Using a social perspective to autism, I would appreciate if there were a way to classify someone as autistic without calling it a disorder. Yes, we have difficulties, but from a social perspective, a lot of them come from society being structured to meet the needs of allistics. They get guidance, acceptance, and ultimately privilege of a world that is designed for them, while we have to try to meet their expectations. From this perspective, we’re not disordered, but oppressed/marginalized. How does that make us disordered?
I agree that there are different levels of functioning, and that some individuals might meet criteria for a disorder due to autism spectrum characteristics, so that would be valid. However, many individuals would function quite well in a setting that was designed to raise, educate, and accommodate autistic brains.
Anyone have any insight or ideas on this?
I feel like this is just a step toward throwing out the classification and description of individuals in terms of social norms and averages. Like, however it came to be (and I’m skeptical of your assertion that society has somehow been fashioned - presumably on purpose? - “to meet the needs of [so-called] allistics”), the society in which we live has bell curve distributions of many personality traits and capabilities and interests and on and on.
There is such a thing as the middle of the bell curve, the 1 standard deviation from the mean, etc. It’s useful to call that something. We’ve called it “normal” or “typical” or whatever. And so people in the 2 std dev and higher bands are increasing magnitudes of “abnormal” or “atypical.” So what?
Well, since time immemorial, being different could be dangerous to the survival of the group. So being different became pejorative. Only in the past couple hundred years have we began to appreciate that creative genius is almost always associated with “atypical” people. (Destructive genius, too.)
I think we’re going through a time now where we’re acknowledging that maybe more people have always been “atypical” but they concealed it for various reasons. I see my kids’ generation as being particularly open to the variation that’s apparently pretty natural in our species (or driven by microplastics and forever chemicals).
I don’t think doing away with statistical analysis of populations is the way to go, though. A better approach, to my mind, is to do away with the negative connotation that still accompanies the diagnosis of being 2 or more standard deviations away from the mean. Certainly it’s not coming up with a slew of new terms to replace “normal” or “typical.”