Daughter of Crisis

I grew up in a house where the air itself carried mood. The tension didn’t arrive, it accumulated. Like static, or damp. You didn’t always hear it in her voice. You felt it first. The way the cutlery drawer opened. The footfall across the lino. The time she took to answer when you spoke.

In the household of a divorced single mother and a teenage girl, my friends tried to protect me. They did their best. But when hypothyroid madness reveals coercive control and occasional physical violence, there is only so much anyone else can do.

Her circadian rhythm was inverted. She spent the night awake, listening to AM talkback radio filled with right-wing fundamentalist zealots. She slept during the day. I would come home from school to housework. Washing dishes. Making dinner. Feeding the dog and chooks. Then homework. She was nocturnal. I was trying to survive.

She wasn’t kind. Not always. Not in the cycle of abuse. Harm, remorse, promise. Repeat. She could be brutal, erratic, possessive. She could rage over crumbs, or fall silent for days. But no one explained why. There were no labels. No diagnoses. Just a quiet, continuous undercurrent of Serepax, one tablet three times a day, and warnings that lived inside me. Don’t push her. Don’t set her off. That’s just how your mother is.

I internalised it all. The weight. The guilt. The vigilance. I mothered my own mother. I built my personality around avoiding detonation. I built my armour around myself. Not always successfully. A single misspoken word could set off a tirade that lasted for days.

I didn’t complain about the soft drinks thrown at my face, or how sticky it is in your hair. I didn’t complain about the cigarette burns in the carpet. I didn’t complain at all.

Because I had learned: if you complain, you make it worse.

At thirteen, I stood in public phone booths in the rain. I called the GP. I knew the pharmacist’s name. I knew how long a Serepax script lasted. I didn’t know what the drug did. I just knew she needed help. And this was the help she had.

I watched her change, and then stop changing altogether. The woman who raised me was no longer rising. She was flatlined. Chemically and clinically.

Now, I know. She wasn’t mad. She was in endocrine freefall. She wasn’t too much. She was sedated out of herself. She wasn’t cruel by design. She was abandoned without a name for what was wrong.

It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t diagnosed.
And it wasn’t my fault I couldn’t fix her.

I had my own bout with hypothyroidism, caused by unrelenting and chronic stress in my thirties and forties. It was during that period, researching the condition, that I finally saw the full horror of what had happened to Lottie.

The swelling. The fatigue. The cold. The cognition. The rage. The utter loss of self. The flattening of personhood.

And then came the other truth. The one I couldn’t avoid.

When I was diagnosed with autism, so much of my childhood came into focus. The hypervigilance. The shutdowns. The mimicry. The freezing. The PDA, mistaken for a bad temper, became a spark to her petrol. The deep, urgent desire to fix things that weren’t mine to fix.

And I saw her more clearly than ever before. Not as a villain. Not as a martyr. But as a woman unseen. And then unrecognisable. Even to herself.

She should have been seen. She should have been tested. She should have been offered more than sedation. She should have been believed.

I am what the system didn’t get to do to her. I am diagnosed. I am angry. I am articulate. I am still afraid of the quiet before the yelling starts, but now I know the shape of it.

This is not catharsis.
This is not memoir.
This is forensic memory.

Her name was Charlotte Ford. She was born on 6 May 1920. She died on 19 July 2005.

Lottie. On this day, what would have been your 105th birthday – I see you.

You were worthy. You were always worthy.
But this damned patriarchal, misogynistic world let us both down.

This closes the three-part file for Lottie Ford. A case of medical misogyny, medical bias, and medical neglect.

This is not forgiveness. But, Lottie, I do understand.

The Price of Quiet

In 1984, at the kitchen table after breakfast, Lottie was still hesitating about selling the house. I was thirteen, resisting the idea with the kind of immovable emotional gravity that only children can manage. Roy was at the sink, washing up the breakfast dishes. She raised the subject again, gently, nervously, that maybe they shouldn’t sell, and stay here in Maryborough.

He didn’t turn around.

“Oh, it’ll be sold all right. You’ll get your bloody half and I’ll get mine.”

That was the end of a marriage that had lasted forty-seven years. A marriage that started in World War Two, was blessed with a son, survived the loss of a son, continued through the medical crisis and grief, celebrated an adopted daughter; 47 years, ended with 15 words.

