The whole "person with autism is better because it puts the person first" sounds exactly like the kind of BS that autism can lower patience for, anyways.

[–] callyral@pawb.social 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

it's just a linguistic quirk, english just so happens to put adjectives first (i.e. "autistic person" instead of "person autistic")

[–] Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz 3 points 4 months ago

The choice is more between 'Sally has autism' (some people think this makes it sound more like a disease, more distancing and separate from the person), and 'Sally is autistic' (sounds more like a character/personality trait, a way of being).

[–] AnarchistArtificer 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think that there are some groups of people who prefer person-first language. For example, "person with epilepsy" is generally preferred to "epilectic person" (n.b. I do not have epilepsy). I also just looked into the history of person-first language and apparently it first arose in the context of people with AIDS, who were sick of being referred to as "AIDS victims" or similar.

In that light, I can understand why some people prefer person-first language. Myself, I am in accord with the general autistic community in calling myself autistic (as an adjective). Occasionally, amongst friends and kin, I may even call myself "an autistic".

There are others on this wider thread that capture some of my reasons why: I remember, shortly after I was diagnosed, I pondered whether I would take a cure for autism, if one existed. I concluded that I wouldn't — not because being autistic was a strictly positive thing for me (it certainly made my life harder in many respects), but because I didn't think that it would be possible to extricate the autism from what is intrinsically me — in short, any "cure" might as well be death.

[–] Omniraptor@lemm.ee 2 points 4 months ago

although this hits kinda different when you're also depressed enough you wouldn't mind disappearing