Feminist epistemology has shown how credibility economies shape knowledge production, yet intimate family contexts remain underexamined. This paper argues that families function as epistemic archives: accumulated interpretive records that stabilise early misreadings and resist revision, producing persistent injustice for late-diagnosed AuDHD women. I introduce epistemic time lag to describe how these stabilised narratives continue to organise credibility even after diagnosis, creating a temporal gap between post-diagnosis self-understanding and family frameworks anchored in neuronormative assumptions. Drawing on autoethnographic analysis of my own late autism/ADHD diagnosis, I show how early interpretations (“that’s just Evie”) harden into durable narratives that dismiss women’s testimony as disruption rather than correction. Building on Fricker’s accounts of hermeneutical and testimonial injustice and Haraway’s situated knowledges, the paper extends feminist epistemology by foregrounding temporal asymmetry within intimate life. Integrating recent neuroqueer feminism (Fox 2025) and empirical studies of AuDHD epistemic harm (Browne revision restores it, with implications for wider neuronormative systems of knowledge.
Evie (2026) studied this question.