Every single way that researchers find that autistics differ from non-autistics will be labelled as a 'deficit' or 'disordered', even if that difference is not negative in any way (and sometimes even when it's positive: i.e. when they found us to be more honest and ethical).
This is because they inherently view autistics and autistic behaviour as 'bad' by virtue of it not being neurotypical. We are nothing more than broken neurotypicals that they're trying to fix, because normality is king even when the difference is harmless or even beneficial.
They are so blinkered by the idea that they have to make us 'normal' that they forget to consider what's actually best for us. So if we express or show distress in a slightly different way, the issue is in making us do distress 'correctly' rather than mitigating distress.
It's why the recent Yale study was able to go ahead, because they see our distress and reactions as inherently disordered and therefore they're doing us a 'favour' by trying to 'fix' it rather than instead examining how to make the world less distressing for us.
Non-autistic autism researchers don't see us anything more than a cluster of deficits to be fixed, and that's why, as much as they claim to 'care' about us or want to 'help' us, they will more often than not only bring us harm.
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