I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I wrote on instagram about the misconceptions of girls not being able to be autistic, and you can access that post here: https://instagram.com/p/CD_6Pj9DprH/  but here’s a few more thoughts https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1318249725993299970

This is not a new idea - it’s well known especially amongst the autistic community that girls are less likely to be diagnosed and more likely to mask.

I think it’s likely a chicken and egg situation as to which comes first - though masking is often for survival. 2/

Masking/camouflaging is when a neurodivergent person tries to appear neurotypical. This is often without conscious effort. Before I was in diagnosis, I had no idea I did this.

Once I learnt about both autism and masking, my entire world changed. 3/

I realised how much exhaustion it was causing me. I realised it was a huge part of what caused my mental health to break down so significantly.

I still masked a lot at school, but that went along with my desperate want for no one but my teachers and close friends to know. 4/

But I didn’t even know I had been doing it, until ASD was first bought up to us. I’d spent years under pressure, so much that it broke me.

I always say that if I hadn’t have had a mental heath crisis, I probably never would have been picked up as autistic. 5/

But the thing is, even though I’d masked for years, I was also so obviously autistic. When my mum told the teachers at my primary school, several told her it made complete sense. But no-one noticed at the time.

Underdiagnosis in girls is not *only* due to masking. 6/

The “female autism phenotype” partially refers to masking, as well as supposed different traits. It doesn’t mean that boys can’t exhibit those traits, and there also does need to be nuance in this entire argument for trans and non-binary autistic people. 7/

But it was in my very first CAMHS appointment that my psychologist asked us endless questions before telling us he thought I was autistic. I have a lot of traits.

I was EXTREMELY lucky to have him. But we can talk about why it shouldn’t have been luck another day. 8/

I guess the point of this thread is to say that no, this is not a new concept. Girls are more likely to mask on the basis of survival because we go undiagnosed. But also, we’re just missed because the medical *and education* sectors don’t know enough about us. 9/

We’ve got a long way to go in autism acceptance, particularly in these sectors.

It shouldn’t take mental health crises for us to be picked up as autistic.

And it shouldn’t take us surviving them to feel like we can be ourselves. /end