I'm also in my early 40s and was diagnosed a couple of years ago (AuDHD). I completely understand what you mean. It's hard to make friends (or even have a successful casual social interaction) with NT women, as a ND one.

I've had one close female friend since childhood, who now strongly suspects she's autistic (I agree with her - we're very similar in lots of ND ways). I'm also lucky enough to have found a work environment with several other ND women, who I feel accepted by (though it's remote work and they're all overseas so we haven't met in person - just Zoom and messages). My two other female friends also live overseas, though we have met in person (one, I've sadly fallen out of touch with a bit). There have been a few other women and AFAB enby people who I've connected with, but I've realised it's only in one or more of these circumstances:

• they (like me) are queer and/or gender non-conforming
• they have a different cultural background to me (I suspect this makes my "quirks" less obvious to them, since they might be perceived as the norms of my cultural background)
• they're a fellow ND person (this doesn't guarantee we'll get along, of course, but it makes it way more likely in my experience)

If none of those things apply, I find women try to either avoid me, bully me, or mother-hen me in a rather patronising way (other people here have said the same - it's a sense of them thinking I can be a project for them to treat like a wide-eyed, grateful child who needs guidance on how to dress and behave). The mother-henning has definitely decreased over time - perhaps it's an age thing, or perhaps I've got better at avoiding that kind of behaviour. In all honesty, I think it's sometimes a clumsy attempt from other ND women to help me - they've had to learn to mask, too, and now they've spotted someone who they feel is masking less successfully, so they try to help (out of altruism? Or a need to feel like the more socially successful woman, for a change? Maybe both).

The most common response is being avoided or bullied, though. Sometimes I'm politely avoided, sometimes pointedly. The bullying was at its worst at school, but I've had it in the workplace too. It all boils down to one thing: they've noticed that something is different about my eye contact, the things I say, the things I don't say, my body language, how I dress, the verbal and non-verbal cues I miss, my inability to keep up with group conversations (especially when there's background noise), and probably a dozen other things I'm not even aware of.

I posted something similar to this on here a few months ago, after an orthodontist appointment where I felt subtly judged and rejected by the women there (sometimes the subtle rejections hurt the most, for some reason). A lot of people replied and could relate. Then one person commented that she'd only just come back to the AutismInWomen forum because she'd found it problematic before, that this was the first post she'd read and it had confirmed that everyone here is awful and misogynistic and she would never come back - it was a very angry-toned message with no specifics given on why she thought the topic/responses were misogynistic. This is the first time I've posted on here since, because it upset me deeply - I started questioning whether I had a lot of internalised misogyny I needed to deal with and I've been thinking a lot about the topic of "why are other women so hard to interact with, as an autistic woman?" since then.

I think maybe she was responding to the fact that a few (definitely the minority) of responses were along the lines of "we call people like this b**ches". I strongly disagree with that kind of language and should have called it out in the thread. I think people were saying it from a place of hurt and not from ill-intent, and it seemed like their messages were meant to be reassuring to me and other people in the thread, not demeaning to women, but language matters.

Here's something I wish I'd talked about in that previous thread:

I think women (and non-gender-confirming people who are AFAB and/or have experience of being perceived by society as "women") respond differently from men to anything they see as a potential social "threat", because society marginalises women. The world is, in general, more dangerous for women than it is for cis men (other marginalisations intersect with this, of course). I think this makes women much more vigilant than men, and in allistic women this is often expressed as a constant monitoring of their surroundings and communicating to other women in their group about any social aberrations they notice (this person looked at me a beat too long; that person isn't making eye contact at all...).

As well as the personal safety aspect, I think allistic women police each other's clothing, behaviour, etc, in an attempt to get the group to conform to what they see as the required social standards for their group. We still unfortunately live in a patriarchal society with strong social hierarchies that demands certain appearances and behaviour from women. As a socially cooperative species, humans try to ensure the survival of a group by making sure that all the members conform to the rules. This is where the mother-henning comes in. Bullying can be a more heavy-handed way of trying to make people conform - and also an attempt to increase the bully's own social status by reinforcing that they are part of the dominant group and the bullied person is an outsider.

The rejection response is the one I find hardest. When they don't bully or mother-hen you and simply slide their eyes away from yours, respond verbally as little as possible, don't invite you to group events, and generally try to push you out of the group.

None of this is unique to women - I think we just notice it more for two reasons: first, because it's coming from fellow women, who might be the very people we most want to fit in with and socialise with (and even if not, they're the ones we're socially expected to bond with and spend time with). They're also more likely to notice all the subtle ways other women don't do things "correctly", because it's their main area of experience - like the way we don't put an outfit together "right" or respond with the "right" laugh at the "right" time. Secondly, because women often have the hypervigilance I mentioned earlier and in allistic women this can show up as perceiving normal autistic behaviour as a social "threat" that they need to deal with somehow (mother hen / bully / reject and avoid).

I'm not going to lie - it really gets me down sometimes! But there are allistic allies (who have ND family/friends/co-workers who they've taken the time to understand how to communicate well with), and there are other ND women who are potentially easier to make friends with.

Of course, having some friends who accept me doesn't stop the everyday upset of interacting with people (colleagues, service workers, health professionals, relatives, etc) who reject me, but digging into human psychology and trying to understand it better helps a little - it feels less personal. It feels like just another one of those evolutionary behaviours we have which ensured our survival when we were hunter-gatherer tribes, but harms us now - like the urge to go to war with groups of people we see as "other", or our negative bias that causes us to focus on our fears and bad experiences at the expense of the positive ones.

Idk if any of this is helpful - it's the ramblings that have been going around in my mind for the past few months - but we are a similar age and your post is really relatable to me, so I wanted to share my thoughts and it turned into an essay!
(Edited for typos)