Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

Almost anyone can be viewed as defective or abnormal under our current medicalized model of mental illness—at least during particularly trying periods of their lives when they are depressed or their coping breaks down. In this way, neurotypicality is more of an oppressive cultural standard than it actually is a privileged identity a person has. Essentially no one lives up to neurotypical standards all of the time, and the rigidity of those standards harms everyone.[42] Much as heteronormativity harms straight and queer folks alike, neurotypicality hurts people no matter their mental health status.

The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder. It also includes people with brain injuries or strokes, people who have been labeled “low intelligence,” and people who lack any formal diagnosis, but have been pathologized as “crazy” or “incompetent” throughout their lives. As Singer rightly observed, neurodiversity isn’t actually about having a specific, catalogued “defect” that the psychiatric establishment has an explanation for. It’s about being different in a way others struggle to understand or refuse to accept.

At times, I can be so intensely focused on a task (such as reading or writing) that the rest of the world entirely drops away.

At other times, I’m an anxious and distractible wreck, unable to make my way through a single sentence of a book because my pet chinchilla is hopping around in his cage and making the bars rattle. These two very disparate responses have the same root cause: the overexcitability of Autistic people’s neurons and the inconsistent way that we filter stimuli (at least compared to allistics).

Trauma survivors often become hypervigilant, which tends to come with intense sensory issues.[45]

Most people have heard that Autism is a spectrum, and it’s really true: each of us has a unique constellation of traits and features, all at various degrees of intensity. Some people are also subclinically Autistic, meaning they might not qualify for an official diagnosis, in the eyes of psychiatrists, but share enough struggles and experiences with us that they belong in the community. Relatives of diagnosed Autistic people, for example, frequently are found to exhibit subclinical traits.[47] Of course, what’s considered to be “subclinical” is often more a function of a person’s ability to hold down a job and conform to societal rules than it is a reflection of how much they are suffering.

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.

You might sometimes hear this called “typically presenting” Autism, though that’s really a misnomer. It’s more like stereotypical Autism.

An Autistic shutdown happens when an Autistic person gets so overstimulated and stressed, they can no longer process their surroundings.[51] It’s the quieter, more interior counterpart to an Autistic meltdown, which tends to involve more crying, self-harm, or outward aggression. Shutdowns are essentially a way of dissociating from one’s surroundings. It can look like falling asleep very suddenly, becoming unresponsive, or just kind of zoning out

“Getting smaller and asking for nothing was how I kept people from calling me too sensitive so often,” she says. “That and assuming that if I was bad at something, it’s because I was never, ever gonna be good at it. Better to not ask.” Now that she knows she’s Autistic, Crystal is trying to unlearn these deep-seated beliefs about herself.

You and me both, Crystal.

The idea that Autism is a “boy’s” disorder goes all the way back to when the condition was first described at the turn of the twentieth century. Hans Asperger and other early Autism researchers did study girls on the spectrum, but generally left them out of their published research reports.[55] Asperger in particular avoided writing about Autistic girls because he wanted to present certain intelligent, “high-functioning” Autistic people as “valuable” to the Nazis who had taken over Austria and were beginning to exterminate disabled people en masse.

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. Girls with disabilities were seen as more disposable, so they were left out of the conversation.[57] Black and brown Autistics weren’t described at all by Asperger or most of his contemporaries, even those who were doing research in more racially diverse countries such as the United States. The existence of LGBTQ and gender nonconforming Autistics was similarly ignored. In fact, the developer of the first therapeutic “treatment” for Autism, Applied Behavioral Analysis therapy, was Ole Ivar Lovaas, who also invented anti-gay conversion therapy.[58] That legacy still haunts the lives of many LGBTQ Autistics, who often feel out of place both in mainstream queer spaces and in Autism groups.[59]

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]

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. It takes many years of research and meeting real-life counter-examples for most of us to recognize Autism isn’t the cold, robotic condition we’ve been told it is.

I am so glad i did my internet neurodivergence learning before my dx!

Of course, even the idea of pursuing a treatment “for” Autism is predicated on the idea we are broken or sick. This is an idea the neurodiversity movement completely rejects. There is no medication for Autism, no cure for it, and no way of changing one’s neurotype. As a community, most Autistics oppose attempts to “fix” us. There are some modifications that can be made to existing therapeutic methods, to make them a better fit for Autistic adults, but unless a provider takes the time to self-educate, they may be unaware such modified treatments exist. For the most part, 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.

The Autistics who lack access to fair diagnoses need solidarity and justice the most desperately out of all of us, and we can’t just shut them out.

The parents I know who have had a positive experience with assessment entered the diagnostic process recognizing they would need to fight many battles to have their child’s agency and humanity respected. This is true of the adults who have successfully pursued formal diagnosis for themselves as well. Unfortunately, Autistic people are frequently put in the position of having to educate our own health care providers. Autistic children in particular need strong advocates in their corner, fighting to make sure their boundaries are respected and that any treatment they are given is actually in their best interest. If you wish to get diagnosed, or wish for your child to be, you should go into the process with accurate expectations, armed with as much information as possible, and ready to fight or switch providers multiple times if needed.

