I suspect part of your parent comment's point is that this is an implicit bias in the way the spectrum is defined and thought of, so it wouldn't be clinically defined in those terms explicitly.

In other words, the "spectrum" doesn't exist to capture the variation in the autistic person's own experience - if it did, it would look very different. It's a remnant of a time when autism was seen as just a "problem" for the people around you, and the spectrum measures how much of a problem you are and how weird you are seen by their measure; which does map onto a continuous line in the same way.

That does capture something useful, but only a small part of what autism actually comprises, and is much less useful at capturing the autistic person's own experience of it, and makes it a less useful tool to them than people might assume.

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michaelt an hour ago | parent [-]

It's not unusual for diagnostic criteria to hinge on the impact the thing is having on your work/family/school life.

Alcoholism, for example - we don't define alcoholism as drinking ≥2 bottles of wine a week, or say that 1 glass of wine a week is part of an alcoholism spectrum.

Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested.

How much of a problem an alcoholic is for others being roughly equal to how much of a problem alcoholism is for the alcoholic.

	▲	sundarurfriend 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Instead, we ask whether drinking often interferes with taking care of home and family; or leads to job/school troubles; or has lead to getting arrested. We don't ask just that, and the diagnosis doesn't hinge on those - in fact those account for only 3 (or 4 depending on how you count) of the 11 diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder. The others are about the person's own experience with alcohol, the difficulties and psychological problems caused by it to the person themself. And that's for alcohol use, an external behaviour-based problem with a specific narrow scope. Autism is a much wider construct with much more varied impact and experiences, and yet in practice people are placed somewhere on the spectrum based mainly on external interactions and troubles. Historically this came about because people who were "low-functioning" caused more difficulties to others, whereas "high-functioning" folk didn't - even though they might have comparable amounts of difficulties and psychological anguish internally and in need of similar help too. This simplistic view is changing slowly within the field and with some therapists recognizing it better for what it is, but it's still not nearly as widely recognized as it needs to be.