Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

To call the stealthy, more socially camouflaged form of Autism a “female” version of the disorder is to indicate that masking is a phenomenon of gender, or even of assigned sex at birth, rather than a much broader phenomenon of social exclusion. Women don’t have “milder” Autism because of their biology; people who are marginalized have their Autism ignored because of their peripheral status in society.

Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It’s also a radical act of self-love. But in order for Autistic people to take our masks off and show our real, authentically disabled selves to the world, we first have to feel safe enough to get reacquainted with who we really are. Developing self-trust and self-compassion is a whole journey unto itself.

Autistic burnout is a state of chronic exhaustion where an Autistic person’s skills begin to degrade, and their tolerance to stress is greatly reduced.[5]

Autistic people frequently experience inertia in starting a task,[6] and challenges in breaking complex activities down into small steps that follow a logical sequence.[7] This can make everything from basic household chores to applying to jobs and filing taxes incredibly challenging, or even impossible without help.

When you’re trapped under the mask, all love feels conditional. It’s hard to know which needs are acceptable to voice.

It’s also easy for us to feel responsible for serving as an intermediary or peacekeeper when any tension arises between other people, because for us, conflict can be very dangerous.

Since Autistic people often struggle to identify our emotions as well (particularly in the heat of a stressful social interaction), we often have a hard time recognizing when someone’s actions have hurt us or made us uncomfortable. It takes time for me to reflect on how and why someone’s actions might have hurt me.

Autistic sex educator and writer Stevie Lang has observed that Autistic people sometimes find it challenging to negotiate sexual consent as well, because we can’t always tell the difference between wanting something, and wanting to want it in order to make someone else happy: “Our aversion to rejection and desire to be accepted may make it difficult to know when we are experiencing consent,” he writes, “and when we are trying to conform to social expectations to be liked or to avoid rejection.”[60]

We’ve grown up believing we truly are hard to be around, and to love.

Reframing

helpful chart

It’s not actually a bad thing that we are spirited, loud, intense, principled, or strange. These traits are merely inconvenient to systems designed by abled people that don’t take our unique way of being into account.