Also, the last person I saw who brought up this argument about how functional they are and how it was unfair to people who are less functional was in the same comment also simultaneously talking about how they’re depressed or suicidal from extreme loneliness and strongly wished to be cured of their autism.

Yeah, not me. Quite happy with who I am, wouldn’t change it. I get a pretty useful, different, point of view which I wouldn’t give up, but I’ve had time to acclimate.

I also doubt how useful language tricks like ‘terminology to refer to lots of those traits commonly associated with autism. Nonverbal, hypersensitive, speech-processing disorder, and more’ are to deal with those problems.

Still, I agree it’s a cluster and a hard problem to differentiate (except for profound things like nonverbal).