Strong Female Character

Fern Brady (b. 1986) is an Irish-Scottish comedian, well-known in the United Kingdom for her appearances on television shows like British as Folk and Taskmaster. She was born and raised in the small town of Bathgate, roughly twenty miles west of Edinburgh. After working as a stripper to pay for her education at the University of Edinburgh, Brady discovered her passion for stand-up comedy in 2010 while on assignment as a writer for Fest Magazine at the Edinburgh Festival. She was tasked by the magazine with trying stand-up herself and then writing an article about it. By 2013, she had placed as a finalist in some of the country’s most notable comedy competitions, including Edinburgh Fringe’s “So You Think You’re Funny?” and the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year.

Strong Female Character follows Brady’s personal and professional struggles as a woman with undiagnosed autism, spanning from her childhood to the early stages of her career. She presents her own story as emblematic of a broader failure in the medical field to diagnose women and girls with autism because of widespread gendered perceptions of the neurodevelopmental condition. In this way, the