Abstract

In October 2019, two months after my 40th birthday, I received a formal diagnosis that I was autistic. I joined all those other thousands of late-diagnosed women in the UK, previously undiagnosed and overlooked. I had spent my years being mislabelled, misunderstood, or misinterpreted. I dealt with feelings I did not understand and sensory experiences I could not bear to process. I felt a need to cope with the ‘normal’ aspects of everyday life. I never knew why I experienced these troubles and troubling feelings for all those years. The discourse surrounding autism is referred to as the cost of camouflaging. In this article, I critically discuss predominant discourses on autism and gender as I reflect on my auto/biographical troubles from my newly confirmed, acquired identity and perspective as an autistic, now 40-something-year-old woman.

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