Unmasked: The autistic women authoring a better future

Masking, camouflaging, trying to blend in - this is what women with autism have been practising to navigate a world that for decades did not even recognise their existence. Having finally been diagnosed as adults, many have taken to print to shed light on the reality, variety and complexity of these once hidden lives.

When Alex Morgan took an online autism test to pass the time while ill with Covid, it had never occurred to her she might have the condition. When she saw the result, everything immediately made sense to her.

"I had all these misconceptions about what autism was," she says. "I thought it was monosyllabic boys, going around looking at their feet and collecting information about trains."

Comedian Fern Brady writes in her book Strong Female Character about how she was left to cope with her diagnosis as an adult through the posts of "19-year-old girls on TikTok".

"I could only find information for parents of autistic kids. There was just an absolute void of information."

Sarah Hendrickx had spent years diagnosing autism in boys and men yet says she "failed miserably to apply it to myself".

These stories and more highlight just how little was known - even in the 2020s - about the condition as it presents in women and girls.

Other than their autism diagnosis coming later in life, these women share a desire to fill that knowledge gap.

Neuroscientist and autism expert Gina Rippon says an increase in late autism diagnoses around the start of this decade revealed the myriad of coping mechanisms women had been employing.

"Most of them had been trying to hide their autism," Rippon explains. "They were camouflaging, they were desperate to be social and wanted to fit in."

After her medical diagnosis three years ago, Morgan, 62, set up The Autistic Woman website through which she collated information and stories.

"I realised we are often invisible," she says. "We hide how we are because we are conditioned by society to blend in."

Her memoir Mothertongue, in which she revisits key life events in light of her diagnosis, has been published this month.

Despite a successful career as a national newspaper journalist, Morgan, who grew up in Edinburgh and now lives in Cockermouth, Cumbria, says she always knew she did not fit in.

As a teenager, she had what her GP thought was a breakdown triggered by watching The War Game - a 1960s portrayal of the effects of a nuclear war on Britain.

"I'm shaking, I'm in tears all the time, I'm terrified. Every sound I hear I think is a nuclear bomb going off."

She was given sedatives, but nothing changed. Now she recognises this as autistic burnout.

"It's when you become totally exhausted with trying to exist in a world that is not designed for how your brain works," she says.

"The world to a lot of us is very loud, very noisy, very crowded, very bright, very smelly, and it's exhausting suppressing your response to all of this and carrying on."

Brady, who was born in Bathgate, West Lothian, sought a diagnosis about five years ago as she was experiencing meltdowns.

"I didn't know what they were," she says.

As so few women were talking about what she calls the "less savoury elements of autism" at that time, she decided to write her book despite fears it may ruin her career.

She also toured a stand-up show called Autistic Bikini Queen, which was later filmed for Netflix.

Brady says: "I actually got discouraged from mentioning that I was autistic when I first got diagnosed because it's still a bit of a dirty word, where ADHD isn't and you're seeing that a lot now.

"So many people are using the word neurodivergent as a polite euphemism for autistic, which bugs me."

Although there were people speaking frankly about the condition, they were not in the mainstream discourse at the time she wrote Strong Female Character.

"I just wanted to make the thing that I wished had existed when I was 20."

She says she displayed a typical trait in autistic girls and women which was to perform well at work and end up spending "weeks in bed not able to speak".

"Something that riles me is people say it's so much harder to diagnose women because they mask well," she say.

"Well, they don't mask 'well' because of the number of women that have burnouts, that end up with eating disorders or terrible depression and anxiety."

Rippon, who is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Neuroimaging at Aston University in Birmingham, wrote The Lost Girls of Autism in 2025 in which she investigates why women have been overlooked for so long.

While the first autism studies in the 1940s did include a small cohort of girls, the condition appeared to be more prevalent in boys and the gender divide became a "self-fulfilling prophecy".

"The male prevalence became the key description of autism and that affected certainly all of the research in my area," she explains.

"So if a young girl was having behavioural problems, whoever was presenting their concern was told girls don't get autism or she's shy, she'll grow out of it."

Overlooking women had huge consequences.

Left undiagnosed, they were being "othered and called weird" while facing serious mental health challenges.

Rippon says: "There's really high levels of suicidal ideation, unfortunately, and depression and other mental health issues in this population."

Like Brady, Morgan is no stranger to this concept. She "struggled on" with "tremendous pain and misery" after her breakdown as a teenager until it all came to a head one day in her late 20s.

"I was working in a very high-pressure job editing a Sunday newspaper magazine and one day I just thought I can't do this anymore.

"I stood up, I walked out. I went to my partner's house, I put on my pyjamas and I went to bed for six months."

Despite receiving help from a therapist, at the time her autism was missed.

"Without that help I don't think I'd have made it," Morgan says.

"It would have been lovely [to get a diagnosis], that would have been very helpful, to have known a long time ago. But realistically, in the 1980s, it was never going to happen."

Hendrickx started working with autistic people in the education sector a quarter of a century ago and later took on a role diagnosing the condition.

By the time she realised she was autistic, she had completed a masters degree in autism and written five books on the topic.

"I'd had lots of relationships, I'd had children, I'd had lots of jobs and I didn't see myself in autism," she says.

"I was kind of shocked about that, that I'd been able to apply the diagnostic criteria to other people but had failed miserably to apply it to myself."

Hendrickx, who is based in north Wales, wrote Women and Girls on the Autistic Spectrum in which she presents the direct experience of women.

Despite similar diagnoses, each individual is different.

A decade on, in 2024, she published a second edition after realising more women in their 40s were coming forward for diagnosis.

"I just wanted their voices to be heard," she says.

"We realised that quite a lot had changed over that period of time. There was a lot more understanding of things like menopause.

"Perimenopause was atrocious and appalling for me. The coping strategies that had kept me going throughout my life just didn't work anymore."

For her part, Brady suffers with premenstrual dysphoric disorder and says she wishes medical professionals were more aware of how certain conditions impact autistic women.

"Healthcare outcomes for autistic people are really poor," she says.

"The way we communicate pain can be different. People might not communicate it the way a neurotypical person does.

"That can become dangerous and then illnesses get missed."

Rippon says it is important women who think they may be autistic feel supported and encouraged to seek a diagnosis, but the rise in the number of women being diagnosed has triggered a narrative on social media that "it's a kind of fashion accessory".

"I would object to that strongly. I think that narrative is very toxic at the moment and has implications - it is something to worry about."

Follow BBC Cumbria on X, external, Facebook, external, Nextdoor and Instagram, external.