I don't understand. In order to be diagnosed with autism, you must have deficits in social communication across three criteria groups (reciprocity, nonverbal communication, developing/ maintaining relationships) and repetitive, restrictive behaviors. The symptoms can change in severity throughout your life, but must be present throughout your entire life. And the symptoms can't better be explained by intellectual disabilities.

Like, you either meet those criteria or you don't. The spectrum is for those who meet all the criteria above as a way of explaining how different all of us with ASD are. My nibling is high support needs, nonverbal but I, as a low support needs adult, understand him better than I get most of my allistic peers. Allistic individuals might identify with parts of autism, but that doesn't make them autistic unless they meet the above criteria

[–] maryXann@lemmy.autism.place 6 points 1 month ago

The diag criteria are an ad hoc thing that only exists so that the society has a systematic way of deciding wether a given individual is autistic or not. Someone who just barely misses the criteria to be positevely diagnosed could very well have a lot in common with those who meet slightly more criteria.

Think of it like the administrative criteria to be considered "poor" in a given country: it helps to decide who can benefit from financial help and such, or to have statistics on how fair is the ressource distribution through the time, but it doesn't mean that your life will switch the very moment your income crosses the limit.