Masking doesn't (only) mean presenting as 100% neurotypical with the goal of others not even realizing you're autistic. It's also what you call any amount emotional labor you go through, trying to decrease the amount of emotional labor that other people have to expend on dealing with the ways you would, if not masking, approach interactions/tasks/etc differently.

If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages", then masking is when an autistic person is going to the effort to speak the neurotypical language, so as to remove the burden from neurotypical people of having to parse the autistic language. Most of the time, unless the interaction is very short and one-shot, the autistic person will still come off as speaking the neurotypical language "as a second language" rather than speaking it "fluently"; but it is the lived experience of many autistic people that this is still less disruptive in mixed company than just letting go and going full native autistic and expecting neurotypical people to be the ones to adapt. (Even in SF, a randomly-selected group of people often contains a few people visiting from elsewhere, who have never interacted with [non-masking] autistic people before, and so have never learned to "speak" autistic.)

Which is not to say that it isn't nice to find other autistic people to hang out with, where you can just let your hair down and "speak your native language" together! But it's not like this is something people avoid doing, if they get the chance. It's just that in most places in the world, you're rather unlikely to stumble into groups consisting solely of autistic people. (Except maybe in engineering-led tech companies!)

The other factor to consider: no two autistic people are alike - one doesn't necessarily have the SAME native language as another - they're just both different from neurotypical. (I have a daughter on the spectrum)

Imagine visiting a new planet where every household has it's OWN unique language, most of them at least somewhat different from all the others, but they can mostly all speak passable english - is it easier for you to learn each of their languages, or for them to "mask" and speak to you in english?

> If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages"

This analogy is very analogous. Damian Milton introduced it to academia as the "double empathy problem", and there are a trickle of studies confirming the obvious corollaries of the analogy (e.g. doi:10.1177/1362361320919286 "Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective") which are considered surprising by academia because autism (like most psychological conditions) is defined badly:

> Autism is defined clinically by deficits in social communication. It may therefore be expected that autistic people find it difficult to share information with other people.