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5:45pm June 11, 2014
Anonymous asked: Hi. If you don't mind me asking, what's your opinion on Asperger's syndrome? I'm asking because I have it, and I got told by a girl once that I didn't know what it's like to be autistic or have any kind of autistic traits, and that I didn't actually have Asperger's because some new guidelines were put in place that eliminated it, so I couldn't have Asperger's. Just wondering what you thought.

I’ve always seen Asperger’s syndrome as just another word for autism with a particular pattern of speech development in early childhood.  It doesn’t make a person less autistic, or more autistic, than an autistic person without it.  And nowadays, it has been eliminated in the DSM.  But that doesn’t mean people with Asperger’s syndrome have nothing, it means that people who would previously have been called Asperger’s are now under the diagnosis Autism Spectrum Disorder, or something like that.  It’s not that you all vanished off the spectrum, it’s that you are now included under one big diagnosis for every kind of autism.

It’s always been my tendency to just call everyone autistic, regardless of whether they were diagnosed with autism, Asperger, or PDDNOS.  Because I think there are differences between autistic people, but that those differences can’t be summed up by those diagnostic differences.  So I’d rather call it all autism, and then sort out the differences as they come.

It’s always possible that as a person with one type of autism, you won’t understand people with another type of autism.  But when people with three different types of autism can all be given the same diagnosis, and when three people with one type of autism can all be given three different diagnoses, then I don’t trust the official diagnosis to show what a person does or doesn’t understand, or what type of autism they have.

Apologies if any of this is unclear, I haven’t slept much and I’m having a bad day.

Notes:
  1. artisticautistic reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    I think this is good. I call my self autistic, as I am, but my diagnosis is Aspergers. Aspergers is still a thing, still...
  2. natalunasans said: i think you can still use it as an identity word even if it’s not in the DSM anymore(?). if you really wanted to. i sort of do, but then i always say it’s a kind of autistic just in case ppl thought i meant it as a separation thing.
  3. withasmoothroundstone posted this