The Feminine Intelligence Agency (FIA) has already sponsored research into how autism criteria are defined and how they fail to capture the lived experience of autistic girls and women—particularly how this leads to missed diagnoses and increased vulnerability to coercion and sexual assault. Building on this existing research, this project will:

1. Map the Decision-Making Process: Identify the key players and committees (e.g., APA, DSM subcommittees, insurance lobbies) who shape diagnostic criteria and public messaging.
2. Analyze Diagnostic Gaps and Biases: Show how the current DSM framework ignores autistic girls’ masking, trauma history, and vulnerability, and how it perpetuates a deficit model instead of a neurodivergent perspective.
3. Conduct Interviews: Engage with key informants—such as clinicians, researchers, advocacy groups, and autistic women—to capture a 360-degree view of how these decisions are made and how they impact real lives. Transcribe and synthesize these interviews to inform the final report.
4. Investigate Health Department Leverage Points: Explore how initiatives like the US Autism Registry could reinforce outdated deficit models or support a divergence-based approach.
5. Propose Systemic Policy Changes: Develop actionable recommendations to shift from the deficit model to a neurodivergent framework, ensuring early interventions include social discernment skills that protect autistic girls from coercion.

✔ Comprehensive Policy Report (50 pages): Incorporates data from interviews, existing research, and policy analysis.

✔ Implementation Plan: Step-by-step strategies for advocacy and policy change.

✔ Policy Brief: A concise, accessible summary of findings and recommendations.

✔ Op-Ed Draft: Narrative to raise public awareness and demand accountability.

✔ Visual Aids: Infographics and charts to demystify the DSM process and highlight real-world impacts.

✔ Interview Recordings/Transcripts: Audio or video recordings of interviews (with consent), accompanied by clean transcripts and a synthesis of key insights.