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?
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.
It’s not as if, when a group gets too big, it’s not natural for sectarianism to develop.
Because autism hasn’t been as heavily politicized and so they have been no attempts to divide and pit autistic people against each other.
That’s the argument though, they’re already being pit against each other, with people already fighting over who is worthy to say “I have autism”.
LGBT+ are the values of a nominal variable sexuality. (maybe not the T tho). Ls are almost only going to sex with other women. If they go both ways, then they’re B, not L. If they go all ways, then they’re P(ansexual). So it seems like less of a spectrum, and more of a single variable. I may be wrong since Im not up on the latest in sexual identities.
While autism is a variable (levels 1-3), it’s ordered, not nominal. The autism spectrum is made up of many variables that are also continuous, not discreet. And they are positively correlated. If one variable is high, it’s likely others would be too. So, you can’t say someone is a kind of autism anymore than levels 1-3. Beyond that, the spectrum varies way to much to typify.
The LGBTQ mixes up several things. Sexuality and romantic attraction with gender identity. And we’ve also added skin color to the pride flag (because people of color also have special issues within the community.) So it’s more a mix of several variables, spectrums and things that are part of being human. I think the common denomitor is that it has to do something with being marginalized and discriminated against. But it’s not about one single concept.
I think there are a couple of points to this. Autism started out as a medical or psychological diagnosis. Whereas the folks behind the LGBT term explicitly created it as an umbrella term in the beginning, with the intention to include as many folks as possible.
Within LGBT, it’s possible to apply multiple labels to oneself - as in your examples (an asexual transexual or an aromatic lesbian).
This used to be possible inside of the autistic spectrum to agree as well, but the labels were less clear. E.g. What was the difference between Aspergers and autism? Where do folks who have non-verbal learning disorder fit on the scale - or is this the wrong scale? Do we count folks who have BAP (Broader Autistic Phenotype)? While high functioning autism vs low functioning autism was easier to define, it was taken as insulting.
So eventually everything just got the one label, but that blurred the differences. Which made it somewhat more difficult to talk about.
That’s a good question. I still struggle with the whole concept of identifying with some exact definitions and labels for oneself. I mean it’s super useful to have words and labels for things. At times. Other times I’m not so sure. Is it really that important to disclose to other people whether you’re into men, women, or mainly attracted to some, or how you fit into gender? Isn’t it enough to be… yourself? (Genuine question.) I mean that’s obviously important to you. And to (close) friends. But I sometimes don’t see the reason why people are set on the exact subdivision of “queer” when talking to other people. Especially to people who aren’t queer themselves.
And I mean the next question is whether that’s useful in a conversation. I doubt people will know how to treat a sensory … autist. They probably don’t know how to handle any autist. So it might be of no use to tell them some exact term. You’re just confusing them and you probably might have to start a short lecture anyways.
Additionally, it’s complicated to add exact terms to a spectrum. I mean that’s the point of a spectrum. It’s blurry and not discrete and hard to tell whether a yellowish-green fits into yellow or green. And even the categories (number of colors) are arbitrary and made up.
Disclaimer: I’m not on the spectrum. I don’t really know what I’m talking about or how life is for other people. I just know how it is to be me.
And with that said, I think it’d be useful to tell people about different aspects of autism. Maybe that helps to get a better picture. Just knowing it’s different for everyone doesn’t get you all the way. We could certainly try with some terms and letters and see if it helps people to memorize details about autism. Though, we should probably try not make it too simplistic, or this is going to be the next stereotypes.
Autism predominantly affects men.
