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It’s time for a new autism category: trivial autism
The diagnosis obviously needs to be split again.
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As the overarching name implies, autism is a spectrum. It encompasses everything from social media influencers who can talk online about their autism to folks whose parents broadcast their adult bathroom habits to millions around the world and whose parents argue with said influencers over who’s got it worse. Given the exclusion of the least externally apparent autism cases from important services, childhood diagnosis, and research, it’s only natural that we carve out a new category just for this population, because that is all that we need to do to solve our problems.
There’s a portion of the level 1 population that keeps getting ignored while simultaneously stealing services from everyone else and neither the current three levels, nor any of the old categories, nor any of the ICD specifiers do it justice. Even though it’s never been remotely easy for us, or any autistic person, regardless of support needs, to actually get support, even when autism was only defined via the highest support needs, categorizing autism under one big umbrella in 2013 is clearly the sole cause of this historic difficulty in access to services. People like me hold all the power…
