Unmasking Female Autistic Representation on TV

My first clue was how much I enjoyed the pandemic lockdowns. Granted, in Darwin our lockdowns were less severe than elsewhere—still, my workplace mandated we work from home for a few months. I live alone, and as others struggled to cope without regular social interaction, I found solace. I vividly remember the comfort of suddenly existing in a society where it was socially unacceptable to go out and socialise. I was exempt from navigating both the social aspect of my work life and the pressure to be around people in my free time. I could switch off the part of my brain reserved for this draining task. Free up some bandwidth. Breathe.

At the time, I attributed this reaction to introversion and didn’t understand its true significance until almost a year later, when the second season of Freeform series Everything’s Gonna Be Okay (2020–2021) dropped. Created by Australian comedian Josh Thomas, the comedy series follows twenty-something Nicholas (Thomas) as he takes on the guardianship of his two teenage half-sisters, Matilda (Kayla Cromer) and Genevieve (Maeve Press), after their father’s death. Matilda is autistic.

Ironically, I’d first discovered the series’ first season during 2020’s lockdowns. I devoured those episodes before I’d entertained the idea that I could be autistic, save for a brief train of thought five years prior, when I’d noticed how terrible I could be at eye contact. But I was too social, and in my twenties, so I relegated this inkling to the pile of discarded delusions collecting dust along my brain’s skirting boards.

Yet from episode one, Matilda’s character not only drew me in, but watching her, in some ways, was like watching myself. In the pilot, Matilda and Genevieve’s father tells them that he’s dying of cancer. Genevieve cries immediately, while Matilda plies her father with questions about his prognosis. Genevieve’s response bemused me, while Matilda’s felt real: logic and information first and then after, once the reality’s been processed, the emotion. I remember as a child, reacting to and processing my own father’s cancer diagnosis in a similar way. I wrote my commonalities with Matilda off as coincidence: shared traits with a fictional autistic character did not come close to a solid base for suspecting I too was autistic. But when the show’s second season dropped, Thomas revealed in a New Yorker profile that he’d been diagnosed with autism while working on season two and subsequently wrote his experience into the show. This shattered my perceptions of what autism looked like: my earlier dismissal of my own suspicions had been based purely on stereotypes.

Everything’s Gonna Be Okay shattered my perceptions of what autism looked like: my earlier dismissal of my own suspicions had been based purely on stereotypes.

Matilda is the first television character I’ve strongly related to. The way many on-screen characters respond to difficult situations never resonated with me—I viewed them as calculated overdramatisations for the sake of ratings-pulling storylines. Yet both Everything’s Gonna Be Okay and more recently Netflix’s 2022 reboot of 90s television series Heartbreak High demonstrate that the issue is not overdramatisation but a lack of neurodiverse representation. They are the first shows I’ve seen that accurately portray female autism on-screen. Each also included autistic women on the creative teams to shape and create these characters. Seeing this nuanced representation led directly to my formal diagnosis.

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There’s an Instagram Reel of a chameleon currently doing the rounds. As it climbs a colour-blocked length of rope, its skin instantaneously adopts each new tone. The transition’s seamlessness is striking. It appears effortless, yet the chameleon must consciously action each adaptation. These changes reflect both the natural environment and variations in temperature or social setting.

Psychiatrist and autism researcher Professor Tony Attwood likens autistic women to chameleons due to our ability to mask and hide our autistic characteristics. We learn to mask from a young age, often unconsciously—hiding our autistic traits beneath a veneer that closely mirrors our peers. We learn socially acceptable ways to behave by observing others and adapting our own behaviour to match. This ability to mask means women and girls are routinely misdiagnosed or dismissed when seeking a diagnosis.

Like a chameleon, I adorn carefully constructed skins to ensure I can blend into the scene and look like I belong. Like a chameleon, adopting these masks appears effortless from the outside. Inside, I’m deflecting the crossfire of instructions and cues my mind shoots every which way, reminding me how to be, what to do, what to say. New environments or experiences are the most taxing: With no prior reference points to rely on, I’m simultaneously navigating the situation while analysing and processing it, spinning a protective web as I live it. It’s exhausting.

Autistic women learn to mask from a young age, often unconsciously—hiding our autistic traits beneath a veneer that closely mirrors our peers.

As well as the ability to mask, stereotypical portrayals of autism contribute to women’s difficulty in being diagnosed. Until recently, autistic representation in popular culture largely resorted to the male stereotype of a socially inept savant. The Big Bang Theory’s (2007–2019) Dr Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) is a PhD-holding physicist who adheres to strict routines, loves trains and cannot understand sarcasm—though the show’s producers never label Sheldon as autistic, arguing these are just a collection of character traits. To viewers, though, he largely reads as neurodiverse, as does his eventual wife in the series, Amy Farrah-Fowler (Mayim Bialik), whose neurodiversity also aligns closely with stereotypes. In Netflix’s Atypical (2016–2021), teenage protagonist Sam (Keir Gilchrist) is openly labelled autistic, and viewers see how it impacts his everyday life—yet the show also draws on stereotypes, neglecting to illustrate the myriad differences in how autism presents, despite the inclusion of other autistic characters. In season one, Sam decides he wants to start dating and actively pursues it with the encouragement of his therapist and his father, despite his mother discouraging it and believing he is not ready for the social pressures of dating. This leads to Sam developing a crush on and attempting to begin a romantic relationship with his therapist. Not only does this reinforce the stereotype that people on the spectrum cannot function in social settings, but it misinterprets the ways in which these social cues can be misunderstood. For many, it is the more nuanced, subtle cues of body language and facial expressions that can be missed or difficult to read.

