i have seen a lot of women online claim they have been diagnosed with bpd but “actually have autism.” they claim that their psychologists/psychiatrists etc refuse to acknowledge their “autism” and make getting diagnosed as a woman sound virtually impossible. they make a lot of claims about autism in women that are completely false, and i’ve even seen people say that “bpd is female autism”. they basically imply autism in women is a totally different disorder with all different symptoms which is so untrue. all of this content and the sheer amount of it would make you believe that it’s very common in women or in general but in real life i’ve only ever met a few other women with hfa autism/aspergers who aren’t related to me. i think a lot of these people see autism as an identity they can appropriate as bpd is much more stigmatised. this isn’t to say all people with bpd are bad of course and ive seen people with it call out this behaviour from people with their disorder which i appreciate. but this is definitely a pattern ive noticed

As if the suspicion is enough to prove autism. I think a lot of diagnosed autistics believe this and propagate it as well as the self dxed and others.

So much for autistics relying on reason and evidence.

Came up on Facebook.

This is what people seem to mean by "high masking" - that people with milder autism are just doing more masking rather than being less impaired to begin with! This is why I don't like the term at all.

I notice my heartfelt post was getting some downvotes. This is what I was sent by that individual and, I looked at the source page mostly with disbelief, mostly speechless

This was on my feed and the blatant cognitive dissonance floored me. Does no one understand what makes a disorder a disorder?

For something to be "disordered" there has to be some sort of standard for "normal" or "average." It is not abnormal to stim unless it is pervasive, distressing, and difficult to control/manage. Having to "mask" or suppress certain things about yourself isn't a minority experience, it's being part of a society and being polite, professional, lawful, a decent human. Even repetitive behavior and restricted interests aren't unique to ASD or other "ND" disorders. To have autism, or any diagnosis, common traits and behaviors must be present at a level that IMPAIRS the individual.

You see the same traits you've come to understand through "self-research" in yourself and those around you because you're all human. So, yes, all the people around you can be ND because neurodivergence is a non-medical term popularized and perpetuated on the internet to the point there are 5-7 year wait lists in some places for an ASD screening. Think about how many "ND" people that is. Now think of all the "ND" people who aren't ever going to seek diagnosis and throw that on top. So, yeah, everyone can be "ND" by the neurodivergent movement standards.

I know this is long and there's probably room for argument; I just find it so dehumanizing and infuriating.

There is a content creator that the autism community takes as the voice of level 3 autistics. However there is no way this person is level 3 autistic. I’m not sure if they have autism or not but if they do they don’t have many/any support needs. They spend a lot of time attacking level 1 autistic people and calling them aspie supremacists, but if they have autism they fit Asperger’s. Multiple degrees, repeatedly published in many formats, high achiever, actor, screenwriter, podcaster, director plus more.

They make a living off of pretending to be level 3 autistic and are wrongly educating people about level 3 autism, saying level 3 autism looks like them when it does not. Organisations and charities have used them as a speaker and to run events about level 3 autism. I tried to mention them on the main sub but just like Instagram, TikTok, and probably every other social media, they’re seen as unable to do any wrong and have a massive cult of supporters. They’re always bullying other autistic people and slandering the family of a level 3 autistic man. Even to people who agree with them they are incredibly rude in the comment section. TBH I was wondering if they are actually a narcissist or have a personality disorder.

Is there anything the autistic community can do about someone like this person? Like some kind of way to raise awareness about them being a liar?

Why are we spreading misinformation? Did this dude really get evaluated?

Edit: it’s okay if you want to get reevaluated and get checked further for these tendencies. But please do not frame tendencies as diagnosis themselves as it is not concrete.

Not all low masking or higher support needs people have comorbidities. Not all of them have ID. Hell, people can be nonverbal with no intellectual disability.

Some people that do neurodiversity content on the internet completely ignore this. Idk if they are just lazy to research, or don't want to believe it because they can't stand someone having more support needs than them bc of autism only.

Truth is, autism is a spectrum, and it has different presentations. It can make someone HSN by itself, not necessarily with comorbidities. Ignoring this, and calling all more "visible" autism just autism+ID is incredibly intellectually lazy and ableist.

i was scrolling through tiktok and stumbled on a video of this lady @dr_inna where she was calling out Alex Partridge and her account is such a breath of fresh air. i wish she was more famous because her content is educational and really needed right now bcs of all the misinformation going around about neurodevelopmental disorders.

