This is a guest article from a longtime friend and colleague of mine, who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.
Recently, I encountered the term “masking” for the first time, as used in relation to folks on the spectrum. Soon, I was seeing it all over the place, as often happens in life (or at least, so it seems).
A video came across my YouTube feed from a channel I wasn’t familiar with. The YouTuber was a person on the spectrum, and the video was about something he called “high masking women,” and how to “spot” autism among them. Intrigued, I clicked through. The video had over a million views. What was this all about, I wondered?
I watched as he described these so-called “high masking women” and how they “hide” their true autistic selves. He made them sound sneaky. Dishonest. Inauthentic. He talked about how to “spot” them. That sounded invasive—almost predatory.
I became uneasy. But I couldn’t put my finger on why. I decided to forget about it. But it didn’t go away.
This “masking” thing kept popping up. Next thing I knew, Uncanny Valley Girl was asking me to look over an essay series she was working on all about it! Here was someone I could ask—what’s the deal with “autistic masking,” anyway? She explained what she found offensive and pernicious about it.
Finally I got it—what it was that bugged me about it in the first place.
It’s calling autistic people liars.
Masking is deception. It means putting on a false affect in order to hide one’s true feelings or intentions. It might be simply neutral, or it might be a specific demeanor—the crucial part is that it’s not true.
For example, a person might mask the depths of their grief at a funeral, because they want others to believe that they’re stronger than they feel inside. Conversely, at the funeral of someone they hate, they might pretend to be sorrowful. Both amount to lying about what’s inside, using tools like behavior, facial expression, tone of voice, and phrasing—if not actual untrue words.
This is where the whole “autistic masking” thing falls apart. It’s an oxymoron.
When it comes to being phony, my observation is that we neurodivergents suck at it. While I’m not autistic, I’m not neurotypical, either. And I am spectacularly bad at lying.
Think about it. When have you seen a neurodivergent person successfully be phony? Let’s go back to that funeral example. It’s going to be that autistic kid who won’t suck it up, put on a good suit, and just go quietly and politely to Uncle Asshole’s funeral and just get it over with.
It is so difficult for neurotypicals to understand those of us on the spectrum. Even though they usually have emotional empathy, they tend to have very little cognitive empathy (a fact that causes problems even between each other, by the way).
Emotional empathy is feeling what you perceive another person feels. (The emphasis is crucial.)
Cognitive empathy is imagining what it might be like to think in a different way.
A lack of cognitive empathy can lead people to assume ill intent. They can come up with motivations that are out of character for the person they accuse. They can draw conclusions that are totally illogical—they’re emotional responses to something they don’t understand. In other words, they get all mixed up.
This inability to imagine a different style of thinking also explains why neurotypicals can be unhelpful in clearing things up when we don’t understand them. They seem unable to recognize that their own perspective is simply that—one person’s point of view.
Uncanny Valley Girl has often shared with me her painful experiences of neurotypicals accusing her of shady motivations, whenever they just don’t understand her. She posits that the concept of “autistic masking” originated the same way—by neurotypicals making a leap from “I don’t get it” to “These autistic people are all up to no good.”
She talks about a “mimicry of the oppressor” as a self-protective response by autistics to the unceasing onslaught of NTs pressuring them to conform. It’s a compelling reframing.
That’s why I won’t say “autistic masking.”