<
https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-i-was-unseen-even-to-myself-as-many-as-half-of-people-with-anorexia-are-autistic-fiona-wright-is-one-of-them-248010>
"The final straw, the one that broke this particular camel’s back, was my
girlfriend’s receipt of her autism diagnosis over email. She didn’t want to
open the report alone and asked if I would read it with her – and when we were
done, the only thing I could think to say was: this is all the things we like
about each other.
It was the final straw, and an important one, but I had been gathering a
veritable hay bale of such pieces of information, slowly and very much in the
background, for the best part of two years by then. It was December 2019. So
much has changed since then – in all of our worlds, but also in our
conversation around (and understanding of) neurodivergence and gender.
It’s all happened at a speed that sometimes leaves me reeling. This is a
wonderful thing: I often think that no one, soon, will have to clutch at straws
the way I had to.
Psychologists have a term, diagnostic overshadowing, for what has happened to
so many autistic women, girls and gender-diverse folk, over so many years that
the scale of it is horrifying to think about in its entirety. It is what
happened to me.
But it’s not the reason, not quite, that it wasn’t until I’d been embroiled in
the medical system for something like 17 years that I was diagnosed as
autistic, nor that the diagnosis was one I’d had to seek out on my own.
It horrifies me to think of this, sometimes: 17 years is such a long time, by
anybody’s reckoning. It’s long enough for a newborn to all but come of age. In
17 years’ time it will be 2041. An adage from medical science states that it
takes 17 years for research to be translated into clinical practice – or, for
what medicine learns to translate into what medics do."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
