Comment by tjwebbnorfolk

We're on hackernews. Half of us in here probably joke about being autistic ourselves. That doesn't mean we need to give Pfizer and Blackstone billions of dollars for pills and treatment.

Not all of us are convinced that each and every component of human diversity needs to be treated as an ailment and medicated. Autism, as the name implies, is a spectrum. But we've widened the spectrum so far that its become meaningless. There are profoundly autistic people who can't speak who would not recognize my diagnosis of autism simply because I have trouble looking people in the eye.

You mention gender, and that's a perfect example: we've widened it to include every possible thing. And when it comes to the over-diagnosis/overmedication question: You can be just fine with the idea that gender is a spectrum, but also believe that giving hormones and surgery to teenagers is utterly insane.