@RavenLuni @strypey Another thing to keep in mind: although collapsing all the complexity of the #autistic #spectrum to the simplicity of a gradient is, in itself, relatively innocent sloppiness of thinking, there is a horrifically toxic ideology that aggressively pushes that collapse because such an oversimplification serves its malign agenda. I'm referring to the "severe autism" ideology, which maintains that all the various components of autism are tightly linked and cannot appreciably vary separately. This is the ideology behind the "high-functioning" and "low-functioning" labels. Having collapsed the autistic spectrum to a gradient, they would like to draw a cutoff for minimum significant "severity", and thus collapse the gradient further, to a dichotomy: those with insufficient "severity" are just high-functioning lifestylers who are Not Really Autistic, are just self-pitying introverts, don't really need much help, and are insufficiently appreciative of the suffering of all those poor autism moms who are stuck with their low-functioning Really Autistic, severely intellectually disabled kids — who, ironically, also don't need that much help, because they're inherently incapable of benefiting from most kinds of help. Resources should instead be devoted to making the lives of autism moms easier — and, above all, to discovering the Causes of Autism, so that any further Really Autistic children can be prevented from being born.

THAT is the kind of thinking whose purposes are served by oversimplifying the autistic spectrum into a gradient.

@autistics

@RavenLuni @strypey Actually, the term "spectrum" becomes even more appropriate for autism when properly understood. It isn't just a gradient. It's like a vector, but continuous rather than discrete. And instead of being completely independent and orthogonal like the components of a vector, the components of a #spectrum are related and overlapping. Think of all the information conveyed by the emission or absorption spectrum of a chemical element. An #autistic neurotype is like that.

@autistics