TL;DR: Because I was (am) an immigrant, from abusive and normalizing family and (misgendered) as a girl. Plus, there was lack of awareness in general. This is part 3 of 5 part series that answers that question. Every part will deal with another element that explains why I wasn’t diagnosed till I was 25.
3. “Girl”
I am not a girl or a women but I am often misgendered as such. At birth I was assigned as female, and got a female name. I was treated as a girl, and when I tried to behave as I felt was right for me I was punished.
I was shouted at for using a hammer and nails, mocked for trying to open pickle jars by myself and discouraged from studying martial arts or doing “more sport then proper”. But this was not the thing that prevented the diagnosis. The thing was… well… being assigned at birth as female (AFAB — assigned female at birth).
Because autistic girls and AFAB children are not getting their diagnosis and support. Because Autism and Asparger’s is “a boy thing”. This is also true about trans girls and AMAB’s, whose autism may seem atypical and “not like the stereotype” — because their socialisation maybe wasn’t as “a boy”. I don’t have to write about it, many people wrote about it before me. Plus, the fact that more boys are diagnosed with autism somehow made many people believe that only boys can be autistic. Go on, read about it. I put 10 links about in in this paragraph. Come back after you read some.
When adult people saw me, they saw a shy girl. It wasn’t hard to learn to please stranger adults, I had plenty of experience from home. When I was 14 I could talk about things many average adults don’t know much about, so I was treated by some as gifted, and they were just confused when at some moments I just couldn’t do or understand things.
My horrible gross motor skills were ignored because I was twice invisible: I looked like a girl, and I wasn’t good enough to gain any attention from the sport teachers. They usually assigned another student to teach me the thing “I should had known” how to do. I couldn’t catch balls, jump with a rope or stand on my hands like all the other kids, and it never occurred to any of them that it is not because I don’t want to.
I acted weirdly everywhere, but I could tone it down near adults, who just didn’t saw me.
At age 4–5 I played differently in the kindergarten, but I had 2 friends, with whom I played occasionally. It was common for me not to understand the games. For a long time I drew the same drawing again and again. Occasionally I hid when the teacher called everybody in after the time outside, and played alone behind the trash bins. I was the shy russian girl, and the staff (of 2 women) had about 30 to 40 kids to take care of.
At school I was even more confused when in kindergarten. My motor skills sucked, my ability to copy from the blackboard was terrible but somehow I managed to do OK at class. When I peed in my pants no one knew. When I didn’t understood I didn’t knew I was allowed to ask. The teacher was nice, and I occasionally played with the other immigrant girls, and my grades were not terrible. The only black boy in class suffered from so much shit that the teachers contributed to (he had a desk alone) that the fact no one saw my struggles is not surprising. I knew how to be quite, and it was enough. In a class of 35–40 students, if you can keep quiet you are good. As long as you don’t disrupt the classwork, no one will notice you, especially if you are not “bright” and understand everything immediately, unlike me. I was “stupid”, but not stupid enough to gain attention.
I stimmed. I struggled with social cues. I was so weird that I was actually kicked out for it in my first academic studies. I was constantly bullied. i lacked eye contact (unless I had to fake it in order to convince my grandmother that I was not lying). Yes, I talked. I could read. But I was so weird and confusing that when the teachers weren’t pitying me, they were convinced it is my fault for being bullied, confused and angry for me being so bright and yet not able to do some things or just ignored me. I would hide under the table before my piano lessons, because I liked it there and I was excited and afraid from my family — but the teacher thought it meant I didn’t want to play the piano. I cuddled under the mattresses in the Ballet lessons, because it was comforting, and I didn’t knew I should stand still and listen. I had my obsessions — like listening to the same story cossets over and over. I actually met every criteria for PDD-NOS and maybe even for Asparger’s syndrom — but I was a girl.
I was not smart enough to meet the stereotype for Asparger’s syndrome, and I just looked shy and cute when I ran away and went to play by myself. I sang to myself, talked to myself, told stories to myself. But when my mom took me to an evaluation in an organisation — they found nothing. I was just a little bit slow. The same organisation found that my Dysgraphic and Dyslectic partner was “just lazy”, so I don’t think their evaluation had any value.
I was also taken to an EEG test, because of the “ticks” I had. It was my favorite stim — doing over and over again 4 part maneuver with my hands. I don’t think my mother asked me what I was doing in a tone that wasn’t angry and shaming. I am not good and reading tone, but I do get the “you should be ashamed” tone in Russian. The EEG found nothing, and my mother actually deny that I ever had this test. I found documentation about it once, so i know it wasn’t imagined.
Even the child psychologist I was sent to (because my grandmother was physically abusing me) didn’t say a thing about maybe being on the autistic spectrum. I was a girl.
Girls don’t have autism unless they can’t talk with their mouth. They can be shy, weird and magical — and shy girls are cute. Girls should be shy, especially if they are Jewish and Russian.
She just can’t be autistic. She is too stupid. She is too smart.
Musings from Mars 