The divorce and property settlement would unfold slowly, bureaucratically, over the following years. But in that moment, the damage was done. The foundations cracked, the promise dissolved, and whatever love or duty had once held them together slipped into silence.

What followed was not rebuilding. Not reflection. What followed was Serepax.

Doctor’s Little Helper

Before Serepax, there was Vincent’s APC powder. Aspirin. Phenacetin. Caffeine.

Tipped into tea, taken at the sink, sold over the counter, handed from woman to woman like advice. For nerves. For cramps. For pressure. For life.

Phenacetin was toxic to the kidneys. It caused silent renal failure. It was eventually banned—but not before decades of women had used it daily. Lottie was one of them.

By the 1980s, phenacetin was gone, but the logic behind it remained. Women weren’t offered support. They were offered sedation.

Enter Serepax. Oxazepam. The little white tablet that didn’t raise eyebrows. Not scandalised like Valium. Not brutal like Mandrax. Serepax was positioned as gentle. Appropriate. Feminine.

“Serepax is gentle,” they’d say. “And sometimes, that’s all you need.”

But Lottie didn’t need gentleness. She needed thyroxine.

What Serepax Did, and What It Didn’t

Serepax binds to GABA receptors. It slows the central nervous system. It calms—but it also dulls. It sedates without healing. It mutes without solving.

What it doesn’t do is more important than what it does.

It doesn’t regulate metabolism.
It doesn’t support cardiovascular health.
It doesn’t restore thyroid hormone.
It doesn’t correct the biochemical collapse of post-surgical hypothyroidism.

Lottie didn’t need to be sedated. She needed her endocrine system supported. She needed a blood test. A plan. A dose.

But instead, she was handed quiet.

Eighteen Years of Slow Poison

Lottie had her partial thyroidectomy in 1969. No thyroxine was prescribed. No endocrinologist consulted. No one followed up.

And for eighteen years, her body deteriorated.

She had previously used Vincent’s powders, damaging her kidneys. She smoked two packets of cigarettes a day—forty cigarettes daily—constricting her blood vessels and starving her tissues of oxygen. She was eventually prescribed Serepax, which dulled the symptoms but never touched the cause.

This wasn’t benign neglect. It was accumulative harm. It was a system that kept handing her silence and calling it medicine.

Her body was in contradiction. One foot on the brake, hypothyroidism slowing her down. One foot on the accelerator, nicotine and anxiety pushing her to keep up.

No one was watching the dashboard.

Her weight crept up, from twelve stone to fourteen. Her energy declined. Her skin changed. Her cognition slipped. Her emotional regulation shattered.

They said she was hormonal.
They said she was difficult.
They said she was just getting old.

They said everything except the one thing that mattered.

“We failed you.”

The Silence of Renewals

Every few months, she would visit the GP. Not for evaluation. Not for curiosity or care. Just for authority scripts.

Her Serepax was renewed, over and over again, without reassessment, without bloodwork, without anyone asking whether it was still helping—or if it ever had.

There was no hormone panel. No psychiatric review. No second opinion. Just a refill.

The treatment she needed was simple. The question she needed someone to ask was obvious.

“Do you think this might be your thyroid?”

But no one asked. Not in 1971. Not in 1977. Not in 1985.

Symptoms Reframed as Personality

Lottie wasn’t treated. She was blamed.

Her emotional outbursts weren’t seen as neurological symptoms. They were called tantrums.

Her swelling wasn’t myxedema. It was weight gain.

Her exhaustion wasn’t hormonal. It was laziness.

Her paranoia wasn’t biochemical. It was madness.

She wasn’t seen as a woman whose body had been mismanaged. She was seen as a woman who was hard to love.

And when a woman becomes too loud, too fragile, too unrecognisable, people stop coming. Friends drifted. Family pulled away.

Eventually, even the mirror avoided her.

This Was Not a Personal Failure

This was not a woman who failed to take care of herself.

This was a woman no one took care of.

What happened to Lottie between 1969 and her death in 2005 was not the result of poor lifestyle choices. It was the result of systemic disinterest, gendered medicine, and a clinical culture that mistook sedation for support. Iatrogenic hypothyroidism. Doctor-caused harm

She was not sad. She was hypothyroid.
She was not mad. She was mismanaged.
She was not a lost cause. She was abandoned.

