5:01pm September 1, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: i-can-eat-your-heart-out: Is it wrong if I classifey all ASD-ers...

Is it wrong if I classifey all ASD-ers Aspies it just has a better ring then Autie or something I mean I just classifey both Aspergers and Autism as the same thing….Is that like a really bad thing? I wouldn’t do it if you told me that you don’t like it, but I’m just…

Yeah to me…

Autism is a universal term. Kanner used it Asperger used it. Some people use it to mean a specific type of autism but even then the whole thing is the autistic spectrum, not the Asperger spectrum.

Asperger has always referred to a specific subgroup and nothing else.

It’s like, we can decide that all creatures in the feline family should be called cats. Even though cats can also mean house cats. But we cannot decide to call all felines lions.

Because cat has both a general and a specific meaning. Lion doesn’t.

Autistic has both a general and a specific meaning. AS doesn’t. The fact that AS isn’t really different from autism doesn’t make it possible to say all autism is AS.

And also. There’s so much assumption already in online autism communities that everyone has AS it makes those of us who don’t (either officially or culturally) invisible enough already. If you start calling us all aspies, you’re just going to make people assume we are even more invisible.

(And I mean people diagnosed with autism, PDDNOS, ASD, people who don’t identify with AS as a concept even existing, people who don’t fit the AS idea in general, and people who technically fit AS or have that diagnosis but don’t really consider themselves aspies. Which is a whole lot of autistic people.)

But that’s my take on it. You can do whatever you want. But as an autistic person who would never in a million years fit any official or unofficial definition of aspie, I’d find it annoying.

But I sympathize. When I realized I was not an aspie I was kind of upset because aspie sounded like an aspen tree and autie sounded like an insult.

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