#Daring to identify myself with the phrase autistic

[birdofmay]

Hi, op of the original "severe autism bad" post here (which yes, I'm anon, I already deleted the og post so I would like to stay as anon please)

Hope you dont mind me sending the ask to u cause since you left the reply, it got me confused yet curious. So I tried to do some looking to see why people use "severe autism", and what I found was that:

From my perspective, it reminded me of how sometimes people think autism is a sliding scale, where it's moreso like a wheel chart. It's a gut instinct because I didn't know what else to interpret the phrase as, so I was offended because in my mind, i thought "how dare people think calling someone's autism severe is okay!!"

But it makes a lot more sense to see it as a self-identify specific autistics use because it's about a bunch of combining factors. Its still a wheel chart, just a specific part of said wheel.

And on the other hand, it's hypocritical of me to judge people using it for themselves when I myself say joking things like "lots of autism today" or something

So yeah. I apologize for jumping to conclusions and I'm glad to see it sparked a discussion about it

Oh shit this sounds like someone got angry at you after reading your post - I hope it didn't happen and only sounds like it 😱

I once made a post about the sliding-scale-wheelchart-analogy to explain severity to people who don't know many higher support needs autistics (because it's difficult to understand otherwise), and then later reposted it with some good tags someone added (please read the linked post first and then the tags):

Many autistic self-advocates who don't "have the whole wheel on maximum" think that "severe autism" is a made up construct to deny agency. That's understandable.

But actually the "severe" is there to tell others "Hey, you need to pay extra attention to certain things when interacting with us, even more than with other autistics. You closely have to follow certain strictly defined rules so that we're not overwhelmed and so that interaction even is possible, if you don't follow these rules, interaction in real life isn't possible!" - so it's there to help us, not to deny agency.

But of course people don't know that unless they're somehow directly involved in higher support needs autism circles, so I get why they think that.