Her Name Was Lottie

Where The Chiaroscuro Anthology was shadow and light, Infernal Dames is fire.
This series is a reckoning—with medical misogyny, with intergenerational trauma, with the systems that smiled while they failed us.

But like all revolutions, this one begins with a single voice. A single woman. My mother.

Her name was Charlotte “Lottie” Ford. Born Charlotte Bissett on 6 May 1920, in Maryborough, Queensland. Fraternal twin. One of four children. Daughter of Scottish immigrants. A nurse. A war bride. A mother. A grieving mother.

She had a goitre. She had hyperthyroidism. She had a partial thyroidectomy in 1969.

And then, she had nothing. No endocrinologist. No hormone replacement. No follow-up care. No apology. Just a neat surgical scar and a script for silence.

The years that followed did not bring healing. They brought unraveling.
Her moods swung. Her cognition dimmed. Her spirit cracked open and leaked out where no one was looking.

She was labelled difficult.
Paranoid.
Senile.

She was not given hormone therapy. What she had, independent of any doctor, was Vincent’s powders.

And 15 years later, I, her 13 year old adopted daughter, was running through rain in my school school uniform to the nearest phone booth to ask for help the way I understood help to exist.

Because that’s what the system taught me:
Drugs were easier to get than answers.

The Prayer

Lottie was forty-seven when her body began to buckle under the weight of grief, menopause, and spiritual resignation. The year was 1967. She was already bone-weary from years of quiet sacrifice—familial, social, and personal. And spiritual.

She had been brought up in the Presbyterian Church of the 1920s and 1930s. Where sermons were long and pews were hard, and women were praised for their silence, not their questions. Where suffering was seen as sanctification. Where grief was not a wound but a test.

“Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10)
She had learned that passage young. The answer was not yes or no—it was obedience.

It was late April when it happened.

She was in the car with her twenty-year-old son, Warren. They were driving—destination forgotten—but she was “flooding,” as she later called it. Uterine bleeding, heavy and unrelenting.

She begged Warren to pull into a garage so she could use the toilet. He refused.

She sat there, bleeding, humiliated in front of the boy she had once held in her arms.
The son she had fought for—against Catholic schools, against family shame, against the shame of a Catholic-Presbyterian marriage..

And now she prayed.

Not for the bleeding to stop.
Not for comfort.
Only this:

“Just make it stop.”

Four weeks later, Warren was dead. Killed in a car accident near Murgon at 2:00 a.m. Out with friends who all survived.

She never forgave herself. She believed her prayer had been heard—and answered.

The Doctrine of Endurance

Lottie did not rage. Not then. Not aloud. She folded inward, into the only theology she had ever known.

The Presbyterianism of her youth had taught her that “women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety” (1 Timothy 2:15).
She had borne the child. She had kept the faith. And now that child was gone.

What did that make her?

She had been trained in a doctrine of endurance. A woman who suffered was not to be pitied. She was to be admired, quietly, from a distance. To break under the weight of pain was not weakness. To speak of it was.

There was a time for everything, the minister had said. (Ecclesiastes 3)
A time to mourn. A time to be silent.

She chose silence. She had been told it was holy.

The Surgery

By 1969, her body had become a stranger. Her neck was visibly swollen. Her eyes sharp with a kind of startled brilliance. Her weight dropped. Her energy burned fast and erratic.

She couldn’t sit still. She couldn’t think clearly. She couldn’t sleep. Or eat. Or feel safe.

But no one called it hyperthyroidism. They called it “the change.” They called it “her nerves.”

Her goitre grew until it could no longer be ignored. She was booked for a partial thyroidectomy.

The surgery was nearly cancelled—her blood pressure was dangerously high. She was visibly distressed. But the operation went ahead.

There was no endocrinologist. No psychiatric liaison. No comprehensive review.
Just a scalpel. A general anaesthetic. A note to follow up with her GP.

They cut. And then they left.

Vincent’s Powders

After the surgery, her body slowed. Her moods thickened. Her fire became fog.

But still, no one tested her hormone levels. No one checked her blood. No one noticed the quiet emergency.

What she had instead was Vincent’s APC Powder: aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine. Tipped into tea. Swallowed at the sink. Passed from woman to woman like an incantation.

It numbed the ache. Dizzied the nerves. And damaged her kidneys.

