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?
Why doesn’t it?
Because autistic people haven’t set up the same kind of community for the same reasons, with the same history.
You gotta understand that LGBTQ+ isn’t even that old as a term. I’m 50, and I was damn near an adult before LGB was an initialism that you’d see often. Tbh, you only really saw it at pride functions, rights functions, and very rarely in LGB media. The T being added in is what? Maybe fifteen years old? It’s hard to remember when trans issues became unified on a large scale with gay issues (using gay as a catchall term here, not an exclusion; back in the day it was very often lumped under that term for whatever reason), but I know it wasn’t fully integrated in the early 2ks, since I was still able bodied and interacting regularly with rights activists. It was getting there, but the T wasn’t added across the board yet.
The Q and other additions are even more recent.
Autism as something other than an illness that needs management is pretty similarly new to the public consciousness. So autistic people didn’t have the same kind of community of exclusion the way LGBTQ+ people did. They were patients, not minorities.
That may seem like sophistry, but if you look at aspergers, there was a community, it just wasn’t one of exclusion in the same way. That community had a lot more similarities to little people (dwarfs) than gay people in terms of how each group interacted with Neuro or physical typicality. There’s definitely a lot of prejudice, and condescension and bullshit involved with being autistic or a little person, but it’s not the same as being actively hated and even killed for being born as you are.
So LGB people came from a place where community was safety in a way that someone with autism doesn’t experience. Trans people do too. As do queer and “other” groups distinguished by sexual orientation or gender.
Safety in numbers was literal safety.
The political and social side of banding together was essential to that safety. Every “letter” added means more people working for equality and fairness. Every “letter” means more voters, more money, more influence.
Autism, on the other hand, hasn’t needed that yet. So far, all the various aspects of autism can be addressed as a group despite the various aspects of its expression the sensory sensitivity group and the focus related group are part of the same spectrum, that can be easily navigated by social and political efforts as a single group by default.
Lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals aren’t the same spectrum. The lived experience of each group (and for bi men and women separately) isn’t inherently linked to the others. Sexual orientation may be a spectrum, but it has different social and political ramifications for each version (and the versions that came into aw areness later). Pointing at a lesbian and a gay man and saying “those are the same thing” makes a lot less sense on a social level.
This isn’t to say the lived experience of autistic men and women is the same, it most definitely isn’t. But both of those groups can benefit from the same efforts in a way that lesbians and gay men couldn’t until they banded together more.
Now, should there be delineation between the different presentations of autism the way your post suggests? Not for me to say. I’m not involved in enough autism groups to have knowledge of whether or not the greater community would benefit from it. And, being an outsider, there’s limits to how much I can pick up from observation compared to someone that’s living with autism. There may be a very pressing need to split the categories of autism so that social and political efforts can be improved.
But that’s a separate issue from why it hasn’t already developed such a system.
This didn’t sound right to me, I’m sure I heard LGBT more than 15 years ago, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia LGBT was first used around 1988 but OED says 1992, other sources say it became widespread in either the 90s or 00s (varies by source). So 15 is a lower bound for widespread usage but I don’t think we can get much more specific than “15 to 35 years ago”.
Yeah, you run into so many regional variants as things spread, and varying levels of acceptance of trans issues that it’s hard to pin down. It isn’t like there’s a single authoritative organization that decides what gets included when, so it’s mostly terrifying happening as ideas spread organically.
I wanna say the first time I ran across it as a 4 letter initialism was in the Advocate somewhere in the early oughts, but that’s memory, and we all know how unreliable human memory is over time. I’m confident that around 2k, LGB was still being used in my general area for rallies. But shit, I’m pretty far out in the boonies; even the closest city isn’t exactly cutting edge in terms of social movement.
It’s so difficult to track the history of such things partially because there weren’t a lot of written accounts and documentation back then. It isn’t even that long ago, but it just wasn’t something organized enough to generate paperwork. It isn’t like trans people were really seen as a separate group by everyone. Look at how long it took the role of trans people in the Stonewall protests to be recognized as trans people in general knowledge. I had actually met some of the people involved, and they never mentioned trans people, just drag queens and gay men.
I’m just now discovering information about things I heard of when they happened because nobody cared. It’s a bit crazy to think about how big a change has happened since the 70s in terms of humanity discovering how truly varied we are. It’s living history, and I don’t think we’ll realize how important this era has been because we’ll be gone before it settles out and becomes something to look back at with a more objective perspective.