Lady Autist

I am a lady autist, here to dance my neurodivergence for you, backwards and in heels. 5! 6! 5, 6, 7, 8!

That’s a joke. I’m bad at dancing. See, the way performance works is you start off with a hook. Now that I have your attention, allow me to get a little pedantic.

Words mean stuff. When I say I am an autist, this should be understood as a noun that contains a quality of being. Like when someone says, “I’m a mother,” or “I’m an artist,” you understand that the human they are is encapsulated by a series of characteristics that together emerge as a type. If I say, I’m autistic, that’s an adjective, it describes a quality about one’s being. Like, “I’m funny” or “I’m conservative”. These are qualities that likely can’t just be removed from a person but they are not the same thing as the person. If I say, “I have autism,” I’m describing myself as a person in a temporary state, like, “I have the flu,” or, “I have a license to operate a motor vehicle in the state of Montana.” It’s true, but it’s not essentially true, it is contingently true.

All three of these usages apply to myself. 

First, I am an autist, a person who at the fundamental level embodies a way of being that can be categorized by certain realities. Primarily, my existence is marked by extreme uneven-nesses. An example, I don’t get habituated to sounds, so I can currently hear a vivid soundscape that never recedes into the background, as I have heard that it does for allists – that is non-autists. This is the same with almost all sensory stimuli all the time. But I also often struggle to get data from my own body – not its edges in space so much as its internal sensations, like if I am hungry or have broken my foot. The volume is turned down very low on those <mime turning down the volume knob>. So where most allistic people hum along with every knob – of which there are like 27 – turned to somewhere between 4 and 6 – many of my knobs are set to 2 or 9, or 1 or 10. 

Also, I am autistic, meaning that as a person when I interact out in the world, you other humans get this “uncanny valley” vibe about me where you know I am a little bit not like most of you. All humans, and I too am a human, have this pesky tendency to assume that others are like themselves. So all you folks with knobs in the 4-6 range see me and you assume I am a 4-6 range knob person also. So when I do something you would not do, you make an assumption about what that variation means as if I am making choices as you would make them. I assure you most of the time I am not. 

And, I am a person with autism, meaning that because of my internal experience and because of how it varies from the majority allistic internal experience I am disabled. I have a diagnosis that basically says, “you are weird, other people know you are weird, and if you’re weird too loud you get in trouble.” The trouble is the disability, not the weird. Sometimes that trouble is people just don’t like me. Sometimes that trouble is I don’t get hired for a job because you don’t like me. For some autistic people, if their weird is too loud, they might get shot because cops think they are violent psychopaths. This happens more than you think, especially to autistics of color. The knob that governs planned movements of my body, thankfully, is set to a 6, so you’ll never see me uncontrollably lunging at anyone. Though I occasionally have dinosaur¹ arms and a strange neurodivergent gait – I walk on my toes. But I have a handy solution for that: high heels <guesture to very high heels>. A socially acceptable, and very demure, way to walk weird.

Speaking of heels, naturally, there are other things about me that are true that are not autism. After all I am, as I said, a lady autist. Because we live in a world that has institutionalized patriarchy, there are certain things about being a visibly cisgendered female that disable and endanger me too. For me, the most glaring disability intersection of being a lady and an autist is the requirement that women be effortlessly good at social emotional skills. Women are good at making space for the power dynamics of other women, and for moving through the world in a way that seeks to not provoke men. Women know that we have to do a graceful dance to center ourselves in any shared space. Because my social awareness is set to 3 – close to your average dude, very low for your average lady – I am bad at this dance. 

I do have a few knobs that are turned up to 11. You need to know that not all autistic people are savants. We are not guaranteed to get knobs turned up to 11, we might not even get any knobs that are turned to 7, but because of the extreme uneven-ness of knob tuning, we can’t be autists without a separation of settings that is greater than the 4-6 allistic range. When people tell me that I do not seem autistic, this is what they are really saying, “hey it seems like your knobs are where my knobs are, congratulations you’re not defective.” <flat affect> Thanks, I feel better now. In fact, the type of autism that I have is called “high functioning,” which doesn’t mean that despite having autism I am basically fine, no it means despite having some knobs set to very low or high, I have found a way to make other people mostly not notice. I have worked to make my disability invisible to you, at no small cost to myself, because when you’re weird too loud you get in trouble.