But it was all she had. That, and a dog.

The Dog

A black and tan Australian Terrier. A gift from her older sister—a woman she hated with a precision born of childhood bullying and adult betrayal.

The dog arrived not as comfort, but as substitute. A living thing to fill the space left by her dead son. A gesture of kindness wrapped in control. But the dog—he did not care about the politics of grief. He cared about her.

He jumped into her lap when she cried. Licked the tears from her cheeks. Stayed close when no one else could bear to be near.

There are griefs you cannot speak. But the body still speaks them.
And that little dog heard every word.

Five years later, I arrived. Another living thing. Not her child by blood—but there to fill the silence, to stand in the shadow of a boy who would never come home.

And though I called her mother, there were days when I, too, could feel the shape of substitution curling around me.

What Was Never Said

No one said “endocrine disorder.” No one said “hormonal collapse.” No one said “grief and menopause are not madness.”

What they said was:

“It’s just her age.”
“She’s always been intense.”
“It’s probably the change.”
“Don’t upset her.”
“Just keep her calm.”
“She’s doing her best.”

And behind all of that, the theology lingered.

“She will be praised.” (Proverbs 31)
But only if she cooks without complaint. Only if she suffers without spectacle. Only if she keeps her lamp burning at night, and does not disturb the peace.

What passed for care was containment.
What passed for treatment was sedation.
What passed for sanctity was silence.

The second part of Lottie’s file will be here tomorrow.

Mama’s Holding Things That You Can’t Buy

From The Chiaroscuro Anthology to The Infernal Dames

Yesterday, The Chiaroscuro Anthology closed with a poem depicting intergenerational trauma, starting with rage against parents, ending with a promise to a child.

So hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
Mama’s here to help you fly.
And if flying feels too much to do,
Mama’s gonna stay right here with you.

A soft ending to The Chiaroscuro Anthology—nineteen poems about my autistic experience.

Yet, I’m not just autistic. I’m a woman, 53 years on this earth, and furious.

Not Joking – Global Gender Parity in 2158

The World Economic Forum estimated, late last year, that it would take another 134 years to reach global gender parity.

134 years

This day, this year, this decade, this century—we have granddaughters still fighting the battles their grandmothers thought they had won. Intergenerational inequity. Injustice, passed down like recipes and silverware. From the Greats to the Silents, the Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and the unborn Gen Bravo.

The First Wave. The Second Wave. The Third Wave of feminism.

How many more waves must we ride when we’re already facing a tsunami?

A tsunami of dead women.
A tsunami of gender pay gaps.
A tsunami of stolen autonomy—of everything, even down to kitchen bench heights and seatbelts in cars.

Why not build a fire so big that not even this tsunami can extinguish it?

From this idea came The Infernal Dames.

While I have no children, I make this promise to the grandchildren of the next generation.

I do not want you to inherit the intergenerational trauma of centuries, the ache of millennia. I don’t want you to have to sing this lullaby and know it’s real:

Hush, little baby, don’t you cry
Mama’s holding things that you can’t buy
And if those things do make you cry
You’ll understand why, bye and bye.

The Infernal Dames

A forensic reckoning, a class action, a ledger of women burned by silence, by medicine, by the system.

We gave more care to punch cards than to living women. “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.”

We built hospitals where no one listened. “It’s anxiety. Lose weight.”

We prescribed silence. “Take this, it will help.”

We institutionalised grief. “You’re too much. Take this, it will help.”

We pathologised hormones. “You’re hysterical. Too much.”

We erased. “Your file could not be found.”

It is my intention that The Infernal Dames will roar.

Tomorrow, we begin.

Why Shebah?

I often get asked why I drive for Shebah, instead of the other rideshare companies. Why? Because Shebah. Rideshare for women, by women.

Shebah started in 2017, with a focus on safe personal transport for women and children. It also empowers us a drivers. We can choose when we want to work, and what bookings we want to accept. We are not penalised for not accepting a booking. Shebah creates female empowerment through that, and by paying 85% of the fare.

My personal ethos – every drive is a safe and secure trip for my passengers, without fear of harm or harassment. This goes both ways. It’s better for me, as a driver, and it’s better for my passengers.

Driving for Shebah is the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. I value the rapport I build with my regular passengers. I value the conversations with one-off passengers. Everyone has a story.

