I used to spend a lot of time on parenting lists and even was a low level presenter at a gifted conference when I was briefly Director of Community Life for The TAG Project. I have two special needs sons who likely qualify for a label somewhere on the autism spectrum, though neither has a formal diagnosis.
I just gave them a lot of instruction on why people do the things they do and how social stuff works while respecting the fact that my sons didn't innately want to interact with others in the "standard" manner. I get along well with them.
I think it is fundamentally problematic to label people as defective simply for being different. Their father likely also qualifies for a diagnosis somewhere on the autism spectrum. As far as I know, he has never sought a diagnosis.
He joined the army when he was twenty and we had an old fashioned marriage.
In the army, everyone where's a uniform. This fits well with the current standard recommendation to let ASD people get multiple copies of their favorite items and dress the same everyday. Wearing a uniform for the job is something most people complain about. For him, it worked well. Bonus points: He wasn't "weird" or "defective" for dressing the same everyday. He was just doing what was required of him by the job.
Military uniforms have the person's last name on the front above the pocket. The fact that he had trouble recognizing faces was not important. All his coworkers had labels.
He was very good at his job, but I handled a lot of the traditional duties typically handled by a full-time wife. This is part of why he excelled at his job. It was the only thing he really needed to focus on.
Over the years, I've seen some research indicating that men with full-time wives typically rise through the ranks at work faster. I've discussed such with other college educated women and so forth.
In the lifetime of my children, the world stopped being predominantly agrarian and became predominantly urban. Most people now live in cities and this has been true for less than thirty years.
In short, the world has changed tremendously. Yet, rather than positing that the world we created is ill-suited to the needs of many humans, we posit that folks who don't readily fit into this never-before-seen highly technologically advanced society were simply born broken. We posit that there is suddenly a shockingly high percentage of defective humans.
I have to question that framing. It doesn't fit with my understanding at all of life, the universe and everything.
It isn't meant to threaten your coping mechanisms.
Personally, I was struck when I saw how kids in my son's kindergarten were bucketed on the angel->troublemaker spectrum. It's a very one-dimensional approach.
At the end of the day, people usually find their role where they click. A top-tier salesperson or engineer have very different personalities and traits that make them effective, but aren't inherently better or worse than each other.
No, that's not the point at all. The point is to question the validity of the concept.
It's apparently the Nazi version of so much race based BS in the US. The US has a long history of saying people of color are less intelligent, unfit to lead, are happier as servants and so forth. It justifies condemning them to a permanent underclass.
If autism is really what the Nazi regime chose to call people it found inadequately emotionally manipulable for its purposes, then you have to question the validity of the label at all.
Then you have to wonder if maybe they are just people and maybe people come in a wide variety of flavors and maybe the flavor we call "autism" isn't some inherent defect after all.