Queerness x Neurodiversity II: The Autistic Mask

by Kay Salvatore (he/they)

source: Fandom

“Beyond all pleasures and woes, beyond this labour of love, we will find the world we wanted and feel the current of life deep within our bones.” — “Reverse the Curse” by Alexisonfire

If you’ve been as in the trenches of Autism Discourse™️ as I have since 2020, you’ll have come across the concept of “masking” for autistic people.

As the aforementioned discourse dictates: “Masking” is a concept that applies solely (to some) or mostly (to others) to autistic people (or, to the incredibly racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, ableist, and eugenicist vocal (white) majority, People With/Who Have/That Suffer From Autism™️).

“Masking” is when autistic people learn to hide parts of themselves from allistic people.

It’s when autistic people “act allistic” in public, and “act autistic” in private.

“Masking” is exhausting, difficult to undo, and is not safe for any autistic person (especially Black autistic people) to do. And due to our racist and ableist society, all autistic people, except some privileged white autistic people, are forced to mask and can’t afford to not mask.

Of course, the concept of masking being necessary and exclusive to autistic people, is all bullshit.

Spend any time with any person — allistic or autistic, cop or not, abuser or victim, poor or rich, straight or queer, cis or trans/GNC — and you’ll see that some people “mask.”

We’re all socialized to “mask” due to racism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, queerphobia, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, classism, colorism, ageism, etc.

The reasons why and with whom we “mask” range from doing so to “keep up appearances”, to abusers doing it to draw in their victims, to doing it out of survival, to people being just completely oblivious to or intentionally ignore what’s right in front of their face because “ignorance is bliss” (which is a ruinous and fundamental aspect of how we, especially white people, are socialized because it’s a necessary part of maintaining, perpetuating, upholding, and safeguarding white supremacy by any means necessary).

When it comes to autistic people, the most consequential parts of “masking” are the centuries worth of lies told to and about autistic people by mostly allistic people (and autistic people who care more about power and privilege and being human).

This creates a gap that all autistic people fall into . Even for those like myself who’ve known their entire lives that they are autistic, even if we may not have had the words to explain it — where we’re trapped between the self-inflicted ignorance of allistic people on themselves about allistic and autistic people in a society created for and by allistic people, and the ignorance imposed on autistic people by allistic people about allistic and autistic people.

All to perpetuate the myth that allistic people are “normal” and autistic people are “disordered.”

Recently, a lot of autistic people have started to “unmask.”

In my estimation, there are two stages of “unmasking” (which don’t always happen simultaneously) for autistic people:

1. Coming to the understanding that being autistic literally has nothing to do with “autism.”
2. Coming to terms with the fact that you’ve actually always known that you’re autistic, and that you may or may not have been lied to about this fact by the people around you.

For many people — particularly those who (a) have not yet done any of the work to challenge and unlearn all the racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, misogynistic, queerphobic, transphobic, classist, ableist, and eugenicist myths about autistic people due to the demonstrably damaging concept of “autism” that the anti-autistic (which includes the Neurodiversity Lite Movement, anti-vaxxers, orgs like the notorious anti-autistic hate organization Autism Speaks, etc.) ilk are hellbent on making real despite all evidence proving that:

1. “autism” isn’t a “neurodevelopmental condition” (aka a “mental illness/disorder” by another name) and
2. lie about this being a part of their autistic experience since they and anti-autistic ilk have a financial incentive on making this myth into fact — the “unmasking” phase causes a lot of discomfort and anger in people as they come to terms with the fact of who they are and that much of their lives and how we’ve been taught to think about, navigate, and engage with life has been a lie.

For most autistic people (especially autistic people who are PoC and/or live/lived outside of the Western world), I’d argue, the process is easier to navigate because it’s confirming what we’ve always known to be true: that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with us, and that the problem has always been with how people treat/treated us.