Good stories and bad stories

The good stories I hear – about school days and assignments, sporting achievements, weekend plans, interests and hobbies.

I’ve done exam coaching and cramming, brainstormed ideas for essays, discussed concepts the teenage passengers have had trouble with, teasing out for critical review and analysis.

Here’s an example from last night. This was for a young Grade 7 girl, from school to her sport. It’s week 4 in term 2, so I always know that assignments will be due soon, and exam block is coming up. I ask about assignments and what they’re working on. This young lady had an assignment to deepen the “no” argument about egg farms. I asked for her thoughts, and in her reply, she mentioned things that she had seen in activists’ videos.

I asked if she had ever been to an egg farm, and if she knew that there was an egg farm less than 10kms away. She was interested in seeing one for herself.

In a short, 10 minute drive, we covered that English assignment, shared acquaintances, and her sport.

Why Shebah? For parents, knowing that drivers have “blue cards” (Positive Notice for Child Related Employment), gives them reassurance for their child, travelling alone, with a stranger. Our bread and butter is school drop offs and pick-ups for other people’s children, often the same children ever day, every week. We’re not strangers for long.

Bad stories

In any group of women, ask, and you’ll find that most have had a bad experience as a passenger. Hence, Shebah.

For example, the 23yo women with severe disabilities who needed help getting her seatbelt done up, only to have the male driver get a bit handsy, and then remind this vulnerable passenger that he knew where she lived. We will ask if you need help, and that help will be respectful. Hence Shebah.

For example, the 21yo model whose male driver started driving in the opposite direction to her destination. We will NEVER do that, unless we know about a road closure or other issue. Hence Shebah.

For example, the male driver who drove two 15yo girls to a party, who kept asking if they’d like to go to another party with him when this party was finished. We will never do that. But we will ask if these girls have their return journey sorted, because we are worried about their safety. Hence Shebah.

For example, the deaf 17yo boy who was punched by the driver because he wouldn’t answer his questions. We will accept boys as passengers until they turn 18. Hence Shebah.

For example, the male driver who was so incensed at my continued refusal to go for drinks with him, he ran a red light on a busy road. That was in 2018; I registered as a Shebah passenger the next day. I registered as a driver in 2021.

Bears and men

There has been quite a conversation recently, about whether women would rather come across a bear or a stranger, male, in the forest. I think the examples above would give some, small example why women are saying, “bear”, and why having a rideshare service like Shebah is invaluable.

Living my values

It is all those reasons, and many, many more, why I love driving for Shebah. Safety, security and 85% of the fare.

Footnote – yes, I am registered with Uber and Didi, as a means to an end. If I’m not going to make my daily revenue target, then I log into one of the other rideshare platforms to make up the balance.

That’s why… Shebah.

Warning – rage ahead

For all the women who think that they are aliens in this world, I see you.

For all the girls who think they are worthless because they can’t write an essay at school, I see you.

For all the undiagnosed autistic women and girls, I see you. I was you. And I rage and grieve for you.

Yes, we didn’t know then what we know now. Except Temple Grandin was diagnosed when she was 3 years old in 1950. Her mother fought to keep Temple out of an institution.

Which makes me wonder how many women with undiagnosed autism were lobotomised in the 1930s to make them more biddable? We’ll never know.

How many girls and women are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, when in fact they are undiagnosed autistic?

How many girls and women are misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, when in fact they are undiagnosed autistic?

How many girls and women are misdiagnosed with borderline personality disorder, when in fact they ate undiagnosed autistic?

How many girls are handicapped by their parents who refuse to get their daughter assessed for autism?

How many girls are handicapped by their parents who refuse to tell their daughter that she is autistic?

How many women are preyed upon because they are undiagnosed autistic and have no defence against manipulative people?

How many women? When will this disparity end?

What could have been, if it was recognised that there is a female autism phenotype in the 1950s? What could my life have been like, if I had been diagnosed at 3 years of age, like Temple Grandin? What if I had been given support? What might have been changed? I’ll never know.

But when I see these undiagnoses, misdiagnoses, and secret diagnoses, I wonder – what have we learned in the last 70 years about women’s health? Why is there still a predilection to diagnose us all with anxiety, or hormonal issues when we seek medical help? Why are we diagnosed with major illnesses 4 years later than men, on average?

