Do you think it's rude to ask if someone has autism?

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If you suspected someone had autism or AS, would you ask them if they do or not?



I think it's rude IMO because kids used to ask me if I was ret*d and I hated it. I wanted to know what I was doing that made me come off it and I just hated being labeled that and having people think I am that. Then when I was 15, these girls on my softball team watched Rain Man and then asked me if I was autistic. I wanted to know then what was I doing that made them think it. So I decided it's rude to ask people it because I remember how it made me feel. It's embarassing. If they want eveyone to know, they would sprout the label.


But sometimes it's not rude to ask like if you saw someone wearing an aspie shirt, then yeah you can ask. It's an invite. Same as if you see someone with an aspie book or they link you to the rdos quiz to the AQ test or to any autism test or they wrote a story and it was about AS.

I don't think it is rude as such but I do think people would take offense to it. I jokingly tell my mum to get diagnosed and she gets on the defensive saying she doesn't have AS.
To those that don't wear it as a label it may be something they are ashamed about and want to hide from people.

I also think that it would be a very rude thing to ask, and I've had simular experiences as the OP, when it came to kids asking if I was ret*d. How could those kids have been rude and nasty?

I had one lady in a bipolar support group interrupt me while I was talking "are you autistic?" I found that more interesting than rude. She said she worked with spectrum people and she could tell, though she was a bit confused by me.

Another time, one of my former roommates said she thought I had different mental disorder than the one I said I had. See I think realized how rude that was later, but I asked which one, and all she could do was ask "Do you like things very, very much?" (special interests?) Anyway, she never could spit out what she thought.

I ironically found my former roommate more rude than the lady, just because of how she worded it and stuff.

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I do not think it is rude, if the person asked when no one else was around.

I remember knowing that I was different, when I was in kindergarden.

I don't know. I have a bit of difficulty with classifying others' behavior as rude or not rude, but prefer to think in terms of favorable to my purposes or unfavorable to my purposes. In high school someone said that I am like the character in Rain Man too. I didn't take offense to it because I knew that the Rain Man character was really smart but had some behavioral differences, so the comparison was not that far from the truth.

Someone else also said my behavior is like Dr. Strangelove. I didn't take offense, but I felt shy about saying anything in response because I hadn't seen the movie and I thought that it was a porno and that the other person was making a sexual reference. I never liked sexual references as a teen because everyone treated things related to sex or drugs as "hehe, get it?" as though it's some big secret. Everything is either sex or drugs. What else is there?

I think it's rude. When I was on about 6th grade a girl in my art class me if I was ret*d,and i was like, I don't know what that mean, and then she said, I guess you are then. Before that time I had only heard the word once. Not that I know what it's means thinking about it makes be angry! I mean really, someone is ret*d because they don't know what the word means even tho they had never heard the word before. Some words I never heard until I was like 12 or older.

Something to think about. About every two weeks someone starts a thread, "What's the matter with NT's! Why can't they just be honest! Why do they always beat around the bush?!"

This is why. If someone is brutally honest to the point of being rude it could hurt someones feelings. The people who asked "Are you ret*d?" may not have meant to be cruel. They may have just been asking an honest question.

I wouldn't want people to ask me when anyone else was around, because I don't tell any of my friends about it. It's private.. but I guess I wouldn't mind too much if someone asked when we were alone. I would never ask though, because people might think it's rude, and I just never ask personal questions anyway.

PS I think most kids ask other kids if they're ret*d, even if there's nothing really weird about them. Like if you do something dumb or weird looking, you get asked even if you're NT. So don't worry about that too much... as a word it doesn't have much meaning anymore.