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I’ve been holding back sharing a thought that I think should not be as controversial as it is: People can be “a little bit autistic.”

This doesn’t mean that I think it’s okay for people to say invalidating phrases like “everyone is a little bit autistic” in response to a person disclosing their autism.

Yet, there is some truth to the idea that people can be a little bit autistic.

I often see people claim on social media that you’re either autistic or you’re not, as if we’ve discovered an autism gene that can definitely confirm this. We haven’t. There is no “autism gene”.

Similarly, I’ve seen people claim that you either have an autistic brain or you do not, as if we can diagnose autism through a brain scan. We cannot. There is no one type of autistic brain.

Sure scientists may have found certain genes or brain features that correlate with autism, but nothing definitive of autism.

Autism is currently diagnosed through a person’s observable traits, perhaps with consideration for their internal experiences as well. These traits or “symptoms” must also cause significant impairment or distress for a person to be qualified for a diagnosis of autism.

Rather than being binary, human traits are often distributed in a bell curve. I don’t see why this wouldn’t be true of autistic traits as well. Many autistic traits could be considered normal human traits, but taken to an extreme. This is why non-autistic people may sometimes relate to some aspects of autistic people or think “everyone does that sometimes.” Depending on the frequency and intensity/severity of the trait, it may be more or less disabling.

Even neurotypicals can experience autistic traits. [This graph is from a screenshot I took on March 4, 2021 from the RAADS-R results page on aspietests.org.]

Autism consists of clusters of traits. It wouldn’t be unusual for people to have a few autistic traits or perhaps more at subclinical levels. That doesn’t mean the person is (clinically) autistic. For example, everyone experiences moments where they are anxious throughout their lives, but that doesn’t mean everyone has an anxiety disorder. Perhaps it is fair to say that people with subclinical autistic traits are “a little bit autistic”.

Within online autistic communities, people like to say there is no such thing as more or less autistic — there is only autistic or not autistic. Often, this is accompanied by a wheel of traits and a claim that the “spectrum” has nothing to do with autism “severity”.

Yet, people also love to take online autism questionnaires that output a score which is interpreted against a threshold cut-off number on a linear scale. Autism traits can be represented by a wheel of traits yet also represented with a single number. In fact, even a wheel of traits can be converted into an overall autism “score”.

In the binary view of autism, if the cut off score for autism is 100, then you would say a person who scored 101 has more in common with the person who scored 150 than the person who scored 99, because 101 and 150 are considered autistic unlike 99. The person who scored 99 cannot claim to be “a little bit autistic”, yet the person who scored 101 can claim that they are as equally autistic as the person who scored 150. How does that make sense?

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Similarly, even non-autistic people may have some autistic traits and partially fill out a wheel of autism traits. How full does the wheel need to be until the person is suddenly autistic? And is a person with a half full wheel as equally autistic as a person with a completely filled out wheel?

What I’m getting at is that there are people that fall in the grey area because of the spectrum nature of autism. Using the examples of the people that scored 99 and 101, those whose level of autistic traits that fall near the threshold may or may not be diagnosed with autism depending on the clinician. Afterall, there is some degree of subjectivity in autism assessments when it comes to getting a diagnosis.

People near the threshold that don’t meet enough of the diagnostic criteria may be considered to have subclinical autistic traits. In other words, they may have some autistic traits and to a milder degree. They may even experience all traits in the criteria but to such a mild degree that it doesn’t cause significant impairment or distress in their lives.

Similarly, there is the idea of the Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP). BAP refers to a range of autistic traits that are considered subclinical. Research shows that family members and relatives of autistic individuals often have the BAP without fully meeting the criteria for autism. This might explain why you often see autistic people on social media casually “diagnosing” all their family members (and friends) to also have autism.

The idea of the BAP is controversial. It goes against the idea that you are either autistic or you are not. It’s the uncomfortable and uncertain grey area where some with the BAP will eventually go on to become diagnosed with autism and some will not.

Some people claim that the BAP is a way to deny some autistic people of resources and unfairly discriminates against high masking autistics. While I can acknowledge that not being able to get an official diagnosis can make it harder to access certain types of support, this societal issue of being able to access accommodations adds nothing to the argument that autism is as black and white as some people would like to believe. 

I think it’s important to acknowledge that there are grey areas when it comes to defining autism. People who have some autistic traits but are not disabled by them are going to have a very different experience from people who are very disabled by their autistic traits. If everyone who experiences some autistic traits were pressured into believing the dichotomy of either being completely non-autistic or being completely autistic, then I think it is inevitable that autistic spaces would be flooded with people with subclinical autistic traits looking for a place to fit in, drowning out the voices of those who are more severely disabled.

Remember the bell curve. There are fewer people with more extreme traits which would make it easier for those who are more disabled by their autism to be pushed out of autistic spaces if the idea of having subclinical autistic traits were merged with simply being autistic. There are already discussions of this happening among autistic people with higher support needs feeling invisible within the autistic community. Even I feel myself being pushed into higher support needs communities to find relatable people, though I originally thought I was only “mildly” autistic.

I’m not trying to be the grinch, ripping away the label of “autistic” from people who relate to having autistic traits. I’m also not trying to say that those with subclinical autistic traits should not receive any support or accommodations. I think adding the language of subclinical autistic traits and BAP for those who see themselves as being borderline autistic can help people find community without pushing out more disabled autistic people from their own communities. Perhaps one day, the diagnostic criteria of autism will change to include the subcategory of BAP, and the autistic community will branch off into subcommunities (which is already happening).

What we need is more nuance in our discussions of autism, and that involves touching on the uncomfortable grey areas.

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