Something I dislike about autism sites

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It kind of does. Aspergers is considered a subcategory of “High Functioning Autism”. “High Functioning Autism” as defined by professionals is Autistic with average to above average intelligence or an IQ above 70. What happened is people cherry picked the part of the definition they wanted which is high IQ to genius or savant part leaving out the Aspies with intelligence in the average range. This trend has been accelerated by the elimination of the Aspergers diagnosis.

While I agree that Aspergers SHOULD NOT be defined by high IQ, or savant syndrome it does not matter. Colloquial terms are defined by how most people want them defined. It has nothing to do with how these terms should be defined.

Same here. I'm ret*d compared to my peers & even lots of other Aspies cuz I struggled with most all the typical Aspie stuff as well as most subjects in skewl.
When I mentioned autism online lots of people assumed I was making big bux working with technology & was gonna be the next Bill Gates but I struggle with the latest technology.

I'm under the impression that there are a lot of issues on which autistic people are more likely than NTs to go to extremes, and on which some of us go to one extreme while others go to the opposite extreme.

Examples: (1) Autistic people are more likely to be intellectually disabled, but also more likely to be geniuses, than the general population. (Of course there are plenty of autistic people in the middle of the IQ range, too, but not as proportionately many as among the general population.) (2) Many autistic people tend to be detail-oriented, but many other autistic people have co-occurring ADHD and hence are not detail-oriented.

One website I saw had a long list of common, relatively less known autistic traits, which included lots of pairs of opposites. I don't remember what website that was, however.

Of course, by no means do all autistic people go to one extreme or the other for every such pair of opposites, but autistic people are more likely than NT's to go to such extremes, apparently.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 08 Jun 2019, 7:09 pm, edited 4 times in total.

There's more to it than this. Autistic people tend to be generally atypical in lots of ways and do not follow the standard bell curve on various traits including IQ. I'll dig up more info and links sometime later, in another thread.

There's some things where the same autistic person can alternate between both extremes depending on the situation. For example there's a thread in the Bipolar & Other Conditions section where someone asks if Aspies can be overly sensitive & emotional because lots of things here & other places say Aspies are logical. As I posted in that thread, I'm a mix of both. I tend to be logical until something upsets me which can be very easy & then I sorta lose control. Another example is the detail oriented & ADHD thing. I tend to be detail oriented with some stuff but I also have ADD & not that detail oriented with other things. Sometimes I'm very detailed oriented with one aspect & then I suddenly lose focus or I miss details in another aspect.

The longer I've spent in autism communities like this one, the more I've come to see autism in this light. On almost any thread about a specific aspect of behaviour, those who agree that they find it troublesome often report a wide variety of underlying reasons for why they feel it's troublesome, and likewise for those traits which people find beneficial.

To me, the stereotypical social differences seem quite obviously secondary effects of underlying perceptual and cognitive differences; not what autism is, but consequences of it. And any similarity in social and psychological consequences need not arise from any specific set of cognitive traits, but simply from there being sufficient "outlier" traits that the way we model the world inside our heads leaves us struggling to find enough common reference points with most other people (and them with us). When someone speaks in a language that is completely alien to you, the lack of comprehension is just the same regardless of which language it is. The behaviourists have been dominant throughout most of autism's history as a recognised condition, and according to their creed they made these resulting social behaviours the focus of research and treatment, which I believe has done a great deal to discourage acknowledgement of our diversity (the lack of recognition for female autistics due to them often not fitting a behavioural model based primarily on observations of males being a prime example.)

I remember hearing years ago how aspies are bad at math and have a hard time with it. Then years later I was hearing how they are great at math and excel at it.

Makes sense to me. "Autistic behaviors" are just ways of coping with being a neurological freak of one kind or another. "Autism" is not one single "disorder" but a category of people who happen to have been born with various kinds of freakiness that make it hard to relate to NT's in "normal" ways, and that make it hard to cope with sudden change, etc.

And it is useful to have an officially-recognized category for all of us freaks, so we can find each other and, together, find ways to build a better world for ourselves.

Would it be fair to day that the people who post threads on WP aren't necessarily representative of all aspies??

Secondly those who start threads may make assumptions about what a typical Aspie is based on their personal experience.

Third some who start threads may project attributes to Aspergers that are (in reality) designed to inflate their own ego (for example High functioning Aspies are all geniuses, we have special gifts that NTs don't have etc etc...).

Fourth many who start threads use the term "autism" but in reality are harking back to the pre-DSMV diagnostic criteria of Aspergers because they assume that low functioning folks can't/don't read threads on this forum (I have discovered over the years this is untrue).

I just now found the page I mentioned above: Inclusive autistic traits.

P.S.: Here's another wideranging unofficial list of Asperger traits and a similar list of Female Asperger traits on a website belonging to Artemisia (formerly Rudy Simone).