#cat-q

[catastrofries]

So uh. How accurate are RAADS and CAT-Q?

[audhd-space]

Tried the CAT-Q (Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire) on Embrace Autism and here’s my result.

Higher on compensation and I think that’s because I made psychology and sociology my special interests when I was growing up.

You can take the test here.

[outragedtortilla]

If you haven't checked it out yet, there's something called the CAT-Q, which is a questionnaire for measuring what kind(s) of ways you might camouflage or mask your autism symptoms. this site does some autoscoring for ya so you don't have to do the math Could be helpful to bring to a therapist so they have some more context about who you are and what you struggle with (instead of dealing with open-ended questions if that is counterproductive for you). Or, just to know more about yourself and what it costs for you to navigate the world out there, what you want to keep in your life (e.g., for interactions where you don't want to explaint too much because they're 2 second interactions for something) vs. what you want to communicate to people who are around and should know to let you not mask/camouflage.

[redvelvetrevolver]

I thought this autistic masking test, the CAT-Q, was really interesting. I'm an allistic (non-autistic) person, but I understand concepts around autistic masking from the perspective of being someone who feels different. Of course, that difference is very bound up with particular life experiences, one of which is being nonbinary in a binaristic world. Another is being a survivor of complex, personality-altering trauma, and another is being in recovery from a very severe chronic illness. And spiritual history and experiences constitute a fourth branch of this tree.

I scored 109, which it immediately tells me indicates some autistic trait masking. But interestingly, when I scrolled to the charts comparing different genders' scores (autistic and non-autistic) my score was exactly average for non-autistic nonbinary adults.

This makes a lot of sense to me- being nonbinary-- and in my case, visibly gendernonconforming-- in public is really like masking in the sense that you are aware that other people may be perceiving you in a variety of binaristic or nonbinaristic ways. You will think about 'do they think I'm a man or a woman?". 'Am I in danger if they think I am neither/both/queer?' 'Is this a safe person' 'Should i bend my behavior to suit the gender they think I am?' 'Should I present behavior that conflicts with the gender they think I am- and what are the pros and cons of doing so.'

It's only possible for nonbinary people to not be masking if we are being understood as nonbinary, or if we genuinely do not care at all how people perceive us. And that is likely fairly rare among visibly GNC nonbinary people because understanding how people around us see us is how we stay safe.

I think it's disappointing that there was no race data reported on this page. i would expect there to also be masking data differences for different races and genders depending on the need to appear in a certain way in different public contexts. I wasn't able to find any race data on CAT-Q yet, but I'm guessing if that data were broken down that racial minorities would experience higher CAT-Q scores.