Why is half of the population so ignored, maligned, and disadvantaged? Why do we keep carrying the same mistakes forward from generation to generation?

Yes, I have rage. And I have grief, for all the girls, all the women, who don’t get the support they need.

I have rage for the psychiatrist who attempted to dissuade me from seeking an autism assessment “because it will be an unremovable label for the rest of your life.”

Autism already is for life. It doesn’t go away. Label or not, I’m autistic. As are all the undiagnosed and misdiagnosed women and girls out there.

I see you. I hear you. I know you.

The Forde Inquiry and the forgotten, adoption and genetic inheritance

(or, how I got to be me)

This is the story of my biological parents and my genetic inheritance. First, though, some background on “the forgotten” – those who were thrown into orphanages and detention centres and… forgotten – including my biological parents.

In June 1999, the report of the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions was tabled in the Queensland Parliament.

It covered the period from 1911 to 1999, examining records from more than 150 orphanages and detention centres, and evidence given by more than 300 people. The Commission of Inquiry found significant evidence of abuse and neglect of children in the past. (https://fordefoundation.org.au/resources/the-forde-inquiry/)

What was not investigated, because it was not in the terms of reference of the Forde Inquiry, was the forgotten who were put into psychiatric wards because of their behaviour.

Imagine this. In 1971, in a psychiatric hospital in southern Queensland, two patients in their 20s met, fell in love, pledged themselves to each other, and conceived a child. Once her pregnancy was discovered by hospital staff, he was transferred to another facility, the Challinor Centre, in south-east Queensland, while she remained in the same psychiatric hospital, Bailey Henderson, alone, having had her love ripped away from her. Her pregnancy developed, and on 5 April, 1972, she gave birth to baby girl.

Within two weeks, that infant had been removed from her mother, transferred to
the Warialda home in Brisbane, and prepared for fostering and adoption. Her mother remained at the hospital, now having had two loves ripped away from her.
Two lovers, forcibly separated, and an infant in an unknown location, being given to someone else.

All hope was lost.

That is the story of my biological parents, and me. It continues.

In 2003, I searched for, and found, both my biological mother and father.

In 2004, my biological mother and father saw each other for the first time in 33 years.

In 2005, they married.

In 2024, the lovers are separated once more, with him in a secure nursing home with dementia of the Alzheimers type, and her, with emotional and physical frailty, in a different nursing home.

Underlying this, like a discordant threnody, lies the falsehoods that saw the mother and father
institutionalised while very young.

She went in before the age of 10, with borderline schizophrenia.

He went in at 11, with schizophrenia and borderline mental retardation. They both got out of the system, and to this day, are not on medication for schizophrenia, indicating they never had the condition in the first place.

In the mid-20th century, especially during the 1940s and 1950s, there was a significant lack of understanding and knowledge about autism. Many children who today would be recognized as autistic were often misdiagnosed or misunderstood. Terms like “borderline mental retardation” and “childhood schizophrenia” were commonly used to describe behaviors and conditions that we now recognize as part of the autism spectrum.

So it’s entirely possible that both of my biological parents are neurodivergent, with either ADHD, autism, or both. My biological father was surrendered as a ward of the state by his parents, and what is described of his behaviour matches a PDA response. My biological mother was a quiet, reserved child, often “away with the fairies”, detested by her adopted mother, and was committed to the psychiatric hospital by her adoptive parents. That sounds an awful lot like the inattentive ADHD type.

In the “pick up sticks” process of meiosis, when DNA from both parents is jumbled and shuffled to create the zygote that then becomes an embryo, which then becomes a foetus, and then becomes a baby, it was almost a dead certainty that their child, me, would be neurodivergent; autistic, in fact.

Experts posit that autism is a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Environmental factors would include whatever drugs she was taking in that hospital, both before and after they knew she was pregnant. There wouldn’t have been a folate supplement, or any of the things that are recommended for intending and expectant mothers today.

Research into and knowledge about autism has come a long way since then, but mostly relevant only for five year old white boys. The gaps in knowledge about autism and girls, autism and ethnicity, and autism and aging are still wide, and the DSM-5-TR diagnosis criteria are still looking at the male presentation of autism.

All we can do is keep speaking up, advocating, participating in research and making the most of every single day. Autism is more than Autism Awareness Day, Week or Month. Autism is for life.

