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By Chloé Caldasso
When I was in the 3rd grade, I befriended a boy who joined our class halfway through the year. He had a difficult time fitting in, to say the least, but I had always been the type of kid to embrace others eagerly. We became fast friends, our favorite pastime being movie talk. At least I thought it was our favorite pastime. It turns out it was my favorite pastime. I learned this when he confronted me mid-sentence one day with a frustrated look on his face, “Do you talk about anything other than movies?!”
Several years later, I almost followed someone off the bus at a stop that wasn’t mine because I wasn’t finished telling them one of my famous “ghost stories.” What I didn’t know then, what my family and friends didn’t know then, was that I was an autistic child.
Now, I’m an autistic adult, and all those seemingly innocuous memories are more important than ever. But I’m not here to talk about what it means to just be autistic. I’m here to talk about what it had meant to be an autistic girl and what it now means to be an autistic woman. Can you think of a single autistic woman other than maybe Temple Grandin? It’s harder than you think, but there is a reason for that, and it’s not because we don’t exist. It’s because capitalism and misogyny have made us invisible.
Who is the first autistic person that comes to your mind? Dustin Hoffman’s character from Rain Man, maybe? Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory? Both male, both fictional. The reality is, most of the public’s conception of what an autistic person is like is extremely male-centric and two-dimensional, at that. What if I told you, the way most people understand autism is harmful to women on the spectrum? The way autism manifests in men is vastly different from how it manifests in women, and because of this, women often don’t get the crucial support they need during childhood development. I lived for twenty-four years without knowing I was autistic. Many women on the spectrum have very similar stories.
One of the most prominent behaviors in autistic women is what is known as “camouflaging” or “masking.” This is the behavior of mimicking neurotypical social norms in order to conceal social disparities. To provide a little insight about how this manifests, when I enter a social situation with people I do not know, I use a different social language. This is a language I have learned by passively observing others and have practiced for years....
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