4:55am July 31, 2014

This post is for…

• Aspies who sometimes can’t speak, despite having no speech delay in early childhood.
• Aspies who have permanently lost the ability to speak, despite having no speech delay in early childhood.
• Aspies who are quiet and sensitive, not loud and blundering.
• Aspies who sit out entire conversations because they can’t figure out where and how to join in, or how to initiate communication.
• Aspies who stim, a lot, visibly, to the point people assume they’re “low functioning” and are surprised to hear them talk.
• Aspies who can’t take care of themselves at all, despite what the DSM says about no significant delays in self-help skills.
• Aspies who have the stereotypical high-tech computer job… and secretly wear diapers because they’re incontinent and always have been.
• Aspies who are very echolalic, very ‘sensing’, other things more commonly associated with 'auties’ than 'aspies’.
• Aspies with autistic catatonia who have gone from being considered very high functioning to very low functioning in a fairly rapid time span.
• Aspies who are 'passive’ or 'aloof’ rather than 'active but odd’ or 'formal’.
• Aspies who look exactly like many of Kanner’s original patients.
• Aspies with extremely severe visual processing issues and other sensory issues, well beyond finding certain stimuli painful.
• Aspies with something resembling visual agnosia.
• Aspies with an IQ in the 70-90 range.
• Aspies with an IQ slightly below 70, who got diagnosed with AS anyway (despite this being against the criteria) because some doctors will diagnose AS in people with, say, a 65 IQ, if every single other thing about them fits the Asperger criteria and not the autism one.
• Aspies who did badly in school, and never made it to college, or did horribly in college or university and never got a degree.
• Aspies who grew up partly or entirely in self-contained special ed classrooms or schools.
• Aspies who find it easier to gesture than to speak.
• Aspies who find body language easier to understand than understanding language.
• Aspies who are extremely polite and careful about respecting people’s boundaries.
• Aspies who are quiet and gentle and shy.
• Aspies whose speech sounds like that of a very young child – they had no early delay in speech, technically, so they got an AS diagnosis, but their speech stalled at the age of five or so, and never got any better than that.  And somehow that doesn’t count as a speech delay because it happened too late.
• Aspies who grew up being considered severely intellectually disabled, didn’t speak until they were 15 (after first learning to type at age 13), but didn’t have an autism diagnosis at the time.  And now they’re adults and are being diagnosed with Asperger’s because they can speak now and there’s nobody to corroborate their speech or diagnostic history so the doctor just doesn’t care about getting it right.  So now they’re officially an aspie.  (I’ve seen this happen more times than you’d be surprised by.)
• Aspies who more than meet the criteria for autistic disorder, but aren’t being diagnosed with it because their doctors are ignoring the DSM entirely in favor of their 'clinical judgement’ that someone has Asperger’s rather than autism based on seeing them as an adult.

Basically, this post is for 'aspies’ who fit stereotypes normally reserved for 'auties’, but had (or were presumed to have) no speech delay and (often) don’t meet the criteria for autistic disorder, so got diagnosed with Asperger’s.  Because such people are all over the place, yet when people say 'aspie’ they never mean them, of course.  Even though they’re frigging everywhere.

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