Not that there isn’t discomfort or anger for the aforementioned autistic people as they “unmask”; however, it’s more that most non-white/non-Westernized autistic people don’t have to work through as much internalized ableism and such to accept the fact that they are autistic.

That is also one of the reasons why I believe that how we talk about the concept of “autistic masking” is dubious at best.

“Autistic masking” is based on the perspective of white people from Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic backgrounds that argues:

• Autistic people have a “neurodevelopmental condition” called “autism,” despite the fact that that’s literally demonstrably not true since “autism,” like every other “mental illness/disorder” in the DSM, is a social construct not a real illness:

“Al Frances chaired the task force for the DSM-IV and has become one of the biggest critics of the DSM-5. What do you think of his arguments?

We agree that the DSM does not capture real illnesses, that it’s a set of constructs. We disagree over what that means. He believes that that doesn’t matter to the overall enterprise of psychiatry and its authority to diagnose and treat our mental illnesses. I believe it constitutes a flaw at the foundation of psychiatry. If they don’t have real diseases, they don’t belong in real medicine. Al’s attack is overdone. I think he’s really trying to keep scrutiny off of the whole DSM enterprise. That’s why he’s been so adamant that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — he believes that the DSM-IV, for all of its flaws, is still worthwhile. I disagree.

Frances also worries that your criticisms are anti-psychiatry.

It’s the universal paranoia of psychiatry that everybody who disagrees with them is pathological. You can’t disagree with a psychiatrist without getting a diagnosis.

I’ve been writing critically about psychiatry for ten years and I’ve always encountered that. Psychiatry is a defensive profession. They have a lot to protect and they know their weakness. To repel criticism in the strongest way possible, from their point of view, you diagnose the critic.”

• All autistic people navigate social settings in the same way and are, therefore, subject to the same abuse that causes autistic people to “mask.”
• And all autistic people have the same frame of reference for autistic people (which is, like, Raymond Babbitt from Rain Man; or, now, Sam Gardner from Atypical and Dr. Shaun Murphy from The Good Doctor).

What the aforementioned white people, at best, do not seem to understand — and at worst are intentionally lying about — is that “autism” didn’t hang over most non-white autistic people’s lives like a specter waiting to steal them or their children away in the night and bring nothing but ruin to their communities the way that it did for white people from (and PoC who grew up with, around, and/or were raised by white people from) Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic backgrounds.

This is due to the fact that:

1. it’s not really until recently, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that most autistic people started to learn and recognize the fact that they’re autistic.

2. people thought “autism” was something that has to be “noticeable” before the age of, like, five (which is part of why the unethical eugenicist practice of subjecting babies and minors who can’t consent to “autism assessments” continues) and was something that people would “just grow out of” by the time they reached adulthood (which is why there’s little to no research and data on autistic people above the age of 10; and why “in many areas of the country, families were able to access ABA services [aka conversion therapy for autistic people] independent of insurance for decades. This is because ABA was provided to children through the public education system when schools identified ABA as necessary for children to access their education,” i.e. made their behavior more “normal/acceptable”.)

3. it was standard practice that doctors and parents lied to children about whether or not they were actually autistic for a myriad of reasons.

4. (and significantly) due to the fact that “autism assessments,” like the psychologists and psychiatrists who created and proctor them, are racist, white supremacist, anti-Black, antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, queerphobic, transphobic, fatphobic, ableist, classist, colorist, etc.

And because of #4, there’s this myth created for and by white allistic people from Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic backgrounds that only a small percentage of the world’s population is autistic that’s solely dependent on estimates based on who is able to get an Official Autism Diagnosis™.

And because of that, white people from the aforementioned backgrounds think that all autistic people are living these tragic, insular lives where all they know is that “autism” is bad, a death sentence, and a tragedy that happens to those in community with “people with/who have/that suffer from autism.”

To these white people, autistic people who are confident in themselves, are gainfully employed and successful, aren’t clamoring to work in STEM, etc. either don’t exist, are lying about being autistic, or are not worth listening to because they’re not “low functioning” like True/Real People With/Who Have/That Suffer From Autism™️.

