Fern Brady: 'Stripping and Taskmaster are the most autism-friendly jobs I've had
When comedian Fern Brady was diagnosed with autism in early 2021, she fired out a tweet with the news to her followers, then added a hastily written follow-up, in a bid to make the news seem ‘flippant’.
‘I’m not gonna go on about it and make it the only thing about me,’ she reassured fans, in a line that went viral and divided the online neurodivergent community – some praised her for sharing, others asked why she didn’t want to make it part of her identity.
‘When I first did that tweet, it was going back to the usual thing of “l don’t want my autism to make you uncomfortable, I’m not going to be a nuisance,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.
‘It wasn’t a relief [to be diagnosed]. It was the opposite. I went through about 18 months of being really sad about it.
‘I thought, everyone’s going to think I’m stupid now and everyone’s going to think that I’m incapable. Also, I thought people were going to stop offering me work.’
The opposite was true. Work requests flooded in, but instead of stand-up gigs and panel show slots, they were documentaries and events related to autism.
‘I hate it when people become campaigners for a single issue,’ Fern admits. ‘I do just want to be a comedian.’
And yet, two years on, she’s written a memoir, Strong Female Character, which documents how autism has shaped her life. So, what changed?
‘I wrote the book because I realised when I saw other people talk about their autism diagnosis who I thought were cool and accomplished, it made me feel a million times better about my own diagnosis,’ she explains.
Her public reception on Taskmaster – when she was praised after visibly stimming (a repetitive movement used to self-sooth) – was confirmation she’d made the right choice.
Boys are statistically far more likely to be given an autism diagnosis than girls in childhood, and it’s thought that outdated stereotypes and misunderstanding about how girls ‘mask’ their autistic traits factors in. But as attitudes about autism and gender slowly improve, more women like Fern are receiving diagnoses in adulthood.
In hindsight, some key signs were always there for her, says Fern. She hated being held as a baby, was best friends with a tree in infant school, and had a compulsion to scratch her arms to shreds after anybody touched them.
However, nobody ever talks about the internal experience of autism, she adds.
‘Imagine you’re at a party and you’re trying to talk to a group of people, and you’re having to pretend that the lights aren’t bothering you,’ she explains.
‘All the sounds in the room make it feel like 10 radios are being played at once, and people keep touching you or cheek-kissing you, and you don’t want to grimace and look put off by it.
‘When you’re concentrating on hiding your autism that much, you do end up blurting out quite blunt stuff.’
There are ‘countless’ times when this has happened in a professional context, she says, like at the Taskmaster Christmas wrap party.
‘I said to someone: “Oh, you used to be famous when I was a child!”’ she says. ‘And then Richard Herring turned up and I said: “Richard, you’re so tiny!” Some of the other ones I can’t even say, because I don’t want people to be annoyed at me.
‘By the time more and more famous comedians arrived, I was like “don’t even bother talking to them, because you’re just gonna say something stupid”. I ended up just going home.’
The public perception of autism isn’t helped by the fact that it’s still thrown around as an insult, adds Fern. ‘People will say, “someone’s a bit on the spectrum,” as a way of saying someone’s a bit of a c**t.’
To shatter misconceptions, she wanted the book to celebrate ‘the benefits to being an autistic woman’.
‘All the descriptions of us are usually deficit-based,’ says Fern. ‘We’re really pathologized, people talk about our “blunt communication style”, for example, rather than saying we’re straightforward, and we’re honest with people.’
Autistic women make inadvertent kick-ass feminists, she adds, because they ‘subvert gender cues that women are told that they have to abide by’.
‘If you’re a woman, often, you have to put lots of exclamation marks at the end of your sentences and emails to show that you’re smiling and positive,’ she says. ‘And autistic women – speaking for myself, anyway – don’t communicate in that way.’
Autism has also freed Fern from shame around sex, she says, which is no mean feat, considering her strict Catholic, working-class upbringing in the Scottish town of Bathgate.
She brilliantly never felt any qualms about her bisexuality and shares how she was recently discussing Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag with a friend, because she didn’t understand the hype.
‘I just didn’t see how it was groundbreaking,’ she says. ‘And she said, for a lot of women, it was empowering to see female promiscuity on screen. For me, I really don’t care what people think about who I have sex with. I couldn’t care less.’
The memoir is not about toxic positivity though and Fern doesn’t shy away from discussing the darker sides of life with autism is a neuro-typical world.
She was misdiagnosed with OCD in her teens and later advised to go on antidepressants. When the medication did little to make life feel more manageable, she started cutting herself. At 15, she took an overdose of pills and ended up in a mental health unit.
‘I think I was really privileged to get put in a mental unit, because now teenagers can’t get anything,’ she says.
Increasingly misunderstood and in trouble at school, Fern would have ‘meltdowns’ when she felt overwhelmed, which would manifest in her shouting and feeling a confusing compulsion to smash up the furniture.
By 17, her relationship with her parents grew so strained that they asked her to move out, leaving her couch surfing while completing her exams.
In the book, Fern writes of how her parents didn’t financially support her when she studied at Edinburgh university, so she ended up homeless again for a period, while she struggled to convince student finance that she needed a larger bursary.
To make ends meet, she started working in a strip club. She’d had dozens of part-time jobs by this point, spanning retail to office admin. But by chance, she realised stripping was the most autism-friendly of them all.
‘First off, there’s no bright fluorescent lights like you would get working in a supermarket or an office,’ she says. ‘And there’s routine, you’re having the same conversation with men every night.’
The moves are also far more predictable and rehearsed than you may realise, as Fern writes:
Rub leg up man’s leg; sway from side to side; rub opposite leg up man’s leg; lean in close enough that they think you’ll kiss them; pull away before they try anything; take bra off; lick right tit not left (left one inexplicably inflexible); slide down man onto floor; writhe around on floor; think what pasta to get from the Italian place at the end of my shift; the End.
Fern wants to be clear, though – she’s not telling young autistic women to run off and be strippers.
‘I just think it’s absolutely insane that one of the jobs I stayed in the longest was one that was perfectly set up for an autistic,’ she says, adding that in hindsight, she thinks some of her co-workers were also autistic.
‘Whenever you’re in groups of outsiders and on the fringes of society, that’s where you’ll find autistic people,’ she says. ‘I met really cool girls. I felt really at home there.’
Her original plan post-uni was to become a journalist, but she tried stand-up on an assignment for the student paper and the rest, as they say, is history.
In 2018, Fern became the first Scottish woman to appear on Live at the Apollo and more recently, found a whole new set of fans via Tastmasker, which she names as the most inadvertently autism-friendly show she’s appeared on.
‘It was so good, because they were like, “just be yourself,” and usually when people say that it’s a lie, but we had the most fun on it,’ she says.
Since diagnosis, Fern’s had therapy and learned more about autism and coping strategies from amazing content creators online (though she notes that nobody should really be learning about their health ‘from 19-year-olds on TikTok,’ because the medical profession is so behind).
Her latest tour, Autistic Bikini Queen, also details her love of weightlifting, which she’s found to be a great outlet for overwhelm.
And now, Fern hopes the book will add to the women-created community resources for others out there.
‘I wrote it for young me,’ she says. ‘I think it would have helped me massively.’
Book credit is Strong Female Character by Fern Brady is published by Brazen, £16.99, www.octopusbooks.co.uk
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