If you’ll humor me for a couple minutes, a thread:

I, admin Hazel, love folklore—so much so that I’m currently finishing a degree studying it. And while it’s not what my thesis is about, I am fascinated by internet folklore.
1/12

The definition of folklore in general and internet folklore specifically could be a thread all on its own, so to oversimplify it for this thread, internet folklore includes memes, jokes, viral posts, etc., as well as language and terms used by specific communities.
2/12

It also includes how terms are shortened/abbreviated, particularly on Twitter where “split attraction model” takes up 22 characters vs. the 3 needed for “SAM.”

And, of course, it can include the discourse around those terms. Which brings us to “aspec is an autistic term.”
3/12

I, like many of you, have seen this claim thrown around for a while, and while I’d seen the occasional post debunking it, I’d never tried to search for it myself. So today, I did.

I spent a few hours combing through the internet in search of the term’s mythical origins.
4/12

Though I didn’t find any new (to me) claims about the term’s creator(s), I was surprised by a few of the places where I found accusations of theft, including the tags of a fanfic on AO3 and the caption of a particularly low-quality screenshot from Tumblr posted to Pinterest.
5/12

Unsurprisingly, most of what I found came from Tumblr, and the unwaveringly consistent pattern I found was that completely unsourced accusations of theft being answered with sources to the contrary and/or autistic people shutting them down.
6/12

Some claim that it has been used irl by autistic people, but not only is it impossible to source that, it’s also *highly* unlikely that it would have been used outside of small, isolated groups and yet left no trace online.
7/12

If someone, anyone, can indeed find a reliable source proving that “aspec” was used for autism from before the discourse on Tumblr, I would genuinely love to see it.

And while they’re at it, they could send it to Wiktionary to replace that nice little [citation needed].
8/12

That Wiktionary entry is a perfect example of how powerful misinformation campaigns can be. Wikipedia/Wiktionary doesn’t add details, