Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I think the problem is simply we're over-diagnosing autism. Basically borderline people would've been considered normal in the past, but are now considered autistic. Frankly, the entirety of symptoms involved in diagnosis sounds subject to a person's opinion of what people's behavior should be vs shouldn't be. Since this line is hard for everyone to agree on, we've come up with degrees of autism, like "high fun…
I and many other autistic people would strongly disagree. Neurotypical vs ASD isn't some gradient like you seem to think, it's much bigger, clearer wall between us. I am one of those that you wouldn't diagnose autistic, but in reality me and my thoughts are much much much closer to the ones you would than neurotypicals. I wasn't diagnosed as a kid, partly because autism wasn't diagnosed at least in my country when I…
Is it only "autistic" people who feel that way? Could it be, that there are people out there who don't meet the diagnostic criteria for "autism"/"ASD"/etc – either some other psychiatric diagnosis fits them better, or none at all – yet they feel much the same way? (What about people on the schizophrenia spectrum, especially those at the "milder" end of it, such as those with schizoid or schizotypal personality disorders–have you ever thought that maybe some of them feel this way too? But most of them would not be "autistic", in that ASD would be the wrong diagnosis for them.) Conversely, isn't it possible that there are people actually diagnosed with autism/Aspergers/ASD/etc who don't feel that way? If "feeling that way" and "autism" can exist independently of each other, maybe there is no necessary connection between the two?
If one feels like one was "born on wrong planet", is that because there is something fundamentally different about you? Or maybe you were raised in an unsupportive environment – there are lots of ways environments could be more supportive without having to structure that support around a diagnostic label – and if you grew up in a more supportive environment you would have felt less like that? Maybe, if the events of your life had taken a somewhat different turn, you might have grown up in a more supportive environment purely perchance, even if nobody had been consciously trying to be more supportive.
Also, isn't it possible that those kinds of thoughts of estrangement and alienation ("born on the wrong planet") can be an idea which enters into one's mind – generally a mind which has some genuine things to feel upset about, and whose upset is not being properly recognised or acknowledged by others; yet still maybe those things are nonetheless insufficient to logically entail that particular statement – but then the idea takes hold, and it grows, and puts down roots, and becomes a lens through which future experiences are interpreted, constantly finding more confirmation for itself – maybe, even at times, turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy? In which case – maybe the real problem is that very thought, and a possible solution is to challenge and question and doubt it, rather than seeking out a community who will affirm and encourage it?
> It all changed when I found out and found others like me.
I have a lot of autistic traits – I strongly suspect that if I wanted the diagnosis, there are professionals out there who would give it to me. I've never thought I was "born on the wrong planet" though – to me that just seems such a bizarre thought. My response to our son's ASD diagnosis was basically "What do you mean X and Y and Z are 'symptoms of autism'? I did stuff like that all the time as a child, I even still do as an adult". I definitely don't want our son growing up believing he was "born on the wrong planet". He's really no more "autistic" than his father is – and his little sister has lots of "autistic traits" too, and I can even see many in his mother (although she really doesn't like it when I say that.) Rather than saying our children have "autism", I think it is more appropriate to say that they are the children of their parents, whose problems are largely continuous with (and inherited from) those of both their parents, and their behaviour is fundamentally normal and even typical for children who have the kind of parents which they have. And they were born on the only planet on which they could ever have been born–this is their planet, they belong here, they may sometimes struggle with fitting in with the crowd but so do heaps of other people (their parents included)–and I hate to think some people might try to plant in their minds the idea that they don't belong on this planet, and if anyone tries I hope they might listen to me and reject it.
Despite my own autistic traits, I don't really like the "autistic community" – it seems to me to be filled with people who put immense faith (at times even verging on religious) in a diagnostic construct which is rather dubious from a scientific viewpoint–but they seem to (by and large) not know that, and even to not want to know that. Many of them express a great deal of resistance presented with the idea that this diagnostic construct on which they've chosen to build their personal identity might be bad science or even a harmful cultural construct – I am left with the impression that many of them don't even want to hear the arguments against it, they already know the arguments must false before they've even heard them–much as many religious people don't even need to hear the arguments against their religion's doctrines in order to know their fallaciousness.