Autism

There is none afaik. We‘re autistic. Some of us are gifted, others have learning disabilities and others again have neither of those. The idea imo is that a severely learning disabled autistic person and a gifted autistic person could stand in for eachother instead of being divided by words since they share the base condition.

While I understand the sentiment...that's a massive messaging failure, especially when you're representing a group of people that largely already have issues communicating.

Labels don't just exist to bully people. They exist to get ideas across effectively. NTs rely on labelling for quick and effective communication, so if you don't have accepted ones... they'll make their own, with your permission or not. And you may not like what they come up with.

We'd be better off taking a page from the LGBT playbook here. They have their accepted labels for identifying pretty much every offshoot there is, in the service of quickly communicating the idea. Like when you hear someone is gay, you know they're a guy that's into men, or depending on context, a woman that's into other women, etc.

We could have non derogatory labels for people who can live independently, those that might have hearing sensitivity considerations, those that need a bit more help, etc. It would actually do wonders when we talk about our autism to NTs. It would do away with a lot of the harmful stereotypes and myths too.