Strong Female Character

Strong Female Character is a memoir written with the express purpose of illuminating the often overlooked female autistic experience, which Brady believes to be crucial for understanding larger societal issues. In Chapter 1, she writes, “I began to realize that an autistic brain could provide an escape route from the traditional paths laid out for women. In turn, the problems experienced by autistic women sparked wider conversations around how society views women generally” (38). This realization is indicative of how the misogyny and ableism that Brady has experienced throughout her life are intertwined and mutually dependent on one another.

Brady’s inability to get an autism diagnosis until her mid-thirties, despite having a personal intuition that she might be autistic, is one of the book’s foundational examples of how misogyny and ableism converge. Recalling an early encounter with a doctor in which she tried and failed to get a diagnosis from a doctor, Brady writes:

I knew I had it. I knew it better than I knew anything about myself. But the psychiatrist had said that I couldn’t possibly have it because I’d had boyfriends. Either he thought that all autistic people are unattractive sea monsters with no interest in forming meaningful relationships or he mistakenly assumed that the men I dated were capable of picking up on my autism rather than seeing it through a ‘manic pixie dream girl’ lens (18).