This is why I prefer to call the type of autism I have, “high masking,” and not “high functioning.” It defines the autism from my experience inside instead of its presentation to people who are allistic outside. The knobs that I have that are turned way up to 11 are, it turns out, some of the knobs that I leverage to construct the mask. The knobs called monotropic mindset and information processing work overtime turning all the head tilts and side-eyes and shrug emojis into a code that I use to predict what will happen next and what people want from me. You know, so they don’t kill me, or severely economically disadvantage me.

The average neurodivergent person processes 42% more information just existing [not even doing anything] than the average allistic person. Your girl is not average. Because society says ladies need to understand and account for everyone’s emotions, be deferential to men, take up very small amounts of space, smile more. I use my information processing to calibrate what that looks like and my monotropic mindset to never stop thinking about it and then using my inhibitory control and executive functioning, I manually instruct my motor planning to make my body – that I steer around like I’m a tiny alien in a giant human ship – to perform normal for you.

It’s truly a marvel. I have fooled you. You think I am a normal person.

Some points to ponder. My inhibitory control and executive functioning knobs are not tuned to the 4-6 range. No, they are more like 2-and-a-half. And that means that my information processor burns them out a lot. And when I fry my circuit board, the whole thing shuts down. And I mean like Ctrl+alt+delete, blue screen of death. But you don’t see that because part of being high masking is scheduling those. They’re for the weekends, or like the staff bathroom.

Now, if I wasn’t a lady autist, just a bro autist, no one would expect me to care very much about anyone’s emotions. No one would be upset that I didn’t just start taking notes in the meeting or bring coffee because it wouldn’t be an unspoken part of my job. I could use those knobs turned up to 11 for something better than making myself be small and nonthreatening. Clearly the problem here is not so much autism or gender but more the misapplied sense of capabilities and aptitudes of people generally. Like we need to understand variation. The problem is the idea that there is a default person, which prevents us from understanding that there are things that can be done to get everyone to a default playing field. When a person is more obviously disabled, say they don’t have legs. We think they should have a wheelchair or prosthesis. That aid – in conjunction with accessibility requirements – enables them instead of disabling them. No one says, “hey person without legs, have you tried harder to walk?” No. I would like there to be some sort of aid for my disabilities. I’d like to not have to mask anymore without people assuming I’m being a jerk.

Like I am not asking to get to be an asshole software developer who is condescending and obtuse, but the grace to not have to answer the question, “how’s it going?” with the word “fine,” and then get some side-eye when I don’t would sure be nice. It seems small but these things take so much energy I could power your car with them. You know when we’re having a beer and you’re talking about WWI and you say “Germany,” just maybe once let me say, “I think you mean the Weimar Republic.” Please? I have to let people talk about crypto and the Golden Bachelor, is it so much to ask that just sometimes I not be punished for taking 5 minutes at the start of a meeting to explain how information travels through mycorrhizal networks. It is related to the meeting. Also, when I say, “hey we should do it this way,” I’m right. Don’t argue. Think of all the mediocre white guys out there making world altering decisions with their information processor set to 5. <break the 4th wall> Mortals.

I want that time back that I spent perfecting the girl hairflip <hairflip>, or the hours sitting in front of the mirror getting my face to look sad <frown> or look happy <exaggerated smile> because just saying, <flat affect> “that makes me sad,” is read as sarcasm or a joke or disrespectful. I could have solved climate change or world hunger.

But I try not to be bitter. After all, frowns cause wrinkles and ladies must be youthful and always, always smile.

1. I wrote and read this as “dinosaur arms,” but it should have been “t-rex arms. ↩︎