Today’s conventional wisdom is that both are spectrums. That means one person’s experience with autism isn’t another person’s experience with autism, and one person’s experience as a member of the LGBT can differ from another’s.
However, that’s what the whole point of the letters in the LGBT is. You could be a lesbian, asexual, aromantic, a lesbian who is aromantic, an asexual who is trans, and so on. Someone I know (who inspired me to ask this) has said they began to question why this isn’t done regarding people with autism due to constantly seeing multiple people fight over things people do due to their autism because the people in the conflict don’t understand each others’ experiences but continue to use the label “autism”.
One side would say “sorry, it’s an autism habit.”
“I have autism too, but you don’t see me doing that.”
“Maybe your autism isn’t my autism.”
“No, you’re just using it as a crutch.”
My friend responded to this by making a prototype for an autism equivalent to the LGBT system and says they no longer encourage the “umbrella term” in places like their servers because it has become a constant point of contention, with them maintaining their system is better even if it’s currently faulty in some way.
But what’s being asked is, why isn’t this how it’s done mainstream? Is there some kind of benefit to using the umbrella term “autism” that makes it superior/preferred to deconstructing it? Or has society just not thought too much about it?
The short answer is because autism is different from sexuality and the same system that works for one will not work for the other.
I would actually caution against embracing any label as part of your identity because as you have observed the autism experience is universally different. So too is the gay or lesbian or transgender experience. These are words we use to describe aspects of ourselves, but too often come to define us instead and enable exclusionary behavior such as gatekeeping identity or depening isolation for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into a label.
Your friend refers to LGBTQIA as referring to “aspects of non-cisgendered life” and it makes me doubt their understanding of the community because there are plenty of cisgendered people within the community…less the obvious exceptions.
Also autism symptoms can overlap and it would be extremely hard to find a label for your specific combinations of symptoms.
LGBTQIA+ started as separate communities that came together. ASD is already one community, it didn’t start as disparate communities based on a single set of extremely varied symptoms.
The closer answer is “Neurodivergent” encompassing ASD, ADHD, and others. ASD is accurate whereas neurodivergent is the umbrella term.
We need to communicate our sexual identity clearly at a high level because we all need to work out with each other who can date or fuck who.
We don’t have as much practical reason to know each other’s specific experience with autism right away. And if you are close to someone and need to understand their autism at a lower level, their personal situation is more complicated than being one of five or six types.
And if you do need to understand someone’s sexuality at a low level, it could also be more complicated and individualized than just being one letter. But knowing that one letter with sexuality helps as a start.
IMO, LGBT descriptors came from that community. Until the autism community develops their own descriptors and hits some critical mass in agreement, it’s not any random person’s place to develop terms for them.
LGBT communities hit major levels of activity and visibility to the public decades ago. My cousin isn’t getting the autism diagnosis she needs today because multiple medical professionals she’s been to still think girls can’t have autism.
It doesn’t surprise me some people like your friend are developing some terms. While people like my cousin and her mom are going to be spending their energy on other priorities.
Just because the concept of a “spectrum” is a useful metaphorical concept for these two things does not necessarily mean that the things themselves are all that analogous. In what way could one map the far end of the autism scale to anywhere on the “queer” scale? It’s nonsensical; apple & oranges. One is any sexual preference but the hegemonic one, where there are no “ends” to the “spectrum”, and the other is something that ranges from personality trait minutia to complete inability to function/survive independently.
I don’t even know if I am autistic, let alone where it diverges from my ADHD or how it differs from the experiences of other ND folk.
Simple answer imo is that society is hypersexualized. Society considers having sex the pinnacle of human experience.
Who you have sex with matters more than how you convinced them to.
