Someone on Mastodon shared this link with me, and I thought you might find it as interesting as I do.
I really hate the misconception of the spectrum. It enables nasty people like Ellen degeneres to justify being a bully (in case you missed it, she tried to get diagnosed autistic. When that didn’t work, she said, well it’s a spectrum so we’re all a little autistic, so I’m not a bully). And enables others to dismiss our struggles, cos hey, we’re all on the spectrum!
Back to the article, I feel like I’m a mix of the three examples. I can see some that match from each example. How about you? When I stop feeling so lazy, I might do my own custom one.
I thought we cancelled Ellen.
Ellen might be Autistic, she might not. I’ve never met Ellen so I wouldn’t really know. As it turns out you can be Autistic while still being a shitty person. It feels very weird to gatekeep being Autistic. She’s totally wrong about everyone being Autistic but I do think Autism is more common than many people want to admit.
She said she got tested and she wasn’t (she said she has an ADHD diagnosis).
It’s not so much whether she’s ND, it was the way she invalidated the autistic community’s struggles with that dumb take. You can’t bully people and then try to excuse it by saying, we’re all on the spectrum, I was just playing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh48IlFkyic
Relevant part at 16mins.
B**** literally traumatises people by forcing their phobia on them, humiliates people on air, forces people to disclose pregnancies, and that’s just the stuff we’ve seen in public. That’s not autism, that’s sadism. No contrition, no admission that she was in the wrong. And her trying to get an autism diagnosis to excuse that really ticks me off.
Saw this one before, the message is good but I dislike the use of a box at all here because the analogy is still weird. I like to think of it as an equalizer, traits are at different volumes and gains like the different frequency ranges of sound going through a sound system simultaneously. (Think bar chart for alternate example.) Different traits manifest differently, i.e. perseverance, stimming, sensory sensitivity, monotropism, special interests, etc.
Tangentially on the same topic, I dislike the term “on the spectrum” because this article’s reasoning. You are not sitting atop a one dimensional number line. You ARE the spectrum, and your spectrum “settings” differ from that of others, though only to a certain extent (or otherwise Autism would not exist)
I think the point of it is more to explain to people who think the spectrum means this side is NT and this side is “severe” autism, and the spectrum is anything in between. For a while I thought this was what it meant too.
So I like that this explains to people who think that, that the spectrum doesn’t work that way.
I think of the spectrum more as a circular rainbow, and you can occupy a bit from this side, maybe a larger segment from that part, maybe a bit more over there.
Maybe defining the autism spectrum is as complex as defining a neurotypical spectrum 🤷🏽♀️
The author’s total misunderstanding of how visual/color spectrums work makes their analogies fall apart.
- the “visual spectrum” as they mention it is a gradient, it’s just a gradient of frequency/wavelength which usually isn’t particularly relevant unless you are doing science
- there are ways people organize, define, and describe colors for aesthetic purposes, often in 2D or 3D “spectrums” or “gradients”. In this context statements like “this color is more red than that color” are very well defined and make sense.
I think I get their core point that there are many facets to autism and annoyance at people who aren’t really “autistic” trying to claim to be to play that “card” in an argument. But IMO trying to pretend words don’t have meaning for the sake of a half-baked analogy is a really weak way to make that argument.
Great read, thank you for posting. People conflating spectrum and gradient is a really eloquent way to put it, actually.
It might not make sense to be wearing red and say that you’re a little bit rainbow, but it does make sense to wear a desaturated red and say that you’re a little bit red. To that point, I like to compare it to visual acuity. Everyone’s vision lies somewhere on the gradation of 20/20 or better up to complete blindness where absolutely no visual signal reaches your brain. Saying that everyone has a little bit of trouble with social situations is akin to saying that everyone is a little bit blind.
It was an interesting read, and helped me process a few things about myself. Thanks for posting/sharing :)
I always liked the idea of a Venn diagram as a metaphor better. The central circle is you and then the autism traits are the circles overlapping with you (and sometimes each other!). How much your autism affects you is related to how much those circles overlap with you in the middle. Probably not perfect either, but I always liked it better than the oft-misunderstood “spectrum” metaphor.
Or even something like this works.
Thanks, I wish there was a Spanish version so I could share it with my parents.
