‘Too Female’ for Autism and ADHD: Misdiagnosis, Mistreatment and Misogyny
By Beth Rees
I’ve never been a ‘girly girl’. I’ve never felt comfortable in make-up, I’m not stable enough for heels and I preferred the company of boys growing up. My school attire was a combination of baggy jeans, holey hoodies and DC trainers, which meant I lingered on the periphery of most female friendship groups. In my early career, I was told I needed to ‘make-up and dress-up’ because I was ‘off-putting to clients.’
So, when I got told by medical professionals at the age of twenty-nine that I was ‘too female’ for an autism/ADHD diagnosis, I thought they were having a laugh. Turns out, they weren’t. It took another five years of misdiagnosis, misunderstanding and a whole load of misogyny for me to finally be heard.
After having a breakdown in October 2017, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (emotionally unstable personality disorder). When I told my counsellor, she suggested I get assessed for both autism and ADHD because i was obvious to her, as a neurodivergent woman, that I was one too. Long waiting lists and lack of services meant going private, which was costly but gave me hope.
In December 2017 I had my first autism assessment. I met with the psychiatrist on three anxiety-inducing occasions for hours at a time. It felt like I was in a police interrogation – why did I think I was autistic? Did I collect trains or dinosaurs when I was little? Why had my family said I didn’t struggle if I had?
It was exhausting and any hopes I had of a diagnosis didn’t last. Two weeks after the final appointment, I was told I wasn’t autistic because I didn’t fit the criteria. According to these ancient and outdated guidelines, my hobbies were ‘too female’, my eye contact was ‘far too good’ and I was ‘coping too well to be on the spectrum’.
I was devastated and went back to the NHS, pleading with psychiatrists to review my BPD diagnosis but was gaslit into the narrative that I needed to ‘come round to the idea’ and that this was ‘classic manipulative BPD behaviour’. Their recommended treatment of group therapy and medication wasn’t working. Group therapy filled me with anxious dread and after the fourth session on Radical Acceptance, I radically accepted I wasn’t going back again.
Medication was a whole trial-and-error trauma in itself, trying to find the magic tablet that wouldn’t give me migraines, make me violently sick or feel like I was bouncing off the walls. They finally settled on a very high dose of anti-psychotics, which meant my choice was ‘Take these and put on weight’ or ‘Don’t take them and feel worse’. Admitting defeat, I took the tablets.
Over the course of three years, I lost three jobs, couldn’t drive, put on a lot of weight and couldn’t stop sleeping. Every time I asked for help or begged for the diagnosis to be looked at, I was told to ‘stop being so dramatic’, ‘there are people worse off than you’ and that I was ‘time-wasting’. It was like stepping back to the days of ‘hysterical women’, who probably, like me and many others, just wanted to be heard.
In December 2020, after waiting nine months to speak to someone, I got a video call with a psychiatrist. Ten minutes into the appointment and many tissues later, she asked if anyone had mentioned I could be autistic with ADHD. I couldn’t believe it. I said they had and explained what had happened previously. That’s when she told me, ‘I’m sorry but I think you’ve been misdiagnosed and if that’s the case, the medication is wrong too.’
It was a defining moment in my life and I thought my struggles would finally be recognised. But no. She said she couldn’t diagnose autism or ADHD, so I needed to refer myself to the autism assessment service and wait a year to be seen. I was stuck with a diagnosis I didn’t have, taking tablets I didn’t need until the right diagnosis could be determined.
She also said not to get my hopes up because neurodivergence was hard to diagnose in women. I couldn’t stop crying. I was frustrated and angry from trying to get someone to take me seriously. Worse still, when asking for an NHS ADHD assessment, one doctor actually laughed and said, ‘You won’t get one of them, there isn’t a service. Anyway, girls can’t have ADHD.’
Well guess what? Yes, they can. In October 2021, I was diagnosed with combined-type ADHD and a month later, after my thirty-fourth birthday, I was diagnosed autistic. Despite having 40 pages of assessment information, the male NHS psychiatrist STILL didn’t believe me, sarcastically asking ‘What are you crying for now?’ when I got upset. This wasn’t the only triggering question. Throughout the process, I got asked why a diagnosis mattered, did I think I was autistic/ADHD because I’d seen it on TikTok, and told that we needed to stop ‘overdiagnosing’.
How can we keep encouraging women and girls to ‘reach out and ask for help’ only to be met with mockery and condescension when we do? And why are we diagnosing conditions according to gender? What medical people don’t realise is that the process to get an autism or ADHD assessment is broken and very traumatic. Their words are leaving a mark and fuelling ableism that already exists inside many misdiagnosed or undiagnosed neurodivergent women and girls.
We’ve been told we’re not good enough, don’t work hard enough, don’t function well enough. That we’re drama queens, hysterical, overreacting, causing a fuss and if we ask for help, we’re ignored. I was misdiagnosed with a mental health condition I didn’t have, which was a trauma in itself and then told to keep taking dangerous drugs that I didn’t need that were doing more harm than good.
Our voices deserve to be heard. Getting the right diagnosis matters because if it’s wrong, the consequences can be devastating. We shouldn’t have to explain why it matters to medical people, nor should we receive a lesser version of care just because we’re female and loved Little Ponies, not planes, when we were young.
Beth is an autistic/ADHD writer from South Wales who is sharing her story in the hopes of raising awareness around the impact of misdiagnosis and late diagnosed neurodivergence in women and girls. She wants them to know their stories and experiences are important; that they matter.