The stigma of stuttering vs. ASD stigma

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I just caught a NYT article on the stigma of stuttering, and it mentioned how Joe Biden suffered from stuttering in his younger years but was able to overcome it (for the most part anyway). As I read through the article, I couldn't help but notice some of the parallels between the mistaken assumptions people make about those who stutter, and the unfair assumptions they make when interacting with US (the autists) - like being really anxious, lacking self-confidence, or mentally impaired... when in many cases those are just surface appearances and not the underlying reality.

I would say that us Aspies "have it worse" though, because social interactions can be like a mine field, where we don't know if we've said the wrong thing or made somebody feel uncomfortable in some way. So we often feel quite apprehensive whenever we interact with others, it's how we've been conditioned to think due to a feedback loop - and so we likely appear as though we're more anxious than we really are, unless we learn to mask our symptoms to the point of barely being noticeable (which I've done successfully, but didn't really get to that stage till my late 20s).

To that point, I would also say that ASD/HFA is more stigmatized because people can't readily define the problem, unlike with stuttering where they can define it to a large degree although their impression of it on a root cause level may not be 100% accurate. To wit, from the article:

"Discrimination against disabled people — sometimes unthinking, other times deliberate — remains common. For stutterers, it can take the form of assumptions that the condition stems from anxiety or intellectual weakness. It is neither. It is a genetically influenced neurological condition."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/29/brie ... ility.html

In my case, I am actually nervous and anxious when interacting with others, due to my horrible experiences from the past. I am actually clueless when it comes to human interactions. However, that is falsely interpreted as stupidity. I am very alert, switched on, and have intellectual strengths, but people falsely assume, based on my poor interactions with them and resulting nervousness, that I am stupid and not capable of intellectual tasks, when I am actually superior intellectually to those that think I'm stupid.

I think that with invisible disabilities, that kind of assumption is common. Probably stuttering may also seem like stupidity to ignorant people. Yes, I think the stigma against stutterers is similar to that against autistic people. Although I'm not really sure if autistic people have it worse, I agree with you that autism is harder to define and varies dramatically from individual to individual, whereas stuttering is probably more clearly defined, which probably makes it easier for people to recognize it as what it is.

I stutter, and people get frustrated with me.

Biden's stutter is so subtle-----that he is mistaken for having more serious "conditions."