Asklemmy

We need to communicate our sexual identity clearly at a high level because we all need to work out with each other who can date or fuck who.

We don't have as much practical reason to know each other's specific experience with autism right away. And if you are close to someone and need to understand their autism at a lower level, their personal situation is more complicated than being one of five or six types.

And if you do need to understand someone's sexuality at a low level, it could also be more complicated and individualized than just being one letter. But knowing that one letter with sexuality helps as a start.

IMO, LGBT descriptors came from that community. Until the autism community develops their own descriptors and hits some critical mass in agreement, it's not any random person's place to develop terms for them.

LGBT communities hit major levels of activity and visibility to the public decades ago. My cousin isn't getting the autism diagnosis she needs today because multiple medical professionals she's been to still think girls can't have autism.

It doesn't surprise me some people like your friend are developing some terms. While people like my cousin and her mom are going to be spending their energy on other priorities.

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.

Why doesn't it?

Because autistic people haven't set up the same kind of community for the same reasons, with the same history.

You gotta understand that LGBTQ+ isn't even that old as a term. I'm 50, and I was damn near an adult before LGB was an initialism that you'd see often. Tbh, you only really saw it at pride functions, rights functions, and very rarely in LGB media. The T being added in is what? Maybe fifteen years old? It's hard to remember when trans issues became unified on a large scale with gay issues (using gay as a catchall term here, not an exclusion; back in the day it was very often lumped under that term for whatever reason), but I know it wasn't fully integrated in the early 2ks, since I was still able bodied and interacting regularly with rights activists. It was getting there, but the T wasn't added across the board yet.

The Q and other additions are even more recent.

Autism as something other than an illness that needs management is pretty similarly new to the public consciousness. So autistic people didn't have the same kind of community of exclusion the way LGBTQ+ people did. They were patients, not minorities.

That may seem like sophistry, but if you look at aspergers, there was a community, it just wasn't one of exclusion in the same way. That community had a lot more similarities to little people (dwarfs) than gay people in terms of how each group interacted with Neuro or physical typicality. There's definitely a lot of prejudice, and condescension and bullshit involved with being autistic or a little person, but it's not the same as being actively hated and even killed for being born as you are.

So LGB people came from a place where community was safety in a way that someone with autism doesn't experience. Trans people do too. As do queer and "other" groups distinguished by sexual orientation or gender.

Safety in numbers was literal safety.

The political and social side of banding together was essential to that safety. Every "letter" added means more people working for equality and fairness. Every "letter" means more voters, more money, more influence.

Autism, on the other hand, hasn't needed that yet. So far, all the various aspects of autism can be addressed as a group despite the various aspects of its expression the sensory sensitivity group and the focus related group are part of the same spectrum, that can be easily navigated by social and political efforts as a single group by default.

Lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals aren't the same spectrum. The lived experience of each group (and for bi men and women separately) isn't inherently linked to the others. Sexual orientation may be a spectrum, but it has different social and political ramifications for each version (and the versions that came into aw areness later). Pointing at a lesbian and a gay man and saying "those are the same thing" makes a lot less sense on a social level.

This isn't to say the lived experience of autistic men and women is the same, it most definitely isn't. But both of those groups can benefit from the same efforts in a way that lesbians and gay men couldn't until they banded together more.

Now, should there be delineation between the different presentations of autism the way your post suggests? Not for me to say. I'm not involved in enough autism groups to have knowledge of whether or not the greater community would benefit from it. And, being an outsider, there's limits to how much I can pick up from observation compared to someone that's living with autism. There may be a very pressing need to split the categories of autism so that social and political efforts can be improved.

But that's a separate issue from why it hasn't already developed such a system.

Just because the concept of a “spectrum” is a useful metaphorical concept for these two things does not necessarily mean that the things themselves are all that analogous. In what way could one map the far end of the autism scale to anywhere on the “queer” scale? It’s nonsensical; apple & oranges. One is any sexual preference but the hegemonic one, where there are no “ends” to the “spectrum”, and the other is something that ranges from personality trait minutia to complete inability to function/survive independently.

The short answer is because autism is different from sexuality and the same system that works for one will not work for the other.

I would actually caution against embracing any label as part of your identity because as you have observed the autism experience is universally different. So too is the gay or lesbian or transgender experience. These are words we use to describe aspects of ourselves, but too often come to define us instead and enable exclusionary behavior such as gatekeeping identity or depening isolation for anyone who doesn't fit neatly into a label.

I just wanted to say that you shouldn't be getting downvoted. Your question is well written and appears to be made in good faith.

There are some good and interesting replies here and it shows that your question was worth asking. Please don't be deterred from asking further questions in the future.

Simple answer imo is that society is hypersexualized. Society considers having sex the pinnacle of human experience.

I don't even know if I am autistic, let alone where it diverges from my ADHD or how it differs from the experiences of other ND folk.

its harder to grasp because the autism spectrum is composed of medical symptoms instead of sexual preferences, being open about your limitations and what makes you break down sounds pretty scary to me

I like it! And I will be trying that out!

What the hell kind of a question even is that