My therapist thinks I can just learn social cues...

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OK thank you

I think my daughter may struggle in this area as well.

You can assure me as often as you like. Simply offering assurances isn't likely to make me agree on this point.

And anyways, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. Still allowed to disagree with you.

Persisting in referring to any expectation of self-guided therapeutic strategy as a total abandonment by the therapist, does not magically make that the reality. Indicating that the watching of videos would be ok, so long as the doctor verifies the vids first is a minor complaint at best, and still hardly constitutes "fobbing off" - and is easily remedied by simply asking the therapist if they could recommend some since you're not sure where to start - or otherwise clarifying your needs - instead of simply taking offense and firing them.

That aside...

Bee33 is correct. Social cues include physical elements like body language, but also verbal elements like tone of voice and word usage.

yes, but it can also be tone of voice, the way something is said but not explained in a conversation (hints) and other things as well. social cues are signs that let others know a certain response is expected. Many of us miss such cues/signs due to being autistic and the way we process what we see or hear.

Agreed, but the opposite problem -- overestimating either one's own or someone else's potential abilities and pouring too much time and energy into vain efforts, often to the point of causing burnout and other mental health problems -- does exist also.

Many autistic people have intrinsic difficulties, e.g. attention issues, sensory issues, and/or face-blindness, that intrinsically make it difficult to perceive -- not just difficult to learn to perceive -- at least some (though not necessarily all) kinds of social cues.

I do think it's important to work on improving one's abilities to the extent that one can. But I also think it's important to be able to identify one's exact sources of difficulty, so that one can make a realistic assessment of which specific kinds of improvements are possible and which are not.

For example, a physically blind person cannot be taught to see but can, in most cases, be taught to read Braille, navigate with a cane, and use various kinds of assistive technology.

The exact sources of most autistic people's difficulties are less obvious than physical blindness, but they are nevertheless real.

Identifying one's exact sources of difficulty makes it possible both to (1) work on improving the things one can actually improve and (2) ask other people for specific accommodations in one's areas of intrinsic difficulty.

A lovely counter-argument that completely misses the point.

It's rather difficult to know what your limits are, until you bump against them. To arbitrarily decide what your limits are, before you've even found them, is the same thing as self-defeat. Doing so is to decide the limits of your willingness, not the limits of your ability. At that point, you've decided you're not willing to try any more, regardless of whether or not you've actually hit that limit.

Autism and blindness both exist on a spectrum - but I love how autism gets compared to full black-out blindness, as though autistic people are simply incapable of learning the things they have difficulty with - another fine example of self-applied helplessness. Difficult does not mean impossible. Pardon me if I'm not terribly swayed by the "blindness" analogy.

And to be fair, if someone isn't very good with social skills, then they're also probably not very good at gauging social ability - including their own - so even if they do decide that they "can't" learn social skills, they're still hardly the "expert opinion" necessary to actually decide that. It's like saying "I don't know anything about singing, but I know I'll never be a good singer!" - they're hardly an expert on the matter, so how would they know?

If there's a reason people get burned out, it's cos they invent a thousand unnecessary rules that they've convinced themselves they have to comply with in order to "fit in" or "act normal", and try to achieve these unrealistic and ineffective goals in a matter of days or weeks, with no patience for anything that takes months or years. It's not their potential that was the issue - it was their unrealistic and ineffective strategies, implemented frantically and desperately.

Failing that, some people seem to just have a chip on their shoulder, and think that cos they've already met some imaginary misfortune-quota, they shouldn't have to suffer any further discomfort or inconvenience in life, rallying behind the battle-cry of what they feel they "shouldn't have to!" do.

I hear a lot of people say "I can't" when they really mean "I don't want to".

It is more common for females to use long complicated sentences with deliberate intonation when a guy might answer with a short "yes" or "no." This allows second class citizens to express their true feelings with sarcasm rather than explicit words. This creates something known as "plausible deniability."