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.

Throughout, I will also refer to Autism as a disability. Disability is not a bad word, because being disabled is not a shameful thing.

These words obscure reality and reflect a discomfort many people have with disabled bodies and brains. 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. The world actively dis-ables people by failing to provide accommodations they need. 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.

Autism Terminology: Common Dos and Don’ts

I was raised as a weird kid, and a gender failure.”

Well.

They lacked the fine motor control to do makeup or write in pretty cursive letters.

Is this why my handwriting looks like it does??? I want all those bad grades on penmanship in elementary school back.

the comfortable, practical ways that they dressed.

The entire not-wearing-jeans until I was teased/bullied into it thing.

“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 Autistic girls engage in self-stimulatory behavior, it tends to be less physically damaging: less arm biting, more hair twirling or opening and closing a book quietly many times.[4]

We often have jewelry to fiddle with, my goodness

On the flip side, when Autistic girls have meltdowns, it tends to get written off as an emotional outburst.

There’s a particular way the neurotype tends to present among people who only discovered the identity late in life. We tend to be emotionally withdrawn yet friendly and socially adaptive. We’re social chameleons, and masters at making people like us, but we never let much of our real selves show. We erect rigid rules around our lives to manage stress and make an unpredictable social world feel a little less scary:

eat this easy-to-prepare meal at this time of day,

Hello smoothies

try to socially “mother” us into more normative behavior.

Managers at work. Well if it was that easy i would just have already done it!

I’ve always had some male Autistic traits, like a tendency to be didactic

Didactic but masked here

I was raised and socialized as a bit of an odd freak more than I was a “boy” or a “girl.” Neither girls nor boys related to me as one of their own, and I didn’t identify with them, either.

This feels right

Our hyperliteral, analytic minds recognize that the rules of the gender binary are arbitrary and entirely made up,[17]

There’s a term for Autistic trans people who see their neurotype and gender identity as inextricably linked: autigender.[18]

Sadly, many “gender critical” parents and mental health professionals don’t see it that way. Transphobic people often take the strong association between gender variance and Autism as a sign that we aren’t “really” trans, we’re “just” Autistic and confused.[19] 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]

"Fix your hearts or die"

it’s meaningless to question whether a trans Autistic person would have “still” been trans had they not been born neurodiverse, because Autism is such a core part of who we are. Without our disability (or our gender identity) we’d be entirely different people. There is no separating these aspects of ourselves from our personhood or personality. They’re both core parts.

perfect examples of why the term “female Autism” is misleading; 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.

“Female Autism” isn’t actually a subtype of the disorder; it’s a way that people cope with their neurodiversity not being taken seriously.

I’ve known quite a few white Autistic men who are, as Catina puts it, obstinate at work. If the white guy in question has an advanced degree or a desirable skill set, such as the ability to code, being a bit difficult to deal with doesn’t necessarily get in his way. In fact, for some Autistic men in tech, being a bit arrogant or cold can work to their advantage. Their aloofness signals they must be a tortured genius, a Sherlock in an office of Watsons. Yet when a Black Autistic woman is even slightly flat in her emotional expressions, she has to worry people will call her “angry” or “unprofessional.”

A report in Harvard Business Review found that many Black code switchers described it as a state of hypervigilance, and that they needed to constantly police their actions and speech in order to minimize white discomfort or hostility.[42]

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]

Autistic people are usually pretty candid, and Black American culture tends to also value direct “real talk” about interpersonal issues.[51] But in majority-white, abled institutions, openly saying what you mean or complaining about anything scares people. Anand had to adapt to hide the parts of himself that were open, vulnerable, and real.[52]

Masking is a sensible survival strategy when you have no other tools at your disposal. But the more you deviate from what society values, the more elaborate your masking must be. Hiding your Autism, your cultural Blackness, and your queerness or womanhood can be too much. Sometimes the only viable alternative is to shut down and become deeply inhibited. You can’t offend anyone if you simply melt into the wallpaper.

So this is what i always feel like i want to do at work when i got told i was too honest or too - whatever it was at the time. But then I literally couldn't stop being myself for long. And then I'd feel like a failure and hate myself when i did the same thing again.

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]

While they found it easy to make surface-level friends at the bar where they use to work, they say that bonding with someone in a deeper way proved very difficult. 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.

But another, equally effective way to cope with sensory challenges is by seeking out really strong, bold sensations that overpower all that white noise.

Once you get used to a roller coaster, it provides consistent stimulation at expected points in time. For sensory-seeking Autistics, the rushing wind

Going fast on the boat!

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.

For all these reasons, it’s not always possible (or helpful) to try to untangle which of a person’s traits are Autistic and which are caused by the trauma of being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world.