In contrast, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay and Heartbreak High are ground-breaking. Everything’s Gonna Be Okay was not only the first television series with an autistic female lead, but also the first autistic lead played by an autistic actress. There are other autistic characters in the show, including Matilda’s girlfriend Drea (Lillian Carrier), and the series demonstrates how each character’s autism manifests differently. In season one’s fifth episode, Matilda, Drea and their friend Jeremy (Carsen Warner) go to a house party because Matilda is adamant it is an essential high school experience. While both Drea and Jeremy are unable to enter the house due to sensory overload, Matilda happily joins the party. The show embraces the characters’ autism as a fundamental aspect of who they are and how they exist in the world. Still, it is ostensibly about autism, rather than one in which autistic characters are part of its everyday fabric.

Quinni exists as part of a storyline not centred on autism, while also portraying the challenges her neurodiversity poses in a neurotypical world.

Netflix’s Heartbreak High fills this void with its inclusion of Quinni, played by autistic actress Chloé Hayden. The series centres on the falling out of best friends Amerie (Ayesha Madon) and Harper (Asher Yasbincek) after the events of a music festival. Amerie can’t remember what happened to fuel Harper’s animosity; Harper, in retaliation, exposes the ‘sex map’ she and Amerie drew on a tucked-away wall of the school. All the students named on the map are subsequently forced to take compulsory sex education classes, Quinni among them. The audience’s first introduction to Quinni makes no mention of her autism; she is allowed to simply exist in the fabric of Hartley High as a whole, three-dimensional character who favours brightly coloured clothing and stick-on face gems and crystals. She exists as part of a storyline not centred on autism, while also portraying the challenges her neurodiversity poses in a neurotypical world.

I didn’t know an autistic character had been included when I started watching the series—yet as with Matilda, I instantly related to how Quinni navigates the world. In the second episode, she’s pacing up and down outside a restaurant, waiting for her date to arrive, unsure whether or not to go inside and claim a table. I recognised her distress as that of an autistic person, a fact not confirmed until later in the episode. As Quinni’s storyline continues to play out, the audience witnesses her chameleon-like qualities. After a date she perceives to be disastrous, she falls into sensory overload, and hides away with her best friend in a bathroom at a house party until the feeling has passed. While Quinni experiences ableism from some around her, the series makes it clear that neither Quinni nor those closest to her view her autism as a deficit: it is simply an integral part of who she is.

Viewing autism through a deficit lens has long been the default position of popular culture representations. In a recent article, writer Clem Bastow explored the deficit perspective of autism rife in the documentary series Love on the Spectrum (ABC 2017–; Netflix, 2022–). Bastow argues the show’s premise assumes there is something inherently wrong with the way the autistic individuals approach love and relationships that needs to be ‘fixed’. This fault in the premise, Bastow argues, exists because autistic creators were not included in the show’s development.

Both The Big Bang Theory and Atypical also fall into this trap. Sheldon and Sam’s perceived deficits are used as comedic fodder and include storylines designed to ‘fix’ their ways of being. In contrast, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay and Heartbreak High avoided this pitfall by including both Cromer and Hayden in conversations about their characters and writing aspects of each actress’ own lived experiences with autism into the characterisations. Josh Thomas additionally had autistic consultants approve scripts and storylines. The decision to include autistic artists as part of the process ensured nuanced, accurate autistic representation not previously depicted on screen.

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After eight months stuck in diagnostic purgatory, my psychiatrist confirmed what I already knew. A few weeks later, I took the time to sort through some of my life’s remnants still littered in my childhood home. In a box filled with old manuscript drafts and half-finished writing projects, I found a printed email from an editor with feedback on a manuscript I’d submitted nine years earlier, to an unpublished young adult manuscript award. My submission had been longlisted, but the editor’s feedback mentioned how mean some of the characters were to my protagonist, and suggested this required softening. I hadn’t known what to do with this feedback at the time—to me, those characters were not extraordinarily mean but realistic. As I re-skimmed the email, it struck me: I’d written an autistic protagonist years before my diagnosis, without realising I was projecting my own masked autistic experience of the world onto her. Bastow writes about a similar experience in their book Late Bloomer. Feedback on a screenplay they’d written stated the ‘emotional journey’ of a character needed work; Bastow subsequently realised the character was autistic.

I owe my own diagnosis and understanding of myself to Cromer and Hayden’s eloquence in sharing so much of themselves as they brought Matilda and Quinni to the screen.

Accurate representation of the broad spectrum of autistic identities, including intersectional representation, matters. Not only to break down stereotypes, but to create safe, inclusive environments where chameleons like myself have the freedom to share our lived experiences of our neurodiverse existence. To see ourselves represented on screen and to have the ability to accurately incorporate our lived experiences into our creative work.

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I wrote this piece with hesitation. I only ever wanted my diagnosis to be for myself—to know myself, and be kinder to myself. I’m not sure this conversation needs another voice like mine: female, yes, and autistic, yes, but also white, neurotypical passing, privileged. But I owe my own diagnosis and understanding of myself to Cromer and Hayden’s eloquence in sharing so much of themselves as they brought Matilda and Quinni to the screen. Not to mention the countless other content creators, writers, activists and artists who provided information and solace on my diagnostic road in their infallible commitment to breaking down autistic stereotypes with unreserved honesty. Without these voices in popular culture, I would still be searching for this piece of my identity. Until the stereotypical representations of autism shift to reflect the entirety of the spectrum, there will never be enough voices.

Everything’s Gonna Be Okay is available on Stan. Heartbreak High is available on Netflix.