females who are driven into hiding. So, as well as exploring the ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of camouflaging, we should look to the role of gender in explaining the ‘why’. And that should include why it is more common in females – is camouflaging linked to some sex-based mechanism that prioritizes ‘belongingness’?

They want to avoid the pain of social rejection. They want to escape the shame of being stigmatized as mentally ill or being ‘othered’ as weird or different.

if you think about it, this aspect of the autistic experience is one of the most difficult to capture, but once you get individuals to let their guard down, they can talk you through their strategies.

This ‘outsider’ theme has come up time and again in the conversations I have had with autistic people over the years, females in particular.

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

in order to understand this gender gap, as well as looking at the brains and behaviour of autistic individuals, we should also look outside, at the world that seems to impact the owners of such brains so differently and from which they so often feel excluded.

during self-representation tasks: ‘Autistic women may engage substantial insight about their own behaviours in interpersonal and social contexts – specifically, how their behaviours impact others, gauging and managing the impressions they make on others, updating the differences between their natural and camouflaged behaviours, and how such

The notion of camouflaging as hiding is not to imply any form of deliberate deceit, but to highlight that this pattern of behaviour, described to me so many times by autistic girls and women as a survival strategy

But closer questioning revealed that the autistic girls had many more challenges maintaining their friendships and were often exposed to bullying within their friendship groups.