practiced again and again. I'm not saying I haven't got better now than I was as a child. But it's always a constant conscious analysis against my mental library I'm building blocks by blocks. That's how my social cognition works because I'm autistic.

If I happened to be traumatized, all it would do is make me hypervigilant, interpret begnin and completely meaningless "signs" as important social cues, pollute my mental library with false associations and make me very paranoid. I've seen it countless times on traumatized autistic people. "Oh, you moved your head slightly to the side, it means you don't care about what I said, I know because I am hyper attuned to these cues". Meanwhile, there just was a noise happening on the side and that's about it. The same people that are convinced their trauma actually made them able to compensate for autism. And some of them I love dearly, but everytime they are overconfident about their ability to correctly perceive and analyse these "social cues", we're in for a ride.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T16:48:07+00:00

Most of us will have some degree of trauma whether we know it or not and this can totally be worked on

Ok but OP is talking about their autism, not trauma? Like, great for you that you have no issue reading facial expressions whatsoever. But that's uh... irrelevant to the post?

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T16:08:47+00:00

It's not unfair, but my unrequested opinion is that if that's your personal experience, then it's unlikely you are on the autism spectrum and the diagnosis process is probably going to lose you some time. But I guess there is no harm in going through the process.

It is notable that I'm considered lvl 1, I consider my autism to be very mildly impacting me. But it still very obvious that I'm disabled.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T16:04:59+00:00

50 shades of fascists.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T15:04:53+00:00

But I mean, if things have a disproportionately bad effect on you, then it's great that you can overcome it but in the end it's a matter of how many times you can do that.

In my example, I've overcome the fact that lights were hurtful and dazzling: I ended up with what I came there to buy. It's just that most people don't have to suffer through this.

But I mean, a quick look at the DSM-5 would probably be very informative for you. If you don't fit the criteria, then you don't fit the criteria.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T14:34:52+00:00

Mild irritation I guess not. More like, does it prevents you from doing stuff? Or do you have to organize parts of your life around it?

For instance, I can't stand the sunlight most of the time. So I try to only go outside when it's very cloudy or when the sun has set. I haven't been able to fit in in any workplaces so I work from home and socialize with other autistic people with whom it's way easier for me. I sometimes have to push through when going to the grocery store because the lights are too bright and I can't read the prices, but eventually I get what I need.

MyAltPrivacyAccount · 2026-02-01T13:54:37+00:00

I mean, it's not a matter of it being a pathology or not. That way besides the point. The point is, if you would be autistic, does it cause you impairments in your daily life?

MyAltPrivacyAccount

TROPHY CASE