2025-01-10 at

Nitpicking on Fallacies in Autism Culture

There are many, in plain sight. I expect to update this post as I gradually collect dialogue or remember to pen down personal observations.


People who self-identify as 'autistic' seem to have a misunderstanding of whether certain traits would be considered relevant to a diagnosis of 'autism'. There are actually three parties involved in these misunderstandings.
  1. professional diagnosticians
  2. lay-persons who use the term 'autistic' differently from the first party
  3. people who might be subject to the term 'autistic', from either or both of the first and second parties
Sometimes a person belongs to both parties 2. and 3., and this is where complications arise. But these complications seem to feed strongly into autism culture ( the culture of people who self-identify as being autistic ).

Further banter :
  • Premise 1 : failure to acknowledge social rank is an insufficient criteria for diagnosing autism
  • Premise 2 : there is a correlation between diagnosed autists and incapability to perceive social rank
  • Premise 3 : you have a thoughtful rejection of social rank

... ergo ...
Corollary 1 : it is wrong to assert, that the diagnostic criteria for autism misinterprets 3. as your incapability to perceive social rank
Corollary 2 : it is more simply the case, that 3. is irrelevant to any diagnosis that you do, or do not, have autism

Further banter :

yes, my entire point was about the identity politics and cultural tropes of autism. Anyone is free to  identify as an 'autist' but as the scope of that group expands wider and wider, it loses its relationship to the original definition. Similar to how in gender identity, folks of any sex can freely identity with being 'man', to the point that 'man' no longer corresponds to 'male', and that's ok. With regards to autism, the gender identity which spins-off from the clinical classification, however, uses the same word for both, so this is bound to be controversial as each group will bicker about who gets to use the word, and in what context. 

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