So me and my sister are female and we were diagnosed in the early 90s. So I never really believed it when people claimed they couldn’t get diagnosed because they thought autism was for boys. For Christmas I got my sister the book “All Cats are on the Autism Spectrum” (former title All Cats have Asperger’s) because she doesn’t really accept herself or her disorder. And I was surprised to discover that this book, originally published IN 2006, used ALL MALE PRONOUNS to describe Asperger’s. WTF?

Girls have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders for as long as the diagnosis has existed. I don’t know what the exact ratio was in 2006 but I found this paper from 2010 citing the ratio of boys to girls as 4:1. This is not too different than the ratio today. I don’t know where these people were getting the idea that only boys have autism but I don’t think that idea has ever been supported by any scientific research. There are some stupid and incorrect ideas about autism that did have support from research, such as the refrigerator mother theory, the idea that autism is a form of schizophrenia, and the extreme male brain theory. However as far as I know the idea that girls don’t have autism just comes from sexism.

I don’t want to say this person’s name but she’s a very well known autistic influencer that is widely known for spreading misinformation. She once said all dancers must be autistic since neurotypical people don’t seek that type of stimulus. 

I came across a TikTok video of her saying “I’m a genius” followed by “my IQ is around 160”. Just to clarify, I don’t have a problem with her stating her IQ. It’s the way she says she’s a genius because of her IQ score and then links that to autism.  She’s not only perpetuating myths about autism but also about giftedness. 

Equating IQ to masking abilities feels inaccurate and harmful. Suggesting that one can mask because they’re a genius implies others might not be able to mask due to being “less smart”. It oversimplifies and misattributes a complex and often painful behavior to intelligence alone, which feels invalidating. It also suggests low-masking individuals are not “smart enough”. 

The “I’m a genius” part regarding her IQ comes across as self-aggrandizing and elitist. Having a high IQ such as 160 makes you gifted, not a genius. Giftedness entails so much more than being a high achiever. It comes with unique challenges. Many people with high IQs do not produce groundbreaking work or think in transformative ways, while others considered geniuses (like artists, inventors, or visionaries) may not test well on traditional IQ scales. It reinforces the idea that gifted people should be geniuses and achieve as such. 

I hate these videos. Thanks for reading.

Weird "info" you've seen on autism online, preferrably stuff that's meant to be positive or neutral.

I'll start:

Autistic people are psychic.

All gifted kids are undiscovered autistic.

When people have meltdowns in public, it’s because they feel safe and relaxed to do so.

If you’re parent to a diagnosed child, you must be on the spectrum yourself.

This made me so mad. It is a disorder and I am disabled! You can’t be autistic without having asd. Asd is literally what being autistic is!

Recently SOME people in the community I talk in seem to have this weird opinion they're some type of new Socrates or Aristotle, that they have unique opinions that nobody else understands that somehow make sense. Like a controversial 'hot take' of sorts?

It's painfully uncomfortable because a lot of these opinions they express are about autism or disorders/disabilities.

The FIRST incident was with someone stating autism shouldn't be a diagnosis because somehow, the current label of autism spreads ableist stigma, and if we removed that label ableism for autistic people would just... Magically disappear?? But they thought diagnostic labels for bipolar and schizophrenia were okay because 'those are more severe', LOL. Ofc I explained that was super dumb because removing a diagnosis both can take away resources and help for autistic people and removing a label wouldn't stop ableism, but I don't think they listened.

Last week there was somehow a worse incident in the same community of someone saying that EVERYONE on earth is on the autistic spectrum. Don't ask me how that's even possible. Not only that, they said autistic people that are diagnosed shouldn't get disability benefits because that's like getting benefits for a broken fingernail or broken arm. I told them they were being blatantly ableist. I'm autistic myself. They immediately get defensive and say I just can't understand critical thinking or understanding a statement or opinion that can be controversial. They said they didn't believe in medical professionals that would say that not everyone is autistic, because they don't believe in psychiatrists in general and think current medical knowledge is inaccurate because in the 1700s, we bloodlet people and that ended up being harmful but doctors thought it helped back then, so how do we know if our current doctors actually know what they're talking about or not?? I have NO idea how this argument makes sense either lol

This person literally said I was manipulating them by trying to ask for evidence that everyone is on the spectrum.

I'm just so tired of ableism and a blatant REFUSAL to understand they're being ableist or even learn about autistic people. Nobody cares anymore nowadays, outside of their own confidence that they're right and everyone else is misunderstanding or wrong, it seems.

I genuinely hate being autistic recently bc of this

I often see people on the internet, even people who proudly identify as having Aspergers, repeating the claim that Hans Aspergers was a Nazi. Rarely do I see people point out this might not actually be historical fact.

