First things first: do not panic. This is typical of magickal women of any and all sorts. Maybe she is smarter than you are used to girls being. Maybe she does not smile enough, not like you have been told girls are supposed to. And you were fine with these things to begin with. She is cold because her powers are ice and rock. She is abrasive because she is superintelligent. This is all well and good. What was not well and good was when she sat you down and said: “I do not actually have magic. I am just autistic.” And this made you very uncomfortable. She was easier when she was superhuman, cuter when her aloofness was to your benefit, and sexier when she was detached from herself, her eyes vacant, her moods incorrigible. You leave her. You could love an inhuman woman. You could not love a neurodivergent one. 

I was reading a novel some time ago (and I have just gotten around to finishing it) called Half A Soul by Olivia Atwater. The novel follows Theodora Ettings, an adventurous girl, who was faerie-cursed in childhood, being robbed by the wily fae of half her soul. The effects of this were as such: Dora lost any sense of social and emotional direction. She did not feel embarrassment or fear. Of course, she understood when she ought to feel embarrassed, or afraid, and mimicked her loving and perfect (and soulful) cousin, Vanessa, on how to carry herself, but the sentiment was not really there at all. Dora, too, did not appear to have the capacity for romantic love, a matter which may change once she meets the elusive Lord Sorcier, AKA nobleman Elias Wilder, who takes it upon himself to help cure Dora of her ailment; to return her soul.

It is not a bad book. In fact, myself as a steadfast enjoyer of light fantasy and ridiculous faerie antics, would say I quite liked it. However, no matter how high I suspended my disbelief, I could not calm the part of myself thinking, rather relentlessly, that Dora did not seem cursed, least of all soulless, to me at all. She just seemed autistic. There was nothing particularly magickal about her as an individual, if one discounted her interactions with the fae of this alternate Regency England. Dora appeared, for all intents and purposes, a slightly quirky, socially inept young woman, who would have benefited more from learning accommodations than the sorcery of a lord. I thought, closing the book, that if this is what it means for a woman to be without half her soul, what does that say for the rest of us? Why was I meant to sit with this novel, and read it, and think, “Wow! There is something seriously wrong with this girl! Only a faerie curse could make her so unbelievably strange!”?

Fictional girls, it is clear, cannot be in any way conceivable as weird without both a supernatural means for it and a desire to be restored. She must be cursed, or traumatized, or alien, but she cannot just be like that, and least of all like herself for it. We disguise neurodivergence with fairy dust because we would sooner accept the otherworldly than we would a girl who was not what we wished she would be. And the world gets very, very upset if you ever try to tell them this. If Starfire was human none of you would want her, I wrote once, on some online Teen Titans forum when I was far too young to be there. I was promptly blocked after being called a whore. What I wished to say was this: If Starfire was human none of you would want her. If her hair were not supernova red, if she could not fly, if her armour was not metal underwear, if you could not excuse her stoicism for her Tamarenean origins, if she was just herself, you would not last a day. You would lose your nerve, as she took everything you said entirely literally. As she did not laugh at your jokes. As she stood there, quiet and pensive most days, but wildly and deeply emotive on others, and as you find yourself without a hold to keep yourself tethered to, you will not want her. And you would not want Raven either. She will not be your sexy goth girlfriend. She will want space, and time, and she will not want to touch you. 

So often, I find, the behaviour of magickal women is tangential to their powerset, and not independent of it, because if these girls were themselves otherwise, when the dust settled, when the battle was done, nobody would buy. They would be mean and off putting, which only men are allowed to be beyond the comfort of their alien or superheroic or otherwise magickal identities. Consider: Tony Stark is not an asshole because he is Iron Man, he is an asshole because he is Tony Stark; Natasha Romanoff is cold because she is Black Widow, she is not cold because she is Natasha Romanoff. Rather, she could not be. If Natasha Romanoff did not have her backstory and skills as a cushion, she would not be granted the grace to behave as she does. Tony Stark’s “powers” excuse his douchiness, Natasha’s only buffer her emotional distance. If both were stripped of all which made them super, Tony Stark would be a sarcastic shitty rich man, and Natasha would be a mean, stone cold bitch. 

And when the signs of neurodivergence stop being fuckable—when her hyperfixations do not make her nerdy and babylike any longer, when her neuroses are not pleasantly overcast with Jessica Day bangs and twee glasses or laser vision and thigh high boots, when she is not white, or thin, or petite, or bashful, or big breasted, and when she demands, that for once, you treat her like more than a teachable pet—I guarantee, she will not be half as endearing anymore.

So, your girlfriend’s superpowers turned out to be an allegory for autism. Where do you go from there? You blink a little and you come to realize, her eyes were not glowing lilac after all. You fell in love with the idea of a woman you could always convince yourself you were smarter than; better than. A woman you had to guide. A woman you could make feel small. A child who doesn’t understand the world like you do; her innocence tantilizing. And, more importantly, she has realized the same thing. That this thing she has been telling everybody was the gift of invisibility was really just this—that nobody had really seen her before. That she grew superpowers for each thing that was undesirable about her to begin with. To charade them. I wonder why we need to believe in ghosts before we can believe in girls? Why are you so afraid to love somebody autistic that you explain it away with wings? Why do you look so uncomfortable at even the word? What I’m saying is—she could sooner be a witch. A demon. Three-eyed, fire breathing, monster, tentacled, fanged, horned, than she could be herself and still worthy of your patience. You want somebody to tame, not a woman with a mind. Look her in the eyes and say you would love her in the same way if she were not beyond your understanding, because she could be understood, if you were not such a coward. Give her half a chance you would give a man, stand back, and watch.