They are both autistic.

I love how autism has become this fetishized thing that you slap onto all people operating outside of expected parameters.

I don’t think that’s what fetishized means.

It is. It refers to things being held in special regard in social arrangements, to an religious extent. The autism discourse, with all the memes and such, does more often than not include a cult-like adherence to beliefs around certain behaviours that anyone could display, shifting focus away from the developmental aspect of autism which are very much real and to diagnostic markers that are less than well defined but are used in clinical settings like: trouble at work/school/kindergarten [Y/N], and certain things the hiveminds of the world latch onto. There I think of people regarding dislike of the “big” light as being an indicator for autism(???).