Why autistic women are often ‘ahead of the curve’ in social justice and feminist activism

“Got diagnosed with autism this week. Told my dad who responded by asking what I had for dinner, so I guess this answers the question of which parent has it.”

It was late at night, and I hesitated, thinking I’d delete it, but it immediately started gaining traction. I still felt totally ambivalent about telling anyone but I had just announced it on Twitter. 

I worried about my neighbours seeing it and thinking I was mental. We’d moved to a recently gentrified bit of London, and I really liked everyone there but only last week one of them had mentioned that the woman who ran our local organic vegan grocery was ‘a bit on the spectrum’ when she wasn’t, she was just a horrible c[*]nt.

I looked at my phone again and started to think of all the ways I could get cancelled. I thought maybe my tweet seemed flippant so I added:

“I’m not gonna go on about it and make it the only thing about me so I’ll just share some resources I found helpful and not talk about it again.”

The tweet went viral. Autistic Twitter was torn between being glad I’d been open about it and angry that I’d said I wouldn’t make it my identity. I felt rising anxiety that once my industry knew about it, I’d never work again.

‘This implies she thinks she’s better than us,’ one activist tweeted. I was furious. I doubled down in my resolve to be the one person who could get diagnosed and keep everything the same. I would set the example for people who were autistic; I would never mention it or complain about it and I’d act normal at all times. Neurotypicals would like me. 

This turned out to be almost impossible as the diagnosis had opened a floodgate. Everything I had avoided reading because it was too close to home, I binged on. I started listening to autistic podcasts every day; and when I wasn’t listening to them, I was reading books on autism, watching autistic YouTubers, discovering autistic TikTok, chatting with autistic strangers online and joining Reddit forums for autistic women. ‘It’s okay,’ one kind stranger reassured me in my DMs. ‘Post- diagnosis you’re gonna feel weird for about six months to two years.’

She was right. I had thought the diagnosis would make life easier. Instead, I cycled through feeling disgusted and embarrassed about it any time I told people, rather than relieved that I’d finally had official confirmation of why I experienced life the way I did. Occasionally, though, it was like having a whole new filter on the world. I struggled to see any positives from the label but by looking at autistic women I admired I began to realize that an autistic brain could provide an escape route from the traditional paths laid out for women. 

In turn, the problems experienced by autistic women sparked wider conversations about how society views women generally.

Autistic women speak out of turn a lot – that their direct honesty is jarring and unacceptable is a problem for all women, especially when we look at how #MeToo played out with so many women feeling unable to communicate consent clearly.

Autistic women pursue their own interests obsessively –  I come from a part of Scotland where women mostly exist as secondary characters in their husbands’ lives. Autistic women have an almost childlike sense of injustice, meaning they are also often ahead of the curve in pushing feminist interests forward.

Honesty is powerful, but it’s not something that comes easily to allistic [non-autistic] people because they’re so driven to fit in with others that they prize collective values over truth.

Strong Female Character by Fern Brady is published by Brazen, £16.99, www.octopusbooks.co.uk