Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

drug addiction,[33] and insecure attachments to others.[34] We tend to maintain shallow relationships, out of fear that people would hate getting to know our “real selves.” We may withdraw from other people, leading to negative emotional and psychological outcomes. And the more isolated we are, the less practice we get socializing, leading to a feedback loop of social disempowerment and shame.

Many Autistic people have trauma histories and post-traumatic stress symptoms, and as I’ve already mentioned, a lifetime of masking puts us at a high risk of conditions like depression and anxiety.[40]

co-occur alongside Autism,

Some Autistic people can’t speak; others are incredibly hyperverbal from a young age, with huge vocabularies.

Some Autistics can read people’s emotions so easily that it’s overwhelming; others empathize with animals or objects, but not people; some of us have zero emotional empathy.[41]

What unites us, generally speaking, is a bottom-up processing style that impacts every aspect of our lives and how we move through the world, and the myriad practical and social challenges that come with being different.

If you struggle in your close relationships because of attachment trauma or an inescapable fear of rejection, you’re neurodivergent too (you might also get stuck with a particularly stigmatizing label, such as Borderline Personality Disorder).

Essentially no one lives up to neurotypical standards all of the time, and the rigidity of those standards harms everyone.[42]

Autism is just one source of neurodiversity in our world. The term neurodiverse refers to the wide spectrum of individuals whose thoughts, emotions, or behaviors have been stigmatized as unhealthy, abnormal, or dangerous.

“Everybody is a little bit Autistic,” is a common refrain that masked Autistic people hear when we come out to others. This remark can feel a bit grating to hear, because it feels like our experiences are being downplayed. It’s similar to when bisexual people get told that “everybody is a little bit bi.” When most people make remarks like these, they’re implying that because our difference is so universal, we can’t actually be oppressed for it, and should just shut up about it.

breakthrough about how mental disorders are defined: why do we declare some people broken, and others perfectly normal, when they exhibit the exact same

traits?

an Autistic person benefits from more flexibility at work, and more social patience, why not extend tho...

Autistic shutdown happens when an Autistic person gets so overstimulated and stressed, they can no longer process their surroundings.[51]

These same populations of people also tend to be raised to be more agreeable and pleasant than their white male peers.

Informed by eugenicist ideals that only granted rights to those who were “valuable” to society, Asperger focused on describing Autism as a disorder for intelligent, yet troubled boys, usually ones from wealthy families.

Autism presented. Nonwhite Autistics were instead identified as

defiant, antisocial, or schizophrenic—all disorders that made it easier to incarcerate them, or forcibly place them in institutions.[62] A

Crystal are still routinely passed over and denied assessments, because they are well-behaved and too pleasant to “really” be Autistic.

Autism is so broadly associated with assholery that many of us initially hate associating with the term,

and try to overcompensate by being excessively easygoing and nonconfrontational.

We may eschew relationships, drop out of grueling academic programs, avoid working in fields that require networking and socializing, or completely disengage from activities that

involve using our bodies, because we feel so detached and uncoordinated in them. Most of us are haunted by the sense there’s something “wrong” or “missing” in our lives—that we’re sacrificing far more of ourselves than other people in order to get by and receiving far less in return.

As of 2020, one in 54 children is diagnosed as Autistic, up from one in 68 just four years ago. In the 1990s only one in every 2,500 children was diagnosed.[66] This upward trend shows no sign of stopping, as all evidence suggests the condition is still profoundly underrecognized in women, trans people, Black and brown people, people in poverty, and those without access to screening and therapy.

In the United States, as many as 50 percent of all people who need mental health support lack access to

From all this data, we can assume that at least half of all Autistic people in the United States currently fail to get diagnosed.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that Autism runs in families, and

A limited number of specialists are qualified to assess and diagnose Autism (your average psychologist can’t do it),

this process can cost anywhere from $1,200[70] to $5,000.[71]

“The first one said basically the same thing my grandpa used to say: girls usually aren’t Autistic. You’re doing fine in life. Don’t worry about it.”

They might understand that Autistic women and people of color have to appear friendly as a means of survival,

reinforcing old sexist, white supremacist notions of how the disability looks. This brings me to my third question: what do you hope to get out of being formally diagnosed?

There’s too great a risk that their colleagues would view them as incompetent or unprofessional if they were open about their neurodivergence.

learning you’re Autistic is a journey of self-acceptance, community building, and growing self-advocacy, and you might not need or want a diagnosis to go down that path.

self-determination or self-realization

Diagnosis is a gatekeeping process, and it slams its heavy bars in the face of anyone who is too poor, too busy, too Black, too feminine, too queer, and too gender nonconforming, among others.

This!-

Being identified formally as disabled is very much a double-edged sword; a diagnosis can even be used against you in divorce proceedings or child custody cases, or to force a legal adult under a financial conservatorship.

Unfortunately, Autistic people are frequently put in the position of having to educate our own health care providers.

Medical documentation does not make your experience any more real.

I believe that Autistic people have the right to define who we are, and that self-definition is a means of reclaiming our power from the medical establishment that has long sought to corral and control us.

Throughout this book, I capitalize “Autistic” for the same reason members of the Deaf community capitalize “Deaf”—to indicate it is a part of my identity I am proud of, and to signal Autistics have our own culture, history, and community.

Disability is not a bad word, because being disabled is not a shameful thing.

We are not “differently abled”—we are disabled, robbed of empowerment and agency in a world that is not built for us.

A person who is completely blind is not “differently sighted”—they lack an ability that other people have, in a world that was designed by and for people who can see.

Naming the reality of disability shows respect for disabled people and awareness of how we are oppressed. “Differently abled” attempts to erase that behind a cutesy euphemism, and many of us find the term offensive.

Asperger’s, though that disorder label no longer exists, and was rooted in Hans Asperger’s eugenicist research.[79]

The word bisexual was once a mental illness label,[80] but we don’t tell bisexual people they can’t use it because of its offensive history.

they do serve to imply that we should be defined by how productive and independent we are.

My acceptance in society is conditional on my behaving respectably and being productive.

“I wasn’t raised or ‘socialized’ as an Autistic girl. I was raised as a weird kid, and a gender failure.”