Comments on: ActuallyAutistic Is For Both Formally Diagnosed People And Self-Diagnosed People

By: Benjamin 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Benjamin 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 19:04:19 +0000

@yourautisticlife it took me about five years to engage with the autistic community because I was (long story but mostly) self diagnosed. So I felt like I didn’t have the experiences actually autistic people would share and I shouldn’t take up spaceNew hashtags wouldn’t have fixed that. The community as a whole became (and is becoming) more welcoming and communicating better about self dx and we just need to lean into that process

By: Zumbador

Zumbador — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 19:01:28 +0000

@yourautisticlife Yeah I think I agree.Hashtags are always going to be a bit blurry, and we can't control how people read them, or how they are misunderstood, no matter how carefully we craft them, or how many wikis we create!More important to me is to repeatedly state the message that self diagnosis is valid. And that requires more than a "#" and a few letters to bring across.

By: Aerliss

Aerliss — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 18:27:38 +0000

@yourautisticlife I pretty much agree with everything here, but wanted to add to this bit;"It would be to use something like SelfDiagnosedAndFormallyDiagnosedAutistics. However, this hashtag is very unwieldy, even if we replace “diagnosed” with “dx.”"Every time I read "formally diagnosed" I think "previously diagnosed but not anymore, maybe the diagnosis didn't fit?"