In 1926, psychiatrist Grunya Sukhareva was the first to describe autistic traits in children, which is a contribution history would erase. Two decades later, Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger reframed the same observations through studies of boys, and autism entered psychiatric history through a lens shaped around the male brain.
The DSM still defines autism through criteria built from male case studies. Autistic women and girls go unrecognized within it, redirected into other diagnoses (such as anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, or hysteria).
Most wait years for an accurate diagnosis, spending that time masking, performing neurotypicality at significant psychological and physical cost. The consequences are concrete, as far higher rates of suicidal ideation and suicidal attempts than among neurotypical peers.
The DSM falls upon the female symbol and shatters it as an indictment of a clinical structure built to recognize only part of humanity.
Illustration holds a critical slant photography struggles to keep. It refuses clinical voyeurism, the rhetoric of the sufferance and the aestheticization of trauma, building instead visual metaphors and symbolic layerings that reveal the system instead of objectifying the subject.
