I get what you are saying... I don't even bother to name the symptoms that I deal with through my TBI ... and I think that is what has those that you mention up in arms...
The disability and its diagnosis are the true barometers of whether or not some "is" something... for instance, my clumsiness and forgetfulness is not anything "like yours" or "that one person you know" because I am disabled and there IS something mechanically wrong with me... it isn't like someone deciding that they did not want to talk or saying something rude to someone else's emotional display...
...you can't give the NT's something like this... they will eventually appropriate and trivialize it... and I am like f*ck all of that...
Pointing out that it's a difference in degree and not in kind does have that double-edgedness to it in that we typical people can think from there, "Well, in that case, why can't you just get over it like everyone else with those kind of traits?" My family used to say that about my ex-boyfriend (Asperger) compared to me (NT who was on the slow side learning social skills and common sense growing up). The problem is that with an actual autistic, or other disabled person, there's more in the way, a lot more, that we NTs can't really imagine that well not having lived it. Also, it's an extremely common (among us NTs at least) cognitive bias to be blind to external factors when they're working in our favor or against other people, as opposed to the other way around. Hence how discussions of social privilege in various contexts tend to blow up.
I tell people that being autistic is like being an immigrant. Immigrants are always getting criticized for being unwilling to learn the language or adapt to the culture, for being rigid and clannish. But they don't fail to immediately fit in because they're bad people, it's because they're massively overwhelmed and lack the security that comes from knowing the culture and their place in it. Same with old people--everything is changing for them and they may even have had their autonomy and possessions taken away. It's the experience of otherness and stigma and placelessness that creates many "autistic" behaviors.
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The disability and its diagnosis are the true barometers of whether or not some "is" something... for instance, my clumsiness and forgetfulness is not anything "like yours" or "that one person you know" because I am disabled and there IS something mechanically wrong with me... it isn't like someone deciding that they did not want to talk or saying something rude to someone else's emotional display...
...you can't give the NT's something like this... they will eventually appropriate and trivialize it... and I am like f*ck all of that...
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people that are tired from walking may limp but that doesnt make them disabled(as it would be when you are half sided paralysed)
One wouldnt say that everyone is a bit paralysed though.
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