This article contains references to rape, stealthing, and other forms of sexual violence.
Christine McGuiness has powerfully spoken out about experiencing sexual abuse as a child and being raped as a teenager. In her documentary, Christine McGuinness: Unmasking My Autism, she explores whether her autism – which she was diagnosed with in 2021 – impacted how she processed this trauma.
“Would a neurotypical woman have said something?” she asks. Back in 2022, a study found that nearly nine in 10 autistic women have been victims of sexual violence, with two-thirds of victims being “very young when they were first assaulted,” suggesting that McGuinness is far from alone in her experience.
Navigating consent can be tricky at the best of times. When so much of our sexual communication relies on body language, non-verbal cues and decades of historical baggage, what happens to those who are neurologically hardwired to do the opposite?
How do those with autism and ADHD (neurodiverse individuals), who already struggle with reading social cues, deal with this confusing space?
GLAMOUR spoke with three neurodivergent women in their early twenties about sex, dating, and the unique medical challenges women with autism face when navigating consent and sexual violence.
22% of autistic women are hospitalised because of their mental health by the age of 25.
On a basic level, autism is a condition where individuals may struggle to understand social cues and communication. But autism manifests uniquely for each person.
The medical knowledge about neurodivergent women, particularly those with autism, is sparse. Women are often diagnosed far later in life than their male counterparts, mainly because much of the diagnostic criteria used to assess autism is based on male autistic symptoms that were formed decades ago.
Women are often not diagnosed with autism until after a mental health crisis. This was the case for Isabella Walton, a 22-year-old London based film-maker, who says she experienced a mental health crisis when she was 16, having to go on antidepressants and take time off school:
“I began questioning whether there was something else going on, and my aunt, who works in psychiatry, suggested that I might have ADHD”.
At 17 years old, she went to CAMHS, where she was put on a 1-year waiting list for a diagnosis and was informed, “but this also sounds like autism.”
“I wasn’t ready to even consider that as an option because I feel like there is a lot more ableism towards autism than ADHD,” Isabella tells GLAMOUR.
“With ADHD, you can be this quirky fun personality, whereas with autism you are more of a weirdo or ostracised for it. So I had internalised ableism with autism.”
Honestly, while the show is beautifully made and wonderfully written, it left me with a sense of hopelessness.
But the wait time for autism assessment stretched even longer, with many in adulthood having to wait several years before diagnosis. There are cases of women in their 40s all the way up to their 70s being diagnosed, feeling out of place for decades.
The late diagnosis is compounded by autistic women’s ability to mask, arguably a feminine superpower and curse. Isabella notes: “With women, we are great at masking. We are great at copying people and being people pleasers because we are taught from a very young age to please people. We are taught that if we are good girls then we will thrive, we will win.”
When she began dating men, coming from this emotional space, it was easy to romanticise them:
“When you're neurodivergent, you’re very vulnerable. You want to give everyone the world. You have got a lot of love to give. And you have low self-worth because of everything that I was talking about before [societal stigma & lack of support]. You think you are a burden to society. So you think, ‘Oh, this person wants me, great’.”
She remarks that people with ADHD are sometimes deficient in dopamine, so they are constantly seeking it, which can lead to risky behaviour: “I think male validation gave me that dopamine, but also sex.”
“I thought I was just being this really sexually empowered person and now when I look back at it, I was giving myself out so freely to these people because I was in this impulsive hyperactive state. It took me to start dating women or non-binary people to really learn about consent and learn about my own boundaries. Because men are so willing to take; especially the kind men I was going for.”
Things came into harsh focus with her when she met a guy one summer:
“There is this thing where you think your rapist is going to be a really disgusting prickly man that you don’t really like," she tells GLAMOUR. "You don’t assume it to be someone who you genuinely want to date, who literally seems like your dream guy and who is really attractive. And when you are autistic or neurodivergent, you follow the rules. You think, 'This equals a good guy.”
“So when for whatever reason something does not follow suit to this narrative you have in your mind, you're like: ‘No, that didn’t happen’. The denial comes in strong. You have not learned that it's possible for men like this – to be perpetrators like that.”
She remembers seeing the condom next to the bed, having not consented to sex without it: "I just pushed it to the back of my head and kept going.”
