The DSM-V is about clinical diagnoses. Mental disorders are understood as something everyone experiences to varying degrees. You're considered to have something clinically when it impairs your daily life, something psychiatrists have defined as being 3 σ away from the average number of symptoms someone would report.

In this example struggling with things like math wouldn't qualify as a disability unless it impaired you in a statistically significant way

At a high enough level; science, math, software; anything that requires super human focus basically.

Speaking for myself, I had to learn everything about human behavior from the ground up, which paradoxically makes me very good at reading and dealing with other humans IRL since it's all conscious for me.

But, it's super important to remember that it's a spectrum, some people are seemingly seriously disabled by it.

This is just nonsense. Depending on the severity, autism makes a person completely dependent on other normal people (neurotypical is just a pc term) to simply survive. There's no degree of "normalcy" that, the more "severe" it gets, the more dependent on others you become.

That is true, I was ignoring the severely autistic. It becomes crippling at a certain point, but on the other hand, there are billionaire CEOs on the autism spectrum, who probably got there because they are different.

> But could an equally compelling list of diagnostic criteria be written, which is all things autists can do but neurotypicals struggle at? Could neurotypical be framed as a disability?

Something like this? https://lemonandlively.com/allism/

From my perspective, the surprising thing about people not on the autistic spectrum is how often they lie, how often they stab each other in the back for quite trivial reasons, and how obsessed they are with evaluating and maintaining everyone's position in the pecking order -- they are barely able to think about anything else, at least half of their brains are always evaluating this.

And the famous "theory of mind" in most cases is merely the ability to understand someone who is almost the same. I mean, of course if someone thinks exactly the same way I do, it will be very easy for me to predict what they think. But find someone different (doesn't need to be autistic; any kind of difference will work) and suddenly most people's ability to read their mind is gone.

> Could neurotypical be framed as a disability?

No. What is it with so many autists trying to turn things around and act as though they are better in some way and NTs are the 'problem'. It's bizarre and seems like some sort of denial.