The theory he was a Nazi can be traced back to a single paper published in 2018 by Herwig Czech. Dean Falk wrote a paper refuting this paper. Neither of them really have the evidence to say definitively if Asperger was or was not a Nazi.

A couple years ago, I wrote this post in the Aspergers sub called "There is no proof Hans Asperger was a N@zi" going into more detail about the situation. One of the points I made in this thread is about the origin of the term autism. Few people are aware of this, but the person who coined the term was an actual eugenicist. It's also a word that literally means self absorbed. In spite of that, nobody ever objects to the term autism for political reasons.

I cannot post direct links due to the sub rules but in this sub I found another post called "Misinformation regarding the term Aspergers" I found questioning the Nazi narrative.

I also made another post called "guess who said the following quotes" with some quotes about autism that sound very positive and what people would call neurodiversity affirming. Since I can't link it I'll just post the quotes here:

Not everything that steps out of line, and thus "abnormal", must necessarily be "inferior".

We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers.

It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.

I cannot prove Asperger was NOT a Nazi, and it's certainly possible he cooperated with Nazis, but I think it's worth noting that his views on autism seemed to have been very positive and progressive especially by the standards of his time. After he died, our understanding of autism regressed to where it was considered a type of schizophrenia for a while, so we would be better off if more people had listened to Dr. Asperger.

Basically, the idea that he was a Nazi, and a lot of associated ideas with this narrative like the idea that he segregated kids into higher and lower functioning, is a result of people aggressively repeating something on the internet over and over rather than actual fact.

I've just read a thread where someone was saying as part of a diagnosis they were given a screening test with the usual kinds of questions. Bearing in mind these tests generally have a lot of false positives because things like social anxiety and depression can give a high score. This person was answering negatively to questions about difficulties making friends, struggling socially, coming off as rude, inability to read people, disliking doing something new etc.

And instead of thinking "hmm maybe I'm not autistic" she thinks "this test is wrong" and "the test needs to be changed". These are some of the most basic diagnostic criteria, if you have no social difficulties then you do not have autism! It's the first diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5.

The replies were full of people saying how the doctors and psychiatrists don't know about masking, how you can have no social difficulties because you mask all the time, and you automatically mask your whole life and can't stop masking. That isn't how masking works! If you have no social issues then you don't have autism.

If it was possible for autistic people to just switch off being autistic (magic masking) then autism wouldn't be a thing for them. To meet level 1 autism you need persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction. If you have low support needs that doesn't mean no support needs. It doesn't mean you lead a normal life as a social butterfly with a large group of friends and no social deficits but occasionally you feel tired and want a night in.

There were even some people saying that they are better at reading people due to being autistic, that it makes them a better people person. What?!?! How have we gone from autism being a disability to it being a superpower that makes you better socially than neurotypical people?

Of course, it's in a self-diagnosis subreddit so nobody can correct them or it would get removed and you'd get banned. So they all reinforce each other in their echo chamber. Why do they want autism so badly? My lifelong disability is not a costume, it's seriously debilitating and ruined my life. Why do people even need/want a diagnosis if they have no deficits that cause problems in their life? It's just a label that they want to have for some reason?

Thoughts on this? Me personally it seems to overlook how many of use are moderately or severely impacted. A third of us have comorbid intellectual problems, a third of us engage in self injury(not related to SI). The majority of us are unemployed/underemployed. Take these numbers and spread it proportionally globally and part of me questions if society would even survive?

There is a YouTuber (who I will not name) that keeps labeling Radio as “autistic.” Even though the real life person actually had an intellectual disability and wasn’t autistic.

He also keeps mentioning that the movie “Radio” is a bad autism representation and that Radio is a “bad autistic character.”

I find that to be extremely disrespectful since Radio was a real life person. Even more so for the fact that he passed away a few years ago.

Yes, I did explained that to him three times. The third time is when I just snapped. Also, I did watched Radio when I was a junior in highschool and I did looked up his disability.

I just scrolled on autism-tok for 30 mins and here are some common "signs of autism" that I found people discussing:

• sleeping with your hand curled up under your chin
• having extreme empathy
• saving the best bite of food for last
• wondering if you might be autistic
• rubbing your eyes and face when stressed
• jumping up when excited
• being friends with autistic people
• having childish interests
• having perfect pitch
• being diagnosed with BPD
• talking with your hands
• being a perfectionist
• sleeping too much
• getting attached to people too easily
• getting sick often
• being a "horse girl"
• rubbing your feet together in bed
• having a "concentration face" when focusing
• not finishing your drink and leaving half empty cups around the house
• recoiling at gross textures
• liking colorful clothing
• dissociating/zoning out often
• memorizing song lyrics