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by
Devon Price
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May 13 - June 1, 2022
In a similar vein, I almost always will use “Autistic” and not “person with Autism.”
Autism is not a thing that is added on to a person—it’s integral to their life and cannot be removed from who they are.
function labels can occasionally be used to highlight the fact that those of us who can talk, dress ourselves, or hide our meltdowns have social privileges other Autistic people do not have.
“I was just in this category of ‘weird annoying kid’ off to the side,” they tell me.
Masked Autism and being a closeted gender minority often go hand in hand, and the experiences share a lot of features. The baffled families of transgender people and adult Autistics alike tend to claim there “were no signs” of these identities when the person was young.[1] In actuality, there were often many signs, which the child’s family either did not know to look for, or didn’t wish to see.[2]
It certainly didn’t help that in movies and television programs in the 1980s and 1990s, Autistic people were all silent, passive nonentities, and transgender people were perverted serial killers or trashy daytime TV curiosities.
“We have to make society over again from the ground up,” they say. “Our own little neuro-queer microsocieties. Because no one else will think to include us.”
When they do act out or behave aggressively, they’re more likely to be punished severely for not being ladylike, resulting in them learning to censor their aggression at an earlier age than most boys do.
We erect rigid rules around our lives to manage stress and make an unpredictable social world feel a little less scary:
All too often, the difference between who gets perceived as an innocent, shy Autistic and who gets viewed as creepy, awkward, and obviously disabled is more a function of things like race, gender, and body size than it is any innate difference in personality or behavior.
Perhaps because so many of us are alienated from mainstream neurotypical life, we come to identify with fantasy creatures,[14] aliens, robots,[15] or animals instead of the people around us.[16]
There’s a term for Autistic trans people who see their neurotype and gender identity as inextricably linked: autigender.[18]
They presume Autistic people are un-self-aware and easily manipulated, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions about our identities or what we do with our bodies.[20]
it presents the root of masking as being a person’s assigned sex at birth, or their identity, when really it’s social expectations that lead to a person’s disability getting ignored. Masking is a social experience, not a biological one.
Autistic people of color frequently end up having their Autism ignored due to racism and bigotry.[27]
Black Autistics are frequently obligated to mask their traits and any negative mental health symptoms because (like girls and gender minorities) society demands they be more obedient and agreeable than white boys are.
This is a systemic and far-reaching problem. White Autistics are 19 percent more likely to be diagnosed than Black Autistics are, and 65 percent more likely to be diagnosed than Latinx Autistics.[33]
Catina’s boss was, in essence, asking her to code switch, and put on different linguistic and social presentations for different situations. Many Black Americans are conversant in code switching, having to shift between African-American English (or AAE)[38] and Standard English
Code switching is similar to Autism masking in the sense that it’s an effortful process of signaling you “belong” in a space, and of knowing when to hide the sides of yourself that the majority will be oppressive toward. Code switching is a cognitively demanding activity that can hinder a person’s performance on challenging or demanding tasks,[40] and it is associated with psychological stress and feeling inauthentic and socially isolated.[41]
For Autistic people of color, being seen as hostile or difficult can become downright dangerous.
Approximately 50 percent of people who are killed by police have disabilities,[48] and Black and brown Autistics are at an especially elevated risk.[49]
We have to keep other people at arm’s length, because letting them see our hyperfixations, meltdowns, obsessions, and outbursts could mean losing their respect. But locking ourselves away means we can’t ever be fully loved.
In 1911, the psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler coined the term autism.[53] It literally means “isolated self.” This is in contrast to the term for non-Autistic, allistic, which means other-self or connected-self.[54]
Outgoing Autistics may fumble with social niceties, interrupt too often, seem “too enthusiastic,” or even be accused of histrionics, but a high degree of interest in connecting with others does generally benefit them psychologically and socially.[61] Unfortunately, because Autism is so singularly portrayed as a disorder that makes you cold and robotic, outgoing Autistics are seldom correctly identified and diagnosed as kids.
It can also make it difficult for an Autistic person to have their need for alone time or other social boundaries respected.
So many of us have poor coordination and feel at odds with our bodies,
They second-guess themselves, and are constantly running an algorithm in the back of their mind about how their actions and words will be received by others. They think a lot about how they’re perceived and rarely feel at home in any community.
