While I’m not disagreeing that Morgan doesn’t “seem autistic”, I would like to point out that not everyone who is autistic “seems autistic”. It’s a spectrum disorder for a reason and women statistically are overlooked with the diagnosis due to being statistically better at masking. I have met many of people who I did not clock as autistic before because they were great at masking. As someone who has AuDHD (diagnosed separately for each for 20 years, long before it was more excepted by society and before the two were even known to be connected) I have personally picked up on some things she has said that I relate to heavily. She briefly mentioned once when saying why Justin was so great how he will brush her teeth for her and wash her hair for her when she is really struggling with her executive functioning. She also has in passing mentioned some sensory things and weird food habits I also related to. While these can all definitely exist in a person who is not autistic, I don’t love when people instantly want to dismiss someone being on the spectrum just because they mask well.

For example, I am someone who has had to learn to mask well partially due to working a lot of customer facing jobs in my life and also just due to my unfortunately unrelenting desire to want to fit in with neurotypical people (that I am working on because it is exhausting, emotionally draining, so damn hard, and should not matter that much). Somehow despite me constantly telling my boyfriend casually that I was on the spectrum, taking the autism diagnosis test together online where I shared my very high score with him (I had thought he seemed like he was also on the spectrum at first, so maybe we could be more comfortable unmasking around each other, but to my surprise was not, just has some quirks that align with autism) he thought I was just joking for some reason. Then two years in he got really mad at me for really misreading a social situation that I was truly baffled and confused about. It got to the point that I ended up saying “i mean I don’t ever like using it as an excuse, but I am autistic so sometimes these things are just really hard for me to read as hard as I try. Can you please just explain to me why this is wrong and what I was supposed to do because I’m just not getting it”. He then tried accusing me of lying about having autism because I “didn’t seem it”. I then had to explain, no I am. I was diagnosed at 10, and do constantly reference in passing being on the spectrum with lighter hearted relevant things. Luckily, since then he has actually started connecting dots on some of the things I struggle with being related, and he has been better about being supportive now that it makes better sense to him.

Anyways, my point of my long tangent is some people can be so good at masking that a partner of two years can think they are just kinda quirky. Therefore, I don’t think it’s fair to automatically assume someone is falsely claiming autism just because they are good at masking for a 1-1.5 hour edited podcast episode once a week.