| > There are also many people who take offense to the term lower/lesser functioning As I understand it, the problem with using the expressions "lower / higher functioning" is that it evokes the idea that problems of people with "lower functioning" are a strict superset of problems of people with "higher functioning". In reality, it's more like there is a set of symptoms, and some people have a larger random selection, and some people have a smaller random selection, so it is possible to be "higher functioning" but fail at X, or be "lower functioning" and fail at everything but X. So the "higher/lower" is more about how much your specific set of symptoms disrupts your life, but it doesn't imply which symptoms are present or absent. But people who see the "lower / higher functioning" as two sets of symptoms will judge you by presence or absence of one specific symptom. (Also, with some symptoms, how much they disrupt your life depends on what environment you live in.) > Autistic twitter is quite the landmine for semantic wars of this sort. Twitter seems to evoke the worst in people in general. The explanation I wrote here would almost certainly be also considered highly offensive by someone. |