Is it true that lesbians are more likely to be autistic? I've never heard that before, and looking it up mostly brings up that trans people are commonly autistic and women often go undiagnosed.
Autistic women are more likely to identify as lesbian, asexual & bisexual, as well (presumably) as all the many stupid tumblr sexualities. In other words, everything except straight. They also tend to be much more sex-averse in general, literature tends to turn up pretty high rates of celibacy that seems to be driven mostly by lack of desire for sexual contact.
Autistic men display a similar pattern sans the sex-averse part. However, I believe that the odds ratio for homosexuality is a bit lower for autistic males. A lot of studies on the subject are a bit muddled and often it's not really clear what's being shown but the broad trend is lower rates of self-identified heterosexuality.
For example
this study which has the OR for female homosexuality identity being ~2 vs. ~1.5 for men though confusingly men apparently display near 4x for attraction. Homosexual contact is presumably higher because they are more gay, then massively lower for heterosexual contact because they don't get laid so much.
While
this study has basically no difference in rates of homosexuality but elevated rates of bisexuality (OR 1.73) and 'None of the above' (OR 3.05). That last catch-all category was 19.1% of all autists as well, which is a lot. Unhelpfully, the authors don't split by sex.
This is a study with a nice design but a tiny sample size:
It's just 14-15 year olds but I think the really high rates of uncertainty are of note and possibly dove-tail with the previous study. My personal hypothesis for a lot of the oddness in autistic sexual orientations is due to in part to impaired
mentalizing and that this is especially pronounced amongst women.
These are some tables from
this study which convey the same general pattern:
The sexual orientation data is again probably a bit rubbish due to small sample sizes (e.g. their controls are all straight) but it's the same pattern.
The real interesting thing about this study is in these tables though:
There is a lot going on here. Of particular note (and relevance to this thread):
- 42% of female autists say they never desire sexual contact.
- 50% of female autists are apparently virgins which is similar to the male 44.6%. (EDIT: I kind of suspect that this might be partially an artifact of the question asked though - rate of virginity is probably a bit lower since someone who hasn't had sex for 10 years might just answer 'Never')
- Male autists like to coom.
- 30% of male autists met the threshold for hypersexuality.
- Apparently 28% have pedophilic urges; this seems unreasonably high IMO but almost everything in these tables is pretty fucked.
