‘extreme interest in pop/rock bands, soap operas or catastrophes involving large numbers of people’.

began to look as if females did, indeed, have their own kind of highly focussed interests, but they weren’t on the ‘approved’ list of weather patterns or transport systems or mathematical calculations listed in the diagnostic tests.

Some described their ‘diagnosis bingo’, being offered ‘generalized anxiety disorder’, ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’, ‘borderline personality disorder’, ‘eating disorder’ before eventually arriving at autism, not uncommonly in the context of becoming the mother of an autistic child and spotting their own autism when working through the

evidence in understanding autism. Overall, they suggest that these research findings add up to support a (rather grim) image of autism as a condition of ‘diminished pleasure, reduced motivation to acquire rewarding stimuli and less avoidance of punishment’. Somewhat alarmingly, they suggest that, in the future, neurostimulation techniques could be

Wenn Lawson, a psychologist who is both autistic and transgender, has long focussed on issues for autistic females. He has noted that terms such as ‘camouflaging’ and ‘masking’ carry rather negative connotations of deceitfulness, or the need to hide something because it is somehow shameful. Instead he has suggested a rather unwieldy term, ‘adaptive

In 2020, a large-scale survey across five different datasets reported that transgender and gender diverse individuals were between three and six times as likely to be autistic as cisgender individuals.

But it is clear that non-autistic people have the same problem.26 A combination of impressions from misleading stereotypes and few opportunities to engage fully with autistic individuals means that non-autistic people don’t know what it is like to experience the world differently, to have overwhelming and genuinely painful responses to sensations

Although the ‘performance’ might be sufficiently successful that the females’ autism isn’t spotted, the delivery of the performance turns out to be exhausting and dispiriting.

We have to acquire some kind of insight into how they might interact with us or other people, what their – obviously invisible – inner thoughts or intentions or wishes might be. This is known as having a ‘theory of mind’.11