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?
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.