Strongly yes as per other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40329772

But she could talk? And touch another person without screaming? Because _severe_ autism is non-tactile and non-verbal.

Autism is a spectrum disorder, but while you may be picturing it as a continuum from less autistic to severely autistic, with nonverbal autistic people at one end and high functioning autistic people on the other, that is not the reality of autism.

Here is a good blog post written by someone, with a graphic that shows the difference between how people think of autism versus how others experience it.

https://themighty.com/topic/autism-spectrum-disorder/autism-...

As they write, this means some autistic people who are nonverbal can go to college, while the author doesn’t have that capacity despite being verbal.

I’ve seen many times in this thread people pointing toward nonverbal autistic people as a reason we should try to cure autism. But it’s not clear to me that people here even understand autism enough to be forming opinions on what we should do to “fix” it. I think if someone is not autistic they should first try very hard to understand a variety of autistic experiences before forming an opinion on what to do about it.

As for me, to answer the original question my neighbor growing up was nonverbal. We used to play legos together. He could communicate, but he didn’t talk and he didn’t like being touched.

Thank you for your candid comment. It is frustrating to engage via comments and I have learned something from your comments.

All labels including "autistic" are usually very misunderstood - often even amongst people with the same label. Hopefully commenters here are more understanding - given that if you work in the software field you very often deal with people with mild traits of autism.

All the best.

Yeah I think people who are autistic gravitate toward it. It's a very happy coincidence that so many things about computers attract autistic minds. It's a skill that's valuable enough and specialized enough that autistic idiosyncrasies are tolerated to a greater degree than in other fields.

I know deep in my heart if my special interest were birdhouses or windchimes, I would not be in the privileged position I am today. I also know that if my skin were not white, my gender were not male, and my orientation not straight / cis I would not have the same life experience as I did, which all things considered has turned out okay (others called my inability to live a typical life an objectively negative outcome, but I disagree!).

Many of my friends are POC or trans or gay and they face challenges I do not on top of their autism. I don't think I would be nearly as "high functioning" as I am if I weren't conventionally attractive and part of a majority race/ethnic group in my country.

Thanks for listening and learning something; I'm glad my attempt at spreading awareness has worked on at least one person!

In no way would I claim that the person does not have severe autism - but it is someone who consented to marriage.

What I mean is a person where this would never ever happen.