Gender bias in autism research

I intended this blog post to be about the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system, getting locked in fight/flight/freeze/fawn mode, and the mind body connection.

In doing my research for this, I came across a piece that yelled, “Stop the press!”

Many in the autism community say that there is likely a high rate of under- or mis-diagnosis for autistic women. Why? Because autistic girls present differently to autistic boys, and the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5-TR is based on typically male presentation of autism.

This article, reporting research that was presented to a symposium is entirely representative of that.

“The pupils of preschool-age children with autism are slow to constrict in response to light, according to results from two unpublished studies presented … at the 2016 International Meeting for Autism Research in Baltimore. The findings suggest that the pupillary reflex could serve as an early indicator of autism risk.” https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/delayed-pupil-response-to-light-may-be-early-sign-of-autism/

This study was based on pupil response to watching cartoons. Of the 104 children observed in this study, aged between 2 and 6, half were autistic and half were “developing typically”.

But all 104 were boys.

Now, this was in 2016. Three years later, in a study looking at pupillometry, visual perception, and ASD features in a task switching paradigm, this was included in the recommendations:

“While sex-differences was not the central focus of the current research, future studies across the BAP should continue to explore differences in neurobiological correlates such as pupil response and phenotypic variability between males and females.”

(DiCriscio, A.S., Hu, Y. & Troiani, V. Brief Report: Pupillometry, Visual Perception, and ASD Features in a Task-Switching Paradigm. J Autism Dev Disord 49, 5086–5099 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-04213-8)

Gender bias is prevalent. https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/news/2023/08/fewer-females-may-be-diagnosed-with-autism-due-to-gender-bias-new-research-suggests/#:~:text=News%20story-,Fewer%20females%20may%20be%20diagnosed%20with%20autism,gender%20bias%2C%20new%20research%20suggests&text=Fewer%20females%20may%20be%20diagnosed%20with%20autism%20due%20to%20misconceptions,condition%2C%20new%20research%20has%20found.

FEMALE AUTISM IS REAL. It’s time, past time, to reflect this in diagnostic criteria and research.

Counting Dead Women

Here, we have a simplistic but compelling comparison. There were 80 one punch fatalities in Australia (2012–2018). https://www.pathologyjournal.rcpa.edu.au/article/S0031-3025(22)00378-6/fulltext
Yet, in the ten months to the 1 November 2023, 43 women have been murdered, victims of domestic and family violence.

Compare and contrast – 80 men dead in 6 years with a legislated response, or 43 women dead in 10 months and regulatory changes that seem to have very little impact on the consistent annual death toll, with an average of one woman dying each week.

Where are our legislators? I’ve seen many promises made by politicians, but very little changes when it comes to women murdered in domestic and family violence. Are these false promises?

False Promises?
I wrote this poem in late 2022. Titled “ False promises”, it explores the tension between a desired future and reality, in a feminist framework. The refrains are from John Donne’s ‘Song: Go and catch a falling star’, and from a book by Daniel Tammett, ‘Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing’. ‘Teach me to hear the mermaids sing’ seemed a delightful, whimsical line, but presented a false promise, given the diatribe about women that ‘Song’ is. Similarly, the book, ‘Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing’, promised a delightful, whimsical exploration of language, but it was something else, another false promise. Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ is also referenced, using the Frumious Bandersnatch, the wicked creature that must be killed, as a metaphor for women who must be repressed, oppressed and silenced.

False promises
Lee-Anne Ford

Every word is a bird we teach to sing.
But why is the Bandersnatch Frumious?
Just teach me to hear the mermaids sing.

“Song’s” hateful words, lyrical, seducing.
Beautiful words but naming us notorious!
Every word is a bird we teach to sing.

We have fought and we are still fighting.
Like the Bandersnatch, we are fuming, furious!
Just teach me to hear the mermaids sing.

Equality is distant, still storming, not norming,
Men’s rights, women’s wrongs, claims spurious.
Every word is a bird we teach to sing.

I want to rest, but there is no resting
Words fly, bitter divides, they want us pious.
Just teach me to hear the mermaids sing.

I want a simpler life, one of my choosing.
Where and when will I find it? I am curious.
Every word is a bird we teach to sing.
Just teach me to hear the mermaids sing.