I’m not picky about “official diagnosis” for this question; I know there are a variety of reasons not to have one either intentionally and/or willingly or otherwise.
Do you folks consider your autism a disability? I have seen online a number of people say they don’t think it is, and it may not be so much for them, but someone with higher support needs might think it is. But also I don’t know those posters’ support needs, so I can’t really judge on that basis either. I figured the easiest way to find out would be to directly ask you all. So if you feel comfortable answering, I would appreciate your feedback.
EDIT: Sorry I can’t respond to everyone’s comments; there got to be a whole lot of them! But thank you all for your input!
i do, yes
it compounds a lot of issues for me and makes everything harder. i have a lot of trauma from growing up autistic. i can’t really point to if a certain basic thing being impossible to me is because of the autism or it’s just compounding the other things, but it doesn’t really matter much for me anyway.
to take a hard stance, i think saying it’s not a disability is just wrong. society is built around many things that is objectively harder if you have autism (namely having to understand social norms to get a job and what not). even if you think it doesn’t affect you that much, you still objectively are going to find certain things in life harder than an allistic person. so its a disability. imo, ppl who are saying otherwise are treating the term ‘disability’ like it’s a bad word, which makes sense given how society at large treats disabled people, but doesn’t actually change the meaning of disability
The way I think of it is we are actively disabled by the society we live in. We could live well if people didn’t treat us like shit and make everything harder than it needs to be. Allistic people complain about a lot of the same shit we do but they deal with it better and don’t have the motivation to change it, so we have to suffer.
yea that’s a better way of putting it, thank you
Societal changes would definitely help but I still definitely have symptoms that would still be disabling no matter the system. Being bothered by certain noises for example.
That makes sense. I used to have a similar stance that “No, my conditions are not disabilities; I can still do anything anyone else can!” But I’m seeing more of your position these days, that there is an objective difficulty interacting with society. If society was built differently, it may be less disabling, but at least for me, there’d still be things that would be harder for me, I think.
yea, i think “disabled” as a term is too linked to one’s self worth so a lot of people have the reaction you did. but i just use it as “if someone has things that makes it harder for them to live in our society”
I would also still have trouble but I think nearly everyone has something they have difficulty with in dealing with society so making things less awful for us would make for a more equitable world.