“Autism is a Spectrum” Doesn’t Mean What You Think

It’s not a gradient that goes from “less autistic” to “more autistic”. That’s the entire wrong way to think about it. If you think about the visible color spectrum, red and blue are on opposite ends, but blue is not “really intense red”, they are actually just different colors. So, my understanding now is that “the spectrum” is a set of different traits that, if you have a lot of them, that makes up autism, but the traits show up differently in different people.