What Autism actually does is influence how our brains filter through the information taken in by our senses, and how we combine all that data into a cohesive whole. That can manifest in us being either sensory seekers (sometimes called sensory inattentive types)[63] or sensory avoiders—and most of us are a combination of both, depending on the sense.
neurotypical brains tend to dismiss small details that might detract from the “big picture” their brain believes it sees.[64] Metaphorically, when a neurotypical person sees a “forest,” their minds start glossing over the dead, bare trees and clumps of hedges that complicate the view.[65] In contrast, Autistic people perceive all the individual trees, and stumps, and rotting animal carcasses. The thousands of small features don’t effortlessly combine into something larger for us,[66] so we have to process all of it separately.
It’s an all-too-common experience for disabled people, being told that your skills in one area are proof that you’re “not trying hard enough” in another.
The leading treatment for Autism in children, Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy (or ABA for short), has widely been criticized by Autistic people as being traumatic to endure.
Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals.
We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have been browbeaten into ignoring our feelings too much.
Autism can also look a lot like an anxiety disorder. Most of us are anxious nearly every moment we’re around other people, after all. Overstimulating, unpredictable surroundings will tend to activate our fight-or-flight response. The rituals and repetitive behaviors we develop to cope with stress can look a lot like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Autistic burnout presents very much like a major depressive episode. All too often, these negative mental health consequences of masking are what a therapist recognizes, rather than the untreated disability that’s caused it. Some undiagnosed Autistic
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Many women (and other gender minorities) who have been repeatedly rejected and traumatized for being Autistic develop an insecure sense of self, a (reasonable) fear of rejection, and big “overly sensitive” emotions that reflect the distress they almost constantly feel.
“I used to pretend to be whoever my boyfriends wanted me to be so they wouldn’t leave me. And that was supposedly so manipulative and evil of me,” she says.
An article by psychiatrists Meng-Chaun Lai and Simon Baron-Cohen, published in the medical journal The Lancet, has proposed that an entire generation of Autistic people were misdiagnosed as having personality disorders.[80] Unsurprisingly, they propose that most of the misdiagnosed were marginalized women.
Autism and ADHD co-occur and overlap immensely. Both disabilities relate to a person’s “executive functioning,” meaning their ability to plan ahead, divide large goals into smaller steps, sequence tasks in a logical order, and self-motivate to complete them.
Though ADHD is not believed by professionals to affect emotional processing and social skills development directly, one prominent experience among ADHDers is rejection-sensitive dysphoria, feeling intense panic and distress when receiving negative (or even neutral) social feedback from other people. Because ADHDers find rejection so terrifying and painful, their social behavior can be just as restrained and people-pleasing as that of masked Autistics.
When neurotypical people equate “functioning” with being less disabled, they fail to recognize the immense, hidden labor that goes into appearing normal. It also misses just how oppressive having to seem normal is by itself.
The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (or ASAN) and other organizations led by Autistic people reject terms like high functioning and low functioning.
Those words oversimplify how a disability affects a person’s life, and equates their productivity with their value as a human being.[92]
I never could fit in with other kids, but I could impress teachers with my grasp of big words and my sophisticated-sounding opinions.
I annoyed other kids by talking too much about subjects that didn’t interest them. I clung to adults who found me “impressive” and equated being well-behaved with being mature and worthy of their respect. I also absorbed the idea, common to many “gifted” children, that a person’s intellectual potential belongs to society, not to themselves, and they owe the world greatness to justify their oddness.
realized I was Autistic, I was basically a perpetual adolescent, performing intelligence for praise but mismanaging my personal life and not connecting with anyone in a deeper way.
The very concept of “functioning status” is predicated on the logic of capitalism and the legacy of the Protestant work ethic, which both have trained us to believe that a person’s productivity determines their worth.
Equating a person’s social value (or even their right to exist) with their productivity is sadly a common outlook, but it’s also a profoundly alienating and ableist one.
I want Autistic people to experience less shame about who they are, and to learn to take off the restrictive masks that have trapped us for decades. The first step to unmasking is accepting who you are, and finding others with similar experiences.
These connections to the Autism self-advocacy world wound up doing far more for me than the psychological establishment did.
Many Autistic people find it challenging to transition between activities. Each change requires a lot of what psychologists call executive functioning, a skill linked to planning and initiating behavior.
