This also happens when you say that you're autistic to other autistic people, but more wokely
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Autism
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I was once told by a therapist that I can't be autistic because I'm married, not quite obsessive enough over my interests, and was teaching college classes at the time.
When I was a teen I was told by my psychiatrist “I would diagnose you with Asperger’s, but I’m not going to because you’ll be able to do any job you want as long as you have a secretary.”
I don't think I have ever known a single person who had their own secretary. I know some people who work with secretaries on a team. And of course I know some secretaries.
There are no healthy people. Just undiagnosed
PRO-TIP: When you learn that a person is a bigoted moron, just stop acknowledging their existence!
Unless you want to help fiight bigotry.
In my experience that is mostly pointless. Those people are not interested in facts they just want to be right.
You don't fight emotional positions with facts. That's correct.
These boots were made for walking and shit stomping.
I had a similar conversation with a date a few weeks ago. I told her that I am getting tested for autism in a few weeks.
"You don't seem autistic."
Then spent the next 15 minutes talking about Magic: The Gathering cards. She was very to forgiving and said, "Oh. I get it now."
I'd be so happy if a psych would spend 15 minutes talking to me about ISO8601 timestamps or IPv6.
I spent my entire last therapy session talking about the history the rise of the IBM PC clone market and how Microsoft's contract with IBM made it possible lol
I'll argue the flip side. I have a son who is 13 and firmly L2/L3. This is where a lot of autistic people sit and specifically online they are grossly under-represented because they don't have the capacity to socialize even from a computer or phone.
My older son is what used to be Asperger's which I would define as your L1.
I continue to hate the fact that they flattened their taxonomy with DSM V. Asperger's != Autism.
So I get and chuckle at the memes but when people think of autism they are thinking of my autistic son not the Asperger's one.
The representation of autistic people in the media, and in social media like this, is not an accurate representation of autistic people
Here we have the diagnostic definition at odds with the desire to socialize the specific condition to the layman and advance acceptance.
I agree the new descriptors sometimes runs counter to that effort. So I tend to describe my L1ASD condition as "the Asperger's style of autism" to the uninitiated.
Unfortunately, this can also draw negativity from the cohort of autistic folks that want to see the term Asperger's deleted because they misunderstand who Hans Asperger was and what he actually was about. The popular story about that has been distilled to a soundbyte of "He WaS a NaZi" spongebob font and all.
Yah I hate that people call SUVs, "cars". They're completely different.
And it's terrible that people started calling lecterns, "podiums". They're entirely independent of one another.
And it sucks that people call 1/2 baths, "bathrooms" even though nobody's doing any kind of bathing in those things.
The problem I have is that there is a loss of specificity, not that Asperger's and autism are fundamentally different. Autism used to be defined as the cluster of autism-like symptoms paired with a developmental problem with language. Asperger's was very similar, except that the impairment was with social interaction and non-verbal communication rather than linguistic aspects. Nowadays, while there is a lot of overlap, the difference is more like car vs truck rather than car vs SUV. You can classify a truck as a type of car, but you can't classify a car as a type of truck.
It's too late, they already classified SUV's as a truck.
That series of analogies is absolute garbage and you know it.
It does kinda fit. The main part that changes between the "levels" of a diagnosis is the severity of symptoms and how much they impact your ability to take part in society. If car and SUV are too close for you, then we can also compare a normal car with a three wheeled one. Its kinda different but still the same. Everyone but the most pedantic person would categories it as a car.
It doesn't mean everyone needs the same accommodation, but that's also the case for someone with a broken pinky vs a broken neck.
What analogies?
Those are examples of other conflationary ambiguing terms that are annoying.
Of course I just made up conflationary and ambiguing. I don't know if they're the proper terms.
Proceed to talk for 3 hours about the train unloading and smelter setups I made in Factorio.
Ask me about my world-spanning train network in Satisfactory!
I'm listening.
Oooh did you use the bulk loader and express smelter mods?
And to his horror, Luke proceeded to name every train ever made.
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"Everyone's a little bit autistic"
"You're too normal to be autistic"
Yeah. Not everyone is autistic; there are lots of other neurospicy reasons why people are the way they are.
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I might not be autistic after learning about the New-Age concept of an indigo child (I might be one of the last indigo children, but not entirely sure).
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