Autistic Women Share Their Stories to Fill Decades-Long Knowledge Gap

Women diagnosed with autism in adulthood are writing books to shed light on lives spent masking their condition, the BBC reported.

Alex Morgan, 62, discovered she was autistic three years ago after taking an online test while ill with Covid. "I had all these misconceptions about what autism was," she told the BBC. "I thought it was monosyllabic boys, going around looking at their feet and collecting information about trains."

According to the BBC, Morgan found an "absolute void of information" for autistic adults and set up The Autistic Woman website to collate resources and stories. Her memoir Mothertongue, published this month, revisits key life events in light of her diagnosis.

The BBC reported that comedian Fern Brady wrote in her book Strong Female Character about coping with her adult diagnosis through posts from teenage girls on TikTok, while autism diagnostician Sarah Hendrickx said she "failed miserably" to apply her professional knowledge to herself.

Neuroscientist Gina Rippon told the BBC that an increase in late autism diagnoses around the start of this decade revealed the coping mechanisms women had been employing. "Most of them had been trying to hide their autism," Rippon explained. "They were camouflaging, they were desperate to be social and wanted to fit in."