Is it a bad thing that I hate being called an aspie?

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ASPartOfMe
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11 Sep 2017, 3:57 pm

A person should self identify as they see fit. I am perfectly comfortable identifying myself as "Aspie" or "Autistic". "Person with" does not do it for me because my Aspergers-Autism while is not all of me it is inseparable from my personality.

Aspies and Auties - New York Times

Quote:
The author Liane Holliday Willey claims to have coined “Aspie” in her 1999 book “Pretending to be Normal”; she later explained:

"I intended for it to connotate images of kind and caring individuals who live lives wrapped in different colors and fluffed with different stuffings."


That is it, nothing more. So many have politicized it, weaponized it, and stigmatized it. Yet it somehow has survived battered and bruised for sure, but it is still there.


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DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity.


naturalplastic
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11 Sep 2017, 9:03 pm

What Krafty, and Bird, said. Its just a handy abbreviated term. Like "vet" (for either "veteran", or "veterinarian").

I don't understand why anyone would object to the term.

Never heard of aspergers until late in life. And when I first suspect I had it, but before I got the formal dx, I found a site for folks with aspergers called "the aspie hangout". That was my main online hangout until I discovered WP years later. So I have nothing but good associations with the term.

Ironically, Bird used the one term I can not stand.

and. Seeing it text is like hearing a sour

note on a piano. And that's the term "autist".

A person with autism is an "autistic". Not an "autist".

A person who voluntarily embraces the profession of art is an...."artist". A person who voluntarily devotes their life to science is a "scientist". Therefore an "autist" would be someone who gets an advanced degrees so that they can qualify to practice the high calling of practicing autism as a profession. And there aint no such people (unless you're talking about malingerers who are adept at faking autism to get government help- don't know if they exist or not either- but if they do than "autist" would be an epithet).



C2V
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12 Sep 2017, 8:57 am

Quote:
I don't like the term "aspie" either... I prefer autistic.

Me too. Because that's what I am. Funny someone recently tried to be all PC on me and corrected themselves reading a medical form and fact-checking. She was all "so you're autistic? Sorry! A person with autism."
I replied with "no, I'm autistic."
No PC, please.
Quote:
I'd say the term tends to separate the aspies from the rest of us with autism. It's like a lot of thread titles here almost don't apply to the rest of us or exclude us because we are not aspies

That's another reason I don't like it. I know some people like to be specific, differentiating between the types of autism, but I've always been uncomfortable with this because it seems to reek of "functioning levels," which is another part of autistic differentiation I don't agree with. I don't know about others, but dependent on variable circumstances, I can be "high functional and Asperger-like" sometimes and downright "low functional autistic" at others.
In my opinion there's nothing to be gained by such mincing. It doesn't encompass how anyone will experience autism all the time. It's divisive for no real purpose as far as I can understand.


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soloha
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12 Sep 2017, 9:59 am

C2V wrote:
Quote:
I don't like the term "aspie" either... I prefer autistic.

Me too. Because that's what I am. Funny someone recently tried to be all PC on me and corrected themselves reading a medical form and fact-checking. She was all "so you're autistic? Sorry! A person with autism."
I replied with "no, I'm autistic."
No PC, please.
Quote:
I'd say the term tends to separate the aspies from the rest of us with autism. It's like a lot of thread titles here almost don't apply to the rest of us or exclude us because we are not aspies

That's another reason I don't like it. I know some people like to be specific, differentiating between the types of autism, but I've always been uncomfortable with this because it seems to reek of "functioning levels," which is another part of autistic differentiation I don't agree with. I don't know about others, but dependent on variable circumstances, I can be "high functional and Asperger-like" sometimes and downright "low functional autistic" at others.
In my opinion there's nothing to be gained by such mincing. It doesn't encompass how anyone will experience autism all the time. It's divisive for no real purpose as far as I can understand.

I started using Aspie because I read it here when I first started learning and many books use the term. I thought it the word people with Asperger's used for themselves and it was strictly positive. "I'm an Aspie" doesn't sound so bad but "I have Asperger's" just sounds weird to me and I kind of feel like I don't have the right to call myself autistic. I feel like it's somehow taking something away from people who have Kanner's Autism who have it harder than I do. You make an excellent point about good and bad days though. I had to get up on a stage a couple of days ago in front of a few hundred people with bright lights and too much sound and say a few words. I was crazy overloaded and stared at the floor and rocked atrociously the whole time. It was all I could do to maintain my capacity for speech. I watched a video of it later and couldn't believe how obviously autistic I looked in that moment...so bad so bad so bad so bad on video forever :(

Your post has changed the way I think about the word "Aspie".