Today’s conventional wisdom is that both are spectrums. That means one person’s experience with autism isn’t another person’s experience with autism, and one person’s experience as a member of the LGBT can differ from another’s.

However, that’s what the whole point of the letters in the LGBT is. You could be a lesbian, asexual, aromantic, a lesbian who is aromantic, an asexual who is trans, and so on. Someone I know (who inspired me to ask this) has said they began to question why this isn’t done regarding people with autism due to constantly seeing multiple people fight over things people do due to their autism because the people in the conflict don’t understand each others’ experiences but continue to use the label “autism”.

One side would say “sorry, it’s an autism habit.”

“I have autism too, but you don’t see me doing that.”

“Maybe your autism isn’t my autism.”

“No, you’re just using it as a crutch.”

My friend responded to this by making a prototype for an autism equivalent to the LGBT system and says they no longer encourage the “umbrella term” in places like their servers because it has become a constant point of contention, with them maintaining their system is better even if it’s currently faulty in some way.

But what’s being asked is, why isn’t this how it’s done mainstream? Is there some kind of benefit to using the umbrella term “autism” that makes it superior/preferred to deconstructing it? Or has society just not thought too much about it?

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    This has the problem of being both overly simplified and overly complicated.

    On the simplification front, it has the same issues as aspergers/autism or the three levels system that the US uses. By simplifying it to several axises you lose a lot of nuance. Someone could have a lot of difficulties, but not even appear autistic if they happen to miss whatever is being measured. Every autistic person is different and has specific needs and desires. Making a simple “political compass” style thing is going to miss that.

    As a comparison to lgbt people, consider a woman who doesn’t feel sexual attraction to anyone, but derives sexual satisfaction from a big burly guy choking her. Where does she lie on the lgbt spectrum?

    However, you’re also overcomplicating things. Instead of people just saying that they’re autistic, they have to list all the symptoms they have in some kind of grid decided by some person who is never getting a consensus.

    We should normalise “hey, could you stop whistling? I’m a bit sensitive to high pitched noises”. Rather than pushing for “Hey, I’m diagnosed as a high-sensitive-hearer, here’s my diagnosis”.

    And as well as all that, people are almost certainly use this as a way to gatekeep. Happens a lot in lgbt circles; gay people saying bisexuality isn’t a thing, bi people saying homosexuality isn’t a thing, people denying the existence of ace, trans or intersex people. If you create a criteria for liking routine, then there’s going to be people that say only autistic people that meet that criteria are REALY autistic.

    Honestly, this whole idea feels like it comes fron the academic desire to categorize and study rather than a desire to help.