After spending most of her life feeling different and alone, an autism diagnosis gave journalist Christina Buttons the kind of relief that w
By: Christina Buttons
Published: Apr 25, 2026
After spending most of my life feeling different and alone, an autism diagnosis gave me the kind of relief that was impossible to resist. But it was based on a lie.
In 2019, I was 30 years old, living in Los Angeles, sharing an apartment with my two cats, and working remotely as an artist. Most of the people my age I knew at the time were setting down roots: getting married, building families. Meanwhile, I spent almost all my time alone, surrounded by plants, animals, and murals. I had no desire for anything else. I enjoyed having a space where I could keep the world, and other people, at a manageable distance.
This had been the case for most of my life. From childhood on, I struggled to make friends, which took a toll on my self-worth. By adolescence, my mental health had deteriorated, and I spent close to a year cycling through multiple psychiatric hospitalizations, outpatient programs, and group homes for depression and self-harm. At age 15, I was groomed online by a much older man, culminating in a traumatic sexual assault. Immediately afterward I tried to end my life, then spent a year in a youth residential treatment center in Utah.
I never had a good explanation for why so much in my life had gone wrong. But the residual effects of this turmoil followed me into adulthood, making it easier to retreat into a kind of comforting solitude.
Then, as an adult, seemingly out of the blue I began encountering stories along a similar theme: women discovering, later in life, that they were autistic. With titles like “The Invisible Women with Autism” or “What My Adult Autism Diagnosis Finally Explained,” these stories told of women who spent years feeling different, misunderstood, and chronically overwhelmed, before experiencing the relief of finally having an explanation.
They also proposed a newer understanding of autism, citing a growing body of research about a “female autism phenotype.” Autism, the research explained, had long been defined using symptoms that show up frequently in males—and are usually very overt behavioral, linguistic, or social difficulties. Autistic girls, by contrast, are more likely to turn their struggles inward, presenting as merely quiet and anxious. As they grow into adolescence, the thinking goes, they are frequently treated not for their underlying autism—which went unrecognized—but for the mental-health problems they developed as a result.
This understanding has spread over the last decade, leading autism diagnoses to rise sharply each year, with some of the largest increases among young adult women. Autism experts have long framed this rise as the uncovering of a “lost generation” that has been there all along. But skepticism is now beginning to emerge. Last month, Uta Frith, one of the pioneers of autism research, warned that the autism spectrum has become so broad that it risks losing clinical meaning altogether.
But I didn’t know any of this back in 2019. The female autism framework was the first explanation I had ever encountered that united the crises of my youth with the realities of my adulthood. And once I began reviewing my life through that lens, I started to see signs everywhere.
The social difficulties I experienced since childhood now looked like an innate communication deficit. My monotonous voice, flat emotional expression, lack of eye contact, and failure to respond to humor—all of which were noted in psychological testing I endured as a teenager—seemed to confirm it. My all-consuming fixations on things like sharks and parasites became autistic special interests. My habit of overcomplicating basic tasks became executive dysfunction, my clumsiness a gross motor impairment, and my fidgeting “stimming.” Even my food intolerances and obsessive-compulsive tendencies seemed to fit the pattern.
But the clearest sign was in my daily war against bright lights and loud noises, which finally seemed to have a real name: sensory processing sensitivity. Suddenly, every aspect of my life, every little inadequacy or abnormality that had once tormented me, had a medical explanation.
• • •
Within a few weeks after encountering this research, I went to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. The assessment lasted about an hour and involved a long series of questions about my interests and experiences that seemed thorough and careful. When I finally received a formal autism diagnosis, I felt immense relief. The diagnosis quickly became the most important part of my identity. It also gave me a sense of purpose: I decided I wanted to help other girls be diagnosed earlier and avoid going through what I had as a teenager.
I joined the online autism community on Instagram, a loose network of accounts that created content about the condition, where I found other women with stories very similar to mine. Using the hashtag #ActuallyAutistic, hundreds of users claimed that their “lived experience” gives them not only the exclusive authority to define autism but also the right to self-diagnose. Their posts revolved around neurodiversity, framing autism not as a disorder but as a natural variation in human experience. As progressive activist Blair Imani put it in one popular Instagram post, “Autism is a natural part of human diversity. Autism is not a disease to be cured.” At first, I saw this interpretation as a positive. But the more I learned about that framework, and the deeper I sank into its world, the more uneasy I became.
Neurodiversity is rooted in an academic framework that recasts autism as a minority identity whose only true impairments are the barriers created by a “neurotypical” world. Followers of the movement reject the idea that autism causes any sort of “deficit.” The problem, activists insist, is not autism itself, but a society unwilling to accommodate autistic people.
But for a community organized around social impairment, they maintained an astonishing number of social rules. Certain language and beliefs were treated as harmful, and activists policed them aggressively. Terms like high-functioning, low-functioning, severe, and profound were condemned as “ableist.” Again and again, I watched popular accounts direct their thousands of followers to comment sections so they could scold people for using the wrong language or expressing the wrong views about autism.
Activists reserved particular contempt for anyone who upheld the medical understanding of autism spectrum disorder, targeting organizations, researchers, and universities that treated autism as a disorder and supported work on its causes, treatment, or cure. They compared that work to eugenics and tried to shut it down through petitions, harassment, and public pressure. Too often, they succeeded.
In practice, of course, this put highly verbal adults with relatively mild difficulties in the position of speaking for people with profound disabilities who cannot speak for themselves. But that didn’t stop the activists. In fact, their most visible hostility was directed at parents of severely impaired children who spoke honestly about their children’s lives. Activists castigated these parents for supporting Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), an autism therapy designed to reinforce more “normal” behaviors—for example, helping autistic children develop language skills or memory—and reduce harmful ones. According to them, ABA is abusive because it suppresses children’s authentic selves.
My personal experience indicated differently. In my 20s, while putting myself through college, I worked as a special-needs caregiver for severely impaired youth, including children with autism. There were times when children needed to be restrained to prevent them from hurting themselves or others. It very quickly became clear to me how little some of the most virulent activists on social media understood about the level of disability they were talking about.
But when I defended parents of autistic children from activists’ accusations, I was met with hostility myself. I faced even more pushback shortly afterward, when I began referring to myself with the term Asperger, commonly understood as a less severe version of autism characterized by similar but milder forms of social and communications challenges. It felt important to distinguish between people with severe impairments and people like me.
[ After transitioning into journalism, Buttons began to reevaluate her own diagnosis. ]
The response was fierce. Activists rejected the idea that there was any sort of hierarchy in the autism spectrum. Some even called me a Nazi because of the history of Asperger’s namesake. After about a year in that community, I began to pull away. I unfollowed many of the accounts and turned to other interests and online communities.
Even then, I still believed I was on the spectrum. I wasn’t ready to let go of the medical framework that explained the isolation I’d felt all my life.
• • •
Then, my life changed. In 2022, after working for several years as an artist, I became a journalist. The career shift was spurred by my discovering the stories of detransitioners: mainly young women who had once identified as transgender and now no longer did, and whose experiences were largely ignored by mainstream media. I could relate to them; many of them, like me, had struggled deeply as teenagers and searched for a label that seemed to explain their suffering. As I learned more about their experiences, I was forced to think more critically about how activism and media shape cultural narratives around identity and diagnosis, and how perverse social incentives can lock those narratives into place.
It became harder and harder not to apply that same level of scrutiny to my own autism diagnosis.
I soon began taking on stories that required heavy reporting. As I spoke with sources, built rapport, asked sensitive questions, and earned their trust, I realized something that should have been obvious much earlier: I do not have a social communication deficit. Not only was I competent at socializing, I was good at it, and I improved the more I did it.
Which forced me to ask: What else could have explained my social discomfort? In retrospect, the answer was more ordinary than I wanted it to be. I was a sensitive, introverted child who felt social mistakes intensely. Instead of responding to them by becoming more resilient, I chose to retreat into my interests, because they felt safer than people. Over time, that withdrawal hardened into a pattern.
In other words, what looked like an innate communication deficit was, in large part, the result of inexperience. Socializing is a skill that develops through practice; I simply hadn’t practiced it.
My diagnosis unraveled further once I started questioning the other traits I had come to see as autistic. Introversion, high sensory sensitivity, intense interests, and social camouflaging are not exclusively the features of an autist; they are widely distributed across the general population. But using the female autism framework, I came to see them as a meaningful pattern.
This framework became so influential in large part because it offers a compelling explanation for why girls were historically diagnosed with autism at lower rates than boys. It is the kind of narrative the press finds irresistible: a scientific correction to a historical wrong against women. Over the course of about a decade, it has become a powerful cultural script through which more and more women have begun to reinterpret their own lives.
This happened very swiftly, partially because an autism diagnosis is not especially difficult to obtain. The process, which has no objective medical test and relies primarily on self-reported traits interpreted by individual clinicians, leaves enormous room for confirmation bias and error. My own evaluation did not consider alternative explanations for my experiences, only that they had been present since childhood.
And the thing is: I didn’t ask for any other explanations. The appeal of an autism diagnosis is not mysterious. While some other psychiatric labels carry stigma, autism invites sympathy. By framing behavior as the product of a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition present from birth, the diagnosis suggests that a person’s actions are outside their control. While this may be true for people with a profound disability, for those without severe intellectual impairment it can provide an external locus of control: the sense that one’s life is governed by irrepressible forces. In some cases, that can also discourage the belief that change is possible or desirable.
In other words, it offers relief from the weight of responsibility for your perceived flaws and failures. My diagnosis gave me coherence. It brought order to what had been a painful and confusing history, and it presented me with a reason to stop expecting more of myself. I found that appeal impossible to resist.
But life is more complicated than that. My struggles were less a product of biological certainty and more a messy overlap of environment, temperament, and choice. I have had to learn to be comfortable with that ambiguity.
I no longer think I am autistic, nor that I ever was. I just took a little bit longer to find myself, and took some wrong turns along the way. And I still struggle: After staying guarded and isolated for so long, I face an ongoing battle to let people in. But I’m doing it. And my self-worth is now rooted not in a diagnosis but in my personal and professional accomplishments, which expand each day.
What happened to me is not interesting because it is unusual. It is interesting because I suspect it is increasingly typical. Research shows that more and more people, especially young women, are over-identifying with psychiatric diagnoses, desperate for some sort of label to explain their struggles or abnormalities. This has consequences. Once challenges are understood as symptoms of a permanent condition, it becomes harder to imagine that they might be worked through, adapted to, or overcome.
Losing the autism label allowed me to regain something more valuable than certainty: agency. My difficulties did not disappear, but they no longer defined the limits of who I could become. There is comfort in a story that shifts responsibility away from the self. Sometimes that comfort is almost irresistible. But in the end, it is better to believe in the possibility of change than to embrace a narrative that says you never had a choice at all.
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Many such cases. Its emidemiology resembles that of "trans" identity.