Recently @urstraight made this post, in which they show a screenshot of google search results for the search “what is the aspectrum” (taken on a mobile device) and indicated that these results are evidence that aspec is a term stolen from autistic people.
tl;dr: Looking at the above images, it appears that the results @urstraight posted may not actually have been for the search term “what is the aspectrum”, but instead for “what is the spectrum”. I’m not accusing them of lying or deliberately attempting to mislead anyone; I think that this may be an honest mistake resulting from how the google search app works on mobile and that it could have happened to anyone, details below.
The thing about google is that it’s a pretty clever search engine.
It spell checks your searches based on the most commonly searched terms and uses this to return the results it thinks you want. So, as in the above example, if you search “what is the aspectrum” it will first show you the results for “what is the spectrum”. It won’t give you the results for the actual search terms you put in unless you then select “Search instead for what is the aspectrum”.
But you can’t always see this when using the google search app on mobile.
This is because the search bar itself remains at the top of the screen while everything else scrolls under it. This means that you can end up with misleading screenshots of google search results. See below,
Notice how not only is the “showing results for” bit gone, the menu bars and google logo are also no longer visible? It’s the same in the screenshot that @urstraight posted.
This means that when you scroll down on the results page in the google app, it will always look like the results are for the search term that was entered, even when google itself “corrected” that search to instead look for what it thought you wanted.
The end result is that you can get a misleading image without using photoshop and without even intending to make it that way.
For this reason, and because of the high degree of similarity between the search results @urstraight shared with the results I found for “what is the spectrum”, I find it quite likely that the search results they shared were actually the results for the search term “what is the spectrum” not “what is the aspectrum”.
Searching for “what is the aspectrum” did not return any results related to autism on the first page. I also didn’t find any autism related results on any of the first 5 pages - though I did find a result relating to ace and aro identities on the second page.
Please note: I am not accusing @urstraight of intentionally misleading anyone. It’s quite probable that they just scrolled straight down the search terms to the first link and didn’t see that google had altered their search. It’s an easy mistake to make and doubly easy to do when the results you find match what you expect to see.
With that said, if you are wanting to share any search results you find with others via a screenshot, I would recommend using search results from a web browser wherever practical. The search bar doesn’t remain at the top of the page when using google search through a web browser, so if you want to include the search bar in your screenshot, information regarding any “corrections” to the search will be included in the screenshot. This is probably easier to do from a desktop, laptop or tablet than from a mobile phone.
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”
If anyone, anyone at all, has any sources, evidence or examples of aspec/a-spec ever being used to mean autistic and/or autism spectrum, please feel free to share at any point in time.
could you maybe consider using the term “acespec” instead of “aspec” which is commonly used to refer to people on the autism spectrum? im not here for discourse and before ppl get aggressive w me which i rly do not want, i am on the ace spectrum,,
I am autistic. I also read extensively on autism in social media(ie; blogs), regular media, literature and scientific contexts and I’ve never seen aspec used to mean autistic spectrum. Additionally, aspec is inclusive of both ace and aro people. So unless someone can direct me to an actual source for the word aspec being used for autistic, I’m going to keep using it for this.
Tf is ur game man. I've seen u reblog like... a dozen of my posts. What freaking side r u on its freakin me out. -mod karkles of kin-against-aphobes
Hi, I’m sorry for freaking you out. I reblog every post I find that discusses the definition of the word aspec into my aspec definition tag. I do this so that I can keep track of all the different opinions that have been put forward and take this into consideration in informing my own opinion.
what do you mean when you answered "anon don't count?" i'm kinda curious
Wait, have I put that in the body of a post? Could you point it out to me? It’s meant to be a tag.
The reason I have been tagging posts with “anons don’t count” is because I have been keeping track of how many autistic people have been saying that aspec/a-spec is an autistic thing versus how many people are saying that it isn’t.
If someone says that they’re autistic, I believe them, but I don’t count anons because one autistic anon can send multiple asks to multiple blogs. Because there’s no way to tell whether different anon messages were sent my different people or the same person, I don’t take them into account.
If anyone has any examples of where they’ve used the term aspec/a-spec to refer to being autistic and/or as an abbreviation of autism spectrum, or has any other sources or references that show aspec/a-spec being used to mean autistic and/or as an abbreviation of autism spectrum, please could you share them?
