[faeriechangling]

The amount of autistic people there are each year has changed every year autism has been diagnosed. Every year it has been observed that when you controlled for SES autism wasn't diagnosed more often in any racial group, but when you diagnosed in the real world you would see diagnosis being socioeconomically stratified (And consequently racially stratified). Psychiatrists also charge THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS for a diagnosis, and of course, the incentive is to not piss off the customer. Since things are so expensive, re-diagnosis is not very common, except when somebody gets told they AREN'T autistic. Psychiatrists regularly say batshit things about what they believe autism diagnosis means and it gets posted on the internet.

All of this has made me a self-diagnosis accelerationist because I don't actually like loose labels like autism conceptually.

TikTok Autism somewhat transcends normal self-diagnosis politics this because the medium is the message, and in the case of TikTok autism, autism often means wearing headphones and "stimming". There is a lot of performative autism which I have never seen millennial autistics do my entire life.