Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Unmasked: The Lost Girls of Autism, the Trauma of Camouflaging, and the Radical Relief of the Late Diagnosis.

Unmasked: The Lost Girls of Autism, the Trauma of Camouflaging, and the Radical Relief of the Late Diagnosis.

Mason, Eliot

Paperback

Series: The Different Minds, Book 3

Medical Reference

ISBN13: 9798190350357
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 27 2026
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.47 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
BOOK DESCRIPTION
For decades, the medical establishment has operated on a single, unquestioned assumption: autism is a male condition. If a young boy was obsessed with train schedules and lacked social graces, he was diagnosed. If a girl was overwhelmingly anxious, socially exhausted, and intensely focused on literature or horses, she was labeled quirky, shy, or worse-borderline.

Unmasked is the groundbreaking investigation into the lost generation of autistic women.

In the third book of The Different Minds Series, author Eliot Mason dismantles the male-centric history of autism research and exposes the devastating reality of female camouflaging. Blending meticulous historical research, modern neuroscience, and the deeply personal lived experiences of late-diagnosed women, this book reveals:

  • The Male Blueprint: How the foundational studies of autism completely ignored girls, making it clinically impossible for them to receive a diagnosis.
  • The Architecture of Masking: How autistic girls become social chameleons, manually computing eye contact, facial expressions, and social scripts to survive-and the physiological toll of this daily performance.
  • The Misdiagnosis Pipeline: Why autistic women are routinely handed labels of Borderline Personality Disorder, bipolar disorder, and treatment-resistant anxiety, and how the treatments for these conditions often cause more harm than the autism itself.
  • The Hormonal Intersection: The profound link between estrogen, dopamine, and the autistic brain, explaining the catastrophic neurological crashes of PMDD, postpartum burnout, and menopause.
  • The Late Diagnosis: The paradigm-shattering experience of discovering you are autistic in your thirties or forties-the burning grief of the lost years, and the radical, liberating relief of finally dropping the mask.
  • Sweeping, deeply empathetic, and profoundly validating, Unmasked argues that autistic women are not broken neurotypicals failing to fit into society. They are a brilliant, intense, and deeply empathetic cognitive variation, forced to hide in plain sight.

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