Bix dot Blog

Does it make more sense to talk about an autistic person’s individual spectrum than to talk about someone being “on the spectrum”? Is “on the spectrum” a term that actually just confounds the issue? (Certainly it tends to lead to neurotypicals pulling out the nonsense, “Well, really, we’re all somewhere on the spectrum.”) My favorite post-diagnosis metaphor I ran across was that of a soundboard: every autistic person’s mix of autistic features and intensities is different. “Spectrum” in a sense should read like “fingerprint”, like the spectrographic fingerprints of the elements and compound in distant stars.