Autistic people with a minority sexual orientation or gender identity face specific challenges, from having their self-assessments dismissed to difficulties advocating for their gender needs.
Girls and boys with autism show different patterns of brain activity in response to sensory stimuli.
Autism researchers must attend to the need for sex and gender diversity in study design as a rule rather than as an exception.
The brain’s immune cells, called microglia, function differently in male and female rodents. In people, a similar phenomenon may make male brains more vulnerable to autism.
Girls with autism traits have fewer problems with social communication than boys do early on, but their skills worsen by adolescence.
More boys than girls have autism; diagnostic biases and genetic factors may explain the skewed sex ratio.
Female mice may compensate for the loss of a piece of chromosome 16 better than male mice do.
Girls with an autism diagnosis have more severe impairments in social communication than boys with the diagnosis.
A greater proportion of 3-year-old girls than boys with autism have psychiatric features such as anxiety and moodiness.
A researcher proposes splitting autism into subtypes, mitochondria make neurotransmitters, and highly successful grantees may face a funding cap.