“We had sex several times afterwards and mostly not with a condom because I didn't want to even have the concept of having the control taken away from me. So I was like, ‘If I'm choosing not to do this then, then I’m consenting to it in my head'.”
Isabella didn’t realise that stealthing is a form of rape until she discussed the ordeal with her therapist.
I was 37 when I was finally diagnosed with ADHD. What took so long?
Sofia, who is 24, and also has autism and ADHD, says it was similar for her in her first relationship, exacerbated by the fact she was undiagnosed. Falling hard for her ex-partner, she states:
“When it comes to love especially, you get so lost in the person that everything they do is so amazing […] It's very hard for us to trust a person. So when we do eventually find someone, we want to keep them around.”
“I don’t know how to say no, and I know it’s a very scary thing…”
Regarding her boundaries being over-stepped sexually, she says: “I don’t know how to say no, and I know it’s a very scary thing. With my ex-partner, there were many times he wanted to be physical, and I really didn’t. I didn’t know how to say ‘No, I don’t want to have sex’ because to me, that is like a soul-crushing word for them to hear.”
The stereotype of autism in popular culture usually consists of a cold, emotionless, hyper-nerdy male figure. For Isabella and Sofia, they feel the opposite is true – they empathise too much.
For Sofia, telling her partner she didn’t want to have sex felt like an excruciating task, as she could palpably feel his disappointment: “I worried it would make him feel bad. He might question his manhood. Mentally, I take one phrase, and I am already going to so many places with it.”
The complexity of having ADHD and autism sometimes made her feel like two people, describing her feelings as going from zero to 100. She would go from feeling very passionate to then wanting to withdraw sexually. Communicating this was hard, as she feared she would be labelled “crazy” or didn’t want to disappoint her partner.
For the 24-year-old writer, director and artist Sumayyah Maryam Bailey, navigating dating as an autistic woman had other challenges.
Due to her autism, she can be very blunt and literal: “People think I am playing hard to get, and the only thing I can think of that would be slightly similar to this is with sexuality. When men approach bisexual and lesbian women and want to ‘fix them’ and are like: ‘Oh I am here to prove you wrong. It’s just because you haven’t been with me yet’.”
“How dare you put yourself on a pedestal and think you're gonna fix my autism by one or two dates?”
She had this experience with a new friend she met over a previous summer. She invited him over to watch a documentary, but he saw it as a sexual invitation:
“Nothing terrible happened, but he just started taking his shirt off during the documentary and then said: ‘But don’t you acknowledge there are feelings?’ And I was like: ‘…No. That’s not what I said’. And at one point I just yelled at him because I said ‘You're not even listening to me. You're not listening to the fact that I set boundaries, and you're just overriding that because you think I'm playing hard to get.”
She continues, “People will just be like 'Well, that's because you haven’t been with me, and I will be the one who will open you up in that way’. And it's like, ‘No, no one will. That's just how my brain works, darling, like stop it.”
She laughingly adds: “How dare you put yourself on a pedestal and think you're gonna fix my autism by one or two dates?”
“I guess having to ask for consent and being blunt about it makes it not interesting anymore. Me being transparent about what I'm comfortable with is not hot any more, which is really weird. And I guess viewing autism as some sort of box to tick off. Similarly to race, where people are like: ‘Oh I want to be with the mixed race girl ‘or ‘the exotic girl’. To kind of have people view me almost as a box to tick off, and view autism as some sort of kink as well, is a very strange thing to kind of navigate.”
Isabella, Sofia and Sumayyah have dated both neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals, but they generally feel it is easier to be with someone who is neurodiverse.
“We tend to attract each other and can accommodate each other’s needs”, says Isabella.
They feel that they are now in a far healthier space in terms of navigating consent and establishing boundaries, despite their struggles. But recognise this is not the case for many neurodiverse women, and why they are keen to raise awareness, aspiring for a more inclusive sex education – accessible to all.
For more information about reporting and recovering from rape and sexual abuse, you can contact Rape Crisis.
If you have been sexually assaulted, you can find your nearest Sexual Assault Referral Centre here. You can also find support at your local GP, voluntary organisations such as Rape Crisis, Women's Aid, and Victim Support, and you can report it to the police (if you choose) here.
