Asklemmy

43945 readers

638 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Why doesn't autistic identity follow the same format as LGBT identity? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] weariedfae@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Your friend refers to LGBTQIA as referring to "aspects of non-cisgendered life" and it makes me doubt their understanding of the community because there are plenty of cisgendered people within the community...less the obvious exceptions.

Also autism symptoms can overlap and it would be extremely hard to find a label for your specific combinations of symptoms.

LGBTQIA+ started as separate communities that came together. ASD is already one community, it didn't start as disparate communities based on a single set of extremely varied symptoms.

The closer answer is "Neurodivergent" encompassing ASD, ADHD, and others. ASD is accurate whereas neurodivergent is the umbrella term.

[–] CraigOhMyEggo@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Your friend refers to LGBTQIA as referring to “aspects of non-cisgendered life” and it makes me doubt their understanding of the community because there are plenty of cisgendered people within the community

Her comment doesn't do it justice, no. Neither does the screenshot, there was a whole conversation involved which added context to her phrasing it like that.