Your yearly reminder that adult autistic women exist
Once a year, every year, I embark on a quest to scream from the mountaintops to anyone who will listen: “Yes, autistic women are real! We are not fictional blue-haired manic pixie dream girls!”
This screamfest will, unfortunately, never not be necessary, because the bulk of popular research around adults with autism continues to hyperfocus on the male experience. In 2013 the NIH reported that autism “remains highly biased towards males,” only to circle back in 2022 to discover that “autistic females are disproportionately excluded from research participation as a result of commonly used autism diagnostic measures.” In other words, researchers studied the ever-loving shit out of men while actively ignoring women.
As a result, the academic community began to assume that, of course, only men and boys were autistic. This assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as autistic women and girls failed to meet the diagnostic criteria of autistic traits present in men, resulting in women getting a diagnosis much, much later in life — or, like me, taking the lack of research with autistic women as a sign to forgo diagnosis altogether.
That’s why the drumbeat of “we out here” won’t be stopping anytime soon. Finding out you have autism as an adult feels like a death knell to many autistic women, due to not just the immense stigma surrounding autistic traits, behaviors, and diagnoses, but among the confusion and fear neurotypicals have around the simple idea of a woman being autistic.
The complex journey of discovering autism later in life as an autistic woman
Most western countries have a history of ignoring the experiences and needs of roughly half of the population, making unilateral decisions that affect our healthy and safety at community, societal, medical, and especially governmental levels. Caroline Cirado Perez notes in Invisible Women that everything from parking lots to public housing to PPE is designed with next to no consideration for women. Leaving us out of studies and scientific research bakes risk and precarity into societal structures, often setting us up for failure, hardship, and harm — sometimes even death.
Now add neurodivergence to the mix. For autistic women in particular, simply finding out you have autism as an adult is a struggle.
Learning I’m autistic in adulthood felt like unearthing a hidden manuscript of my life. Suddenly, experiences of sensory overload, social faux pas, and profound exhaustion after seemingly simple interactions made sense. But like many adult autists, alongside the relief of recognition comes a heavy grief for the younger you who struggled without support. Why didn’t anyone notice? Why wasn’t I believed when I said I was overwhelmed?
Not only do a large swath of psychologists not actually believe autistic women and girls exist, this is regularly enforced by the societal expectations we live under.
For many autistic women, the answer lies in societal expectations of womanhood. Girls are often socialized to “mask” their differences from an early age. We learn to mirror others, to suppress our sensory needs, and to excel academically or socially—often at great personal cost. The result is that we can appear “fine” to outsiders, while internally grappling with anxiety, burnout, and a pervasive sense of alienation.
Societal expectations for girls and women contrast with the stereotypes we use to diagnose boys and men
The reality is, autism in women often manifests differently than in men. Autistic women may be more likely to hyperfocus on social rules, develop intense special interests that align with societal norms (see: obscure fashion), or channel their creativity into masking their challenges. This divergence from the stereotypical “autistic traits” means that many of us slip under the radar for years, or even our entire lives.
To illustrate the point, if an autistic boy is, say, aloof, socially inept, shy, and intensely interested in trains, he’s definitely “on the spectrum” and his parents will likely flock to get him admitted right away. But if his also autistic sister is a little brash, but chatty, neat, is really into Myers-Briggs types, and has read every Neil Gaiman book by the time she was 11 years old, she’s…just a girl. So long as her attitude and special interests are sufficiently girly, kind, docile, and sweet, her autistic traits will fly under the radar with everyone, except other autistics.
When society doesn’t believe we exist, our struggles become invisible
I wish I could share that example to neurotypical researchers and autism moms. Then I’d tell them to take Shy Train Boy and Brash MBTI Girl and age them up 15 years. The boy becomes Francis Bourgeois, and the girl becomes…well, me!
Tell the average person you’re autistic in a female body, though, and one of two sentiments will come out of their mouths:
- “Oh no, I’m so sorry for your loss. How is your mother taking it?”
- “But you can’t be autistic! You’re so hot!”
Still others think autism is something you can catch, like the flu. “Can I get autism later in life? What essential oils cure it?”
Previous versions of the DSM, referenced by every clinical psychology professional in America, used to list both left-handedness and homosexuality as mental disorders. People used to talk about gay men and lefties like victims suffering from a disease.
When autism and womanhood collide, intersecting stigmas combine into this beautiful amalgamation, a funhouse mirror of misaligned stereotypes designed to comfort confused neurotypicals, when in reality neurodivergence might be more akin to being neurocognitively left-handed. In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker calls this the pathology paradigm, a disempowering system of rhetoric surrounding neurodiversity that makes two fundamental assumptions:
- There is only one right way for a brain to think; and
- If your brain or behavior different from this way right, then there is Something Wrong With You.
Being an autistic adult is hard enough. Being an autistic adult woman adds a new layer of complexity. Women are expected to be emotionally intelligent, socially adept, and nurturing—traits that many autistic women either struggle with or express in unconventional ways. But, they won’t believe we’re prone to that level of struggle until they see it with their own eyes.
And then we’re just…bad women.
Autistic women aren’t autistic until we’re failing at gender norms
Take, for instance, the stereotype that women are natural caregivers. While many autistic women deeply value relationships, the emotional labor of caregiving can be especially draining for us. Yet, if we struggle to meet these expectations, we’re labeled “cold” or “selfish.” Similarly, autistic women who excel in traditionally male-dominated fields or reject conventional beauty standards may be dismissed as “eccentric” rather than recognized as neurodivergent.
These stereotypes don’t just make it harder for neurotypical people to recognize us—they also make it harder for us to recognize ourselves. Many autistic women internalize societal messages that we’re simply “too sensitive,” “too quirky,” or “too much.” We may go through life blaming ourselves for not fitting in, all while silently battling chronic exhaustion from trying to meet impossible expectations.
Stereotypes that erase autistic women
The myths that perpetuate the invisibility of autistic women are deeply entrenched:
1. “Autistic people lack empathy!”
Let me be bold enough to assert that most women, including us autists, are taught at the earliest possible age to express empathy whether they want to or not. It’s a survival tactic. Show me someone who thinks no autistic woman has ever cared about another human being, and I’ll show you someone who thinks autism begins and ends at Sheldon and Spock. (They’re probably insulting one of their friends right in front of their faces.)
2. “Autism is a childhood condition!”
God, enough with this. You don’t graduate from autism. You can’t cure left-handedness, or being gay, or being autistic. Neurodivergence simply describes alternative ways for a brain to do brain things. You can put your child in ABA and train them like a dog to behave more neurotypically, but they’re still autistic, friend. And that’s okay!
3. “Autistic people aren’t interested in relationships!”
Anyone saying this clearly hasn’t met a high school girl whose special interest is her new partner. There’s a very clear difference between “new relationship energy” and collecting so much information about another living, breathing person that you make them think you’re stalker. Ask me how I know!
4. “Autistic people can’t mask.”
Tell that to every autistic woman in corporate America. And when you’re done, thank her for her time by pitching in for her next therapy session.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
This has been yet another episode of “autistic women are real.” Please, spread the word! Like fake gamer girls of 2014, we must prove our existence, in real life and on the internet, by any means necessary. (Unless we want to spend another few decades waiting for research to reach gender parity.)
