I grew up in Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the U.S., and like your college mate had only seen gray squirrels before visiting Ontario. I was delighted to see black squirrels on our visit to Niagara Falls and Toronto in 1980 (when I was ten). I would later attend high school in a neighborhood of Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill :-)

In any case, I'm also queer and trans, and though not officially diagnosed as autistic, have Sensory Processing Disorder and consider myself to be "on the spectrum" of neurodiversity. Good analogies in your post.