@Oggie I am not a fan of "low-functioning" and "high-functioning" classifications; those classifications, themselves, are (like just about everything else in the medical view of autism) from the perspective of external observers and not from that of the autistic person and how they experience the world - they presume that "not functioning like neurotypical people" is automatically a deficit, no matter what.

@joepie91 okay, and I will grant there is a high degree of ableism in even touching those terms- but recognize that under the umbrella of autism there are people who cannot function on a basic level, or cannot communicate in any real sense ( not the same thing). It is a very, very broad diagnosis, and stretches from people who are perfectly capable of articulation to those who will not be able handle their own sensory input, or relate anything about anything

So, conflicted.

@Oggie
You can use "autistic person with blablabla". It's not bad to say that someone has a learning disability for example.

In a more pedantic way, we can use something like: "A [insert the neurotype] person" and talk about their specific needs for support, access and/or accommodation
@joepie91

@Oggie I find this complicated, because there's a bunch different issues that all tend to get conflated... to take 'ability to communicate' as an example:

1. External observers (parents, teachers, etc.) are claiming that someone is unable to communicate, because they don't meet NT communication expectations (external ableism)

2. An autistic person themselves is having trouble communicating because they do so differently than NT people do, and they have been taught that that is a deficit on their part (internalized ableism)

3. An autistic person actually is intrinsically having trouble expressing themselves, because eg. they cannot convert their internet thoughts and feelings into external communication of *any* kind (genuine communication issues)

Of those three scenarios, only the third one is one that I consider a legitimate 'deficit' that requires treatment of some kind. And one person can experience any of those three things simultaneously, muddying the waters.

When people talk about "low functioning", they usually are talking about the first one. But even when generalizing it to "cannot communicate", people are often *still* just talking about the first two.

So if it's genuinely about option 3, then yes, that is a problem. But personally I am extremely hesitant to accept that that is the case in a situation until I understand it fully, because internalized ableism is a thing - and it doesn't actually seem to be the case all that often in practice, going off my experiences so far.