And that is simply not true, especially for those of us who (a) lived/currently live in mostly autistic communities and/or were mostly raised by autistic caregivers; and (b) unconsciously gravitate towards TV shows, movies, films, anime, video games, books, etc. that often unintentionally provide validating and affirming representations of autistic people by showing us as full, complex human beings instead of as “people with/who have/that suffer from autism” like Raymond Babbitt, Sam Gardner, and Dr. Shaun Murphy.

A lot of autistic people — literally whole communities and societies — simply are able to be themselves without the label/diagnosis of “autism” hanging around their necks like an albatross.

And this fact doesn’t negate the experience of autistic people like myself who were abused throughout our lives because we stood out because we’re autistic (whether or not we knew it at the time), and people unconsciously were treating us with the hostility they were taught to meet us with because of how we’re socialized to treat introverts, people who are “shy”/“socially awkward,” boys and men who are seen as “soft”/“feminine”/“acting like a girl,” people who are assumed to be “gay” (derogatory), people who are trans or gender nonconforming, etc. (It’s like Emma Frost says in Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #1, “When they perceive you as a threat to their survival, that’s a danger unlike any other.”)

There was never a time in my life that I actually “masked.” I always stood out because of how quiet I naturally am, I never spoke just to speak, and I never really tried to “fit in” or cared about “fitting in” — especially because all the abuse I was met with for simply existing as myself made me (a) more intentional about giving people the space to be their full selves around me; (b) recognize that the cost of “fitting in” was too high a price to pay for my individuality; © learn and want to be more respectful, kind, understanding, patient, empathetic, teachable, accepting, etc. towards others; and (d) work through my own biases to recognize my own faults and begin to change them, and to learn to do better and be a better person all so I would never put others through what had been done to me.

And even during the rare times I felt like I was “masking,” it was less because I was making a conscious decision to “mask” and more because I wasn’t given space to express myself, especially in comparison to times when I was actually given that space.

I was never not myself.

I was just never my full self around everyone because a lot of people made it very clear to me that they were not a safe person for me to be my full self around.

And I think this is what “autistic masking” really is.

Because I don’t think autistic people can stop being autistic, even when they do try to “act allistic” or aren’t aware that they are autistic.

I may not have known that I was autistic; however, I’ve always been aware enough of myself to know that I was different from other people, and a lot of people throughout my life (including other autistic people) wasted no opportunity to let me know unequivocally that I was different from them.

And for all these reasons, I think we need to have a more nuanced conversation about “masking” and “unmasking” when it comes to autistic people that doesn’t center whiteness.

Especially because most “masked” autistic people don’t learn that they’re autistic until later in life; and those who’ve faced a lot of rejection for being different only recognize in hindsight that part of why they were rejected is because they were seen as “too autistic” (which is really just existing as an autistic person in a way that other people can’t control).

Not to mention the fact that racism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny, queerphobia, transphobia, fatphobia, ableism, classism, colorism, etc. affects who is and isn’t seen as autistic, who is and isn’t rejected for being autistic, what is and isn’t considered to be an “autistic trait”/”sign/symptom of autism,” etc. It’s why the social model of disability is important to the neurodiversity movement since, as Jacquiline den Houting states in “Neurodiversity: an insider’s perspective,” “disability results not from autism itself but instead from living in a society which tends to be physically, socially and emotionally inhospitable towards autistic people.”

And we have to address this in order to properly address any shame or guilt an autistic person may feel when “unmasking” and create a world in which autistic people are able to just be themselves.

This is also why it’s bullshit to say that “unmasking” is a privilege, and that it’s unsafe for most people to “unmask” since that’s simply not true.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy the more we perpetuate this myth because people then treat autistic people (especially Black autistic people) who express themselves in a way that’s not palatable enough for white people, especially cis het white allistic men from Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic backgrounds, as if they are both a threat to public safety and to themselves for being themselves; and then we continue the same oppression of autistic people we claim to want to end.

And it ignores the lived realities that many autistic people are able to just be themselves because they’ve grown up in community with people, especially other autistic people, who don’t treat them like an anomaly that must be destroyed by any means necessary.

A fundamental part of ending autistic oppression is both educating yourself on and engaging with the concept of neurodiversity, and allowing autistic people to learn about themselves in a way that doesn’t require choosing between only seeing ourselves as a burden or only seeing ourselves as superhuman.

Not engaging in this self-education inherently upholds, perpetuates, and reinforces racism, white supremacy, antiBlackness, misogyny, ableism, and eugenics. We are already living through the consequences of not practicing this, and we can all literally see the ruin it has brought to the world.

This also necessitates learning how to love ourselves while also learning how to love others. A radical kind of love, if you will, because, to quote bell hooks, “without love there can be no justice.”

If we, as autistic people, are serious about changing the way society is structured in order for it to be accepting and inclusive of all people (since the neurodiversity movement is literally also for allistic people as well!), we autistic people — especially white autistic people — have to stop perpetuating harmful myths and lies about ourselves, especially the myth that is “autism.”

I know there’s this belief (especially among white autistic people, tragically so among queer and trans white autistic people, too) that if we lie about ourselves and act “respectable enough” and appease our oppressors that eventually they will learn to see and treat us as human beings; however, history has proved that belief to false without a shadow of a doubt. No amount of respectability politics can ever, has ever, or will ever save marginalized people from being oppressed, and the same is true when it comes to autistic people.

What’s happened, though, is that now, as Lydia X. Z. Brown says in their post “Hello, internalized ableism”:

We’re constantly competing for limited resources (“likes” and “reblogs” and “retweets,” all the twenty-first century trappings of social capital — and that word “capital” is critically important), trying to be better activists, always on, always saying the right thing. We give pithy acknowledgements of privilege and past ignorance/fuck-ups, but functionally act as though in the present time, we no longer fuck up because now we’re Educated. That it is our duty to jump down each other’s throats at the slightest mistake or misphrasing — ignoring the completely classist, racist, and ableist implications of expecting people to always say the right thing and never accidentally say the wrong thing or not know the correct terms.

All we’ve done is replicated the painful violence of white supremacist, (cis-hetero) patriarchal capitalism in supposedly revolutionary, transformative, liberatory spaces.

All we’ve done is take the practices we find harmful and do the exact same things to each other.

We’ve created activist cultures where it is not acceptable to talk about ongoing struggles with internalized ableism, yet we expect autistic and other disabled people doing disability movement work to be politically perfect (that is, to have no traces anymore of any internalized ableism.).

There’s this idea that exists in society that if you tell a lie enough times,it becomes the truth; however, that’s demonstrably false. If you tell a lie enough times, it still remains a lie. It just makes accepting the truth harder for those who either willingly buy into and need the lie to exist for them to feel like a human being or were coerced and abused into buying into the lie, always to everyone’s detriment.

And there’s never a care about who pays the cost of the initial lies.

Because it’s never white people from Westernized, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic backgrounds who are telling these lies.

Which is the point, I suppose.

This is also why white people necessarily need to de-center themselves when it comes to autistic advocacy and neurodiversity advocacy more broadly; however, that’s a different conversation for a different day.

And I say all of this to say that while “masking” as a concept is understandable and does offer some autistic people a point of reference to better understand themselves, I think we need to either let go of the concept entirely or fundamentally reframe the conversation so it focuses less on autistic people and more on the ways that society is inherently structured (due to racism, white supremacy, antiBlackness, misogyny, queerphobia, transphobia, ableism, and eugenics) to make autistic people feel so unsafe that we think we have to hide parts of ourselves otherwise face extreme amounts of harassment, abuse, abandonment, and ostracism (aka we should talk about “masking” within the context of the social model of disability instead of within the context of the medical model of disability).

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