Growing up it was incredibly obvious I was on the autism spectrum. I was very rule-following and smart at school, getting described as “demonstrative” by preschool teachers (who calls a four year old that word?), but was very sensitive about minor things like the texture of lotion or potatoes or certain fabrics, or toys being organized differently from the way I wanted them, or frustration with not being correctly understood. While no diagnosis is the same, these are signs of being on the spectrum, and at three years old when my mom talked to a friend who was a psychologist she posited that I might be autistic. 

But when I went to get evaluated, four year old me was denied an official autism diagnosis. Then I was denied again at age seven, and instead put under the label of Sensory Processing Disorder. I finally got the Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis at age 12 (a year after also getting diagnosed with anxiety and depression). I also found out that in the years before the DSM-5, I was on the part of the spectrum that would have been denoted Asperger’s Syndrome, but luckily I got the diagnosis too late to become attached to that term and was educated of its problematic origins. 

Looking back on my history of diagnoses, I always wondered why despite it being obvious with all my quirks growing up I was over and over again refused a clear answer. But learning about gender and disability studies/justice in the last couple years, it has become apparent why: I grew up a girl. 

I was very lucky to have the privilege of parents that let me express myself whatever way I wanted as a kid, and I did exactly that in my special interest of dinosaurs, which were gendered as a “boy” thing. But I realize that I was still unable to escape the social part of socialization: Specifically, the experience of girlhood (as I have understood from mine and others) that involved making yourself and your problems smaller, while boys around the same age were allowed to be loud and take up space. 

This difference was especially present when looking at the differences between ways that autistic cisgender boys expressed their traits without much dramatic behavioral intervention or judgement from other kids, such as verbal or physical expressions of stimulation. Meanwhile, if a young girl was perceived to be “different” in the way they behaved, they faced more bullying and ostracizing than boys might. So as I grew up into the American school system as a girl, I learned that I would face more unspoken social consequence for expressing my traits, and thus felt more pressured to mask. And as these traits went unexpressed, from classrooms to doctor’s offices, they too went undiagnosed.

Finding out that this experience I had growing up was validated through the study of how disability is embodied differently across genders and social standards (as Shakespeare implies, there is no accurate one-size-fits-all model of disability), I felt quite vindicated honestly. Even after transitioning and finding community with other transgender autistic people, I can still see this difference in how traits are expressed due to assigned-at-birth-gender socialization. I worry that I may seem annoying at times for making this intersection of my identities my “personality,” but with how much I’ve come to terms with how it has affected my entire life I cannot really deny its stake in the person I’ve grown up to be.