Aspec Doesn’t Mean Autistic
Okay, so recently some people have been claiming that the word “aspec” is a commonly used term to mean autistic and/or it’s a commonly used abbreviation of austic spectrum (they haven’t really been clear which it is). Turns out that the authors of at least two of the posts claiming that “aspec” is an autistic thing have said that they aren’t actually autistic.
Anyway, I’ve been tracking how many autistic people have been saying what. Posts, comments and reblogs have all been counted. Posts/comments etc were only counted if it was clear whether or not the author had heard of “aspec” being used to mean autistic and/or autistic spectrum before this came up in the discourse. Likes were not counted. Neither were reblogs where no additional text was added. No asks were counted because all the ones I saw were made by anons, however responses to asks were counted (provided the responder was autistic).
All statements that “aspec” is an autistic thing were assumed to be made by an autistic person unless the author confirmed that they weren’t.
Statements that “aspec” is not an autistic thing were only considered to have been made by autistic people if a) they stated they were autistic in the post/comment b) confirmed they were autistic in tags c) their “about” said that they’re autistic or d) they are users of the actuallyautistic tag.
Because of this, it’s possible that the numbers may be slightly skewed in favour of “aspec” being an autistic thing since this group could potentially include allistic people.
Anyway, so far I have counted a total of 44 comments on this from individual autistic people.
Of these, a total of 8 people objected to “aspec” being used to mean “ace and/or aro” and 36 did not.
Of the 8 people who had a problem with “aspec” being used to mean “ace and/or aro”, 2 confirmed that they hadn’t actually ever heard of the word “aspec” being used to mean autistic/autistic spectrum. Another has since deleted their post, which makes me suspect that they’re probably allistic, but we’ll count them anyway.
This means that a total of 6 (assumed) autistic people have said that “aspec” has been used to mean autistic/autistic spectrum and 38 autistic people have said that they have never heard the word used like that. That is an overwhelming majority.
None of the 6 people who said that it does mean autistic and/or autistic spectrum have shown any examples of the word being used this way or any other source. Conversely, you can find lots of examples of autistic people using aspec to mean “ace and/or aro” even just in the ace discourse tag. Of the 8 people who have said that they don’t want “aspec” to mean “ace and/or aro”, at least 5 hold the opinion that ace and aro people are not inherently LGBT+. Given this, as an autistic ace person, I’m finding it very hard to believe that these claims that “aspec” is an autistic thing are sincere.
(Of the remaining 3, 2 are non-discourse blogs that left comments on another person’s post and the third is the blog that has since deleted their post on this topic)
tl;dr: Most of the autistic people who have commented on this issue have agreed that "aspec” was not stolen from the autistic community.
If you want to read through posts and comments etc on this subject yourself, I’ve been reblogging posts with the tag “aspec definition”