What do people mean when they say

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"I am not a diagnosis, I am a person"? Does this sentence mean something personal to you?

It means you are not THE diagnosis.

The essence and worth of you doesn’t change because of a diagnosis.

You are not inferior because of the diagnosis.

You are not Autism Spectrum Disorder. That is not your name.

In a way it represents a dissatisfaction with a label or "pigeonhole".

A medical diagnosis such as "diabetes" can have a specific understanding and communicate specific conditions within which a person will function.

A behavioral diagnosis such as "autism" has less clarity and greater variability such that one may be reluctant to be considered within the confines with which others may regard them.

I think the point is that each person is a whole. A diagnosis of any type describes only part of a person. There is so much more.

You hear here, that when you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. We are all different. We don't want to be labeled (and often dismissed) as autistic and all that implies to the NT culture.

I used to work in an emergency room, which can be pretty hectic at times. In that environment, where patients are very temporary, nurses and doctors will refer to: "the chest pain in room 16" labeling patients by what brought them in to the ER. I get that. We didn't have time to learn names and what we had to attend to was the emergency that brought the person in to the ER.

It isn't just autists who feel this way. People in the developmental disability community don't like to be labeled by their "diagnosis" either. One of the greatest joys in my life has been learning to know and love so many people with so many disabilities who mostly passed by in life. Others do not know what they are missing.

A diagnosis is not an identity.

It means you want people to see you as you, not as a pile of symptoms. I hate when people bring up autism in a conversation about me.

Yes, they probably mean that they're fed up of being interacted with solely in terms of whatever diagnostic label has been applied to them, which of course is much too simplistic a way of regarding a human being, as it overlooks all the other things about them that have nothing to do with their DX.

I heard that some doctors, in the US anyway, refer to their patients just by their ailments and not by their actual names, like "the diabetes" or "the appendicitis". As if the patients weren't actually people.

Of course, those are real diseases and not a person's mind just working in a different way.