I’m Aimee and I’m an Autistic Artist and Ph.D. student from Leeds, UK. I received my diagnosis in 2019 and ever since I’ve been on a mission to try and make people more aware of autism in women. Due to masking (which is something that autistic girls use to mimic other children to be accepted) autistic women grow up to be left behind, or under-represented, which can cause inaccuracies within the media, academia, and mental health.

I’ve been recently studying the portrayals of autism in popular culture and, in my opinion, these can be sometimes false or inaccurate. Not every autistic person you meet is like Dustin Hoffman from Rain Man, and not every autistic person is like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. As the saying goes “when you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism,” and, also, savant syndrome is rare. I doubt every single autistic male in pop culture would be a genius, let’s be real. However, this shows the conflicting ideas around autism and the issues this causes within the autistic community. These portrayals make us all out to be either someone who can’t function within society or someone who overcomes their autistic issues to pursue something which highlights their genius. Those in between, like myself: an autistic woman who loves the humanities, apparently do not exist in media.

So, here I am society. An autistic woman who is an artist, a feminist, attempting a Ph.D. which is in art and not physics. Wish me luck!