!TW: sexual harassment!

Neurodiverse women and girls (and AFABS in general I find) spend our whole lives knowing we don’t fit in but we desperately want to and often try to mask our way through life…to make friends, to find jobs…to try and make the bullying at school stop…to be liked.

I have had situations with neurodiverse guys throughout my life that do not respect boundaries and are made out to be unable to understand them instead of being held accountable and told that their actions aren’t appropriate. There was a guy at my school who used to follow girls home, he did it with me once but when I noticed…because he didn’t live anywhere near me and I took an alternative route, he stopped. I brought this up to people at school who informed me he was autistic as if it made the situation any better. The teachers just said to ignore his behaviour as he was probably “trying to make friends”. He ended up moving schools so that was the end of that. Grew up around multiple autistic and neurodivergent boys at school who didn’t understand boundaries, and their behaviour was often excused the same way.

The most recent was a guy at university, a few years older than me who started hanging around in our friend group. I caught him multiple times looking up my skirt and saying inappropriate things, like ‘if I didn’t have a boyfriend he would pursue me’ etc. He would get in my space and make me uncomfortable and one time he fully groped me by grabbing one of my breasts. When called out for his behaviour he would go into a meltdown and say he couldn’t help it or understand because he was autistic. Our friend group started avoiding him for the sake of the safety of the women and AFABs in our group. Every interaction with him felt uncomfortable.

I have had many male friends who are neurodiverse and lovely and understood boundaries very well, but too many experiences with others where they were never held accountable, were excused and continued with inappropriate behaviour. It’s too patriarchal, as if men with autism are just big children or something and are let off the hook, with neurodiverse women becoming their victims. Its just very uncomfortable and difficult to talk about, knowing they never receive the blame for their own behaviour its always ‘their autism’ at fault.