🎙️🔴 ASD Part 2 - Interoception

Neurolight Series — Part II
Articulation Bias and the Erasure of Adult Autism
How Intelligence, Gender, and ADHD Distort Diagnosis

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Abstract

Autistic and transgender people are disproportionately misdiagnosed or excluded from autism diagnoses in adulthood. This article argues that a key mechanism behind this erasure is articulation bias—the tendency of clinical systems to treat coherence, insight, and reflective language as evidence against autism. Drawing on neurodevelopmental research, trauma theory, and lived experience, this article introduces the concept of premature identity load: a developmental condition in which early self-knowledge is punished rather than mirrored, leading to chronic nervous-system strain, forced withdrawal, and later diagnostic misinterpretation.

1. Born Into Contradiction

Some individuals are not born into confusion about who they are.
They are born into clarity—before language, before norms, before social permission.

For many autistic and transgender people, selfhood appears early:

  • a sense of continuity
  • an internal truth
  • awareness of being a distinct individual

This is not learned through socialization.
It precedes it.

The problem is not the self.
The problem is that the external world categorically contradicts that self.

When a child knows who they are, but every mirror denies it, development begins under contradiction rather than support.

This creates an existential condition best described as:

certainty without recognition

2. Premature Identity Load

Most children are allowed to explore identity gradually, with error, safety, and repair.

But when self-knowledge itself is punished—whether through gender invalidation, behavioral correction, or social exclusion—the nervous system is forced to adapt too early.

This results in premature identity load:

  • hyper-reflection before emotional maturity
  • self-monitoring before self-regulation
  • ethics before safety

Instead of learning through attunement, the child learns through constraint.

The nervous system does not get time to form.
It is required to perform.

Burnout, sleep disruption, learning difficulties, and emotional dysregulation are not failures of development—they are signs of development under siege.

3. Autism, Transness, and Existential Friction

Autistic cognition often involves:

  • difficulty inferring social norms
  • reduced reliance on implicit rules
  • preference for internal consistency over external conformity

Trans identity introduces an additional fracture:

  • the self is accurate
  • the system is not

This creates existential friction—a persistent clash between internal truth and enforced categories.

Each attempt to connect requires:

  • language that negates reality
  • compliance with false premises
  • translation that costs more than it gives

Connection becomes dangerous not because it is unwanted, but because it injures.

4. The Container Effect: Retreat as Protection

Repeated punishment for authentic expression produces a predictable outcome:

  • the individual compresses
  • interaction narrows
  • the world becomes smaller

This is not avoidance.
It is injury prevention.

Many autistic people retreat not because they reject connection, but because connection repeatedly fails to meet basic neurodivergent needs.

Solitude becomes a recovery space—a way to regulate, reflect, and survive.

This is often misread by clinicians as:

  • preference for isolation
  • lack of social motivation
  • emotional detachment

In reality, it is rest after chronic misattunement.

5. Desire for Connection Is Not the Problem

No human nervous system is designed for total isolation.

Autistic people want connection.
They want to be understood.
They want to exist without translation.

What looks like withdrawal is often:

  • recovery from social trauma
  • rebuilding after invalidation
  • protection of a depleted system

Connection is postponed, not rejected.

6. Skills Forged in Retreat

Extended time alone often leads to:

  • deep interests
  • skill development
  • ethical frameworks
  • intellectual precision

These are frequently romanticized as “strengths of autism.”

But the truth is more complex.

These skills are adaptations formed under constraint.
They emerge because spontaneous connection was unsafe.

This is not a superpower narrative.
It is an adaptation narrative.

7. Masking Is Not Performance — It Is Survival

Research by Amy Pearson and colleagues demonstrates that masking:

  • is used by both neurotypical and neurodivergent people
  • carries dramatically higher cost for autistic individuals
  • is associated with trauma, burnout, and long-term health consequences

Masking is not deception.
It is forced coherence under threat.

For autistic and trans individuals, masking often begins in childhood—not to fit in, but to avoid punishment.

The body remembers this.

8. Articulation Bias in Adult Diagnosis

By adulthood, many individuals subjected to premature identity load can:

  • explain themselves fluently
  • reflect deeply
  • articulate ethics and boundaries

Psychiatry often interprets this as:

  • emotional maturity
  • intact social understanding
  • evidence against autism

This is articulation bias.

The system mistakes:

  • survival adaptations
    for
  • absence of neurodevelopmental difference

The more coherent the survivor becomes, the less visible their history is allowed to be.

9. ADHD as Diagnostic Sink

ADHD is frequently used to explain away:

  • social disruption
  • executive dysfunction
  • emotional overload

But ADHD alone does not account for:

  • persistent social uncertainty
  • ethical overcompensation
  • sensory moral reasoning
  • chronic identity strain

Instead of asking what coexists, the system asks what replaces.

Complexity is collapsed into convenience.

10. Why Stereotypes Fail Here

Diagnostic stereotypes assume:

  • neutral environments
  • delayed self-awareness
  • externalized difference

But autistic and trans individuals often experience:

  • early self-knowledge
  • internalized difference
  • external punishment

The result is false negatives, discharge, and erasure.

Not because autism is absent—but because it does not look the way the system expects.

Conclusion

When truth is inborn but disconnection is imposed, development does not fail—it adapts under pressure.

Articulation is not evidence of ease.
Coherence is not evidence of safety.
Kindness is not evidence of understanding.

Until psychiatry learns to recognize survival as survival, autistic and transgender adults will continue to be misread—not because they are unclear, but because they are too clear to fit outdated frameworks.

Listening must replace assumption.

References

  • Pearson, A. et al. (2023). “Masking is life”: Experiences of masking in autistic and non-autistic adults.
  • Hull, L. et al. (2017). Social camouflaging in adults with autism.
  • Bargiela, S., Steward, R., & Mandy, W. (2016). Late-diagnosed autism.
  • Livingston, L., & HappĂŠ, F. (2017). Compensation in autism.
  • NICE NG128 (2018). Autism spectrum disorder in adults.
  • American Psychiatric Association. DSM-5-TR (2022).
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