Today’s conventional wisdom is that both are spectrums. That means one person’s experience with autism isn’t another person’s experience with autism, and one person’s experience as a member of the LGBT can differ from another’s.
However, that’s what the whole point of the letters in the LGBT is. You could be a lesbian, asexual, aromantic, a lesbian who is aromantic, an asexual who is trans, and so on. Someone I know (who inspired me to ask this) has said they began to question why this isn’t done regarding people with autism due to constantly seeing multiple people fight over things people do due to their autism because the people in the conflict don’t understand each others’ experiences but continue to use the label “autism”.
One side would say “sorry, it’s an autism habit.”
“I have autism too, but you don’t see me doing that.”
“Maybe your autism isn’t my autism.”
“No, you’re just using it as a crutch.”
My friend responded to this by making a prototype for an autism equivalent to the LGBT system and says they no longer encourage the “umbrella term” in places like their servers because it has become a constant point of contention, with them maintaining their system is better even if it’s currently faulty in some way.
But what’s being asked is, why isn’t this how it’s done mainstream? Is there some kind of benefit to using the umbrella term “autism” that makes it superior/preferred to deconstructing it? Or has society just not thought too much about it?
Just because the concept of a “spectrum” is a useful metaphorical concept for these two things does not necessarily mean that the things themselves are all that analogous. In what way could one map the far end of the autism scale to anywhere on the “queer” scale? It’s nonsensical; apple & oranges. One is any sexual preference but the hegemonic one, where there are no “ends” to the “spectrum”, and the other is something that ranges from personality trait minutia to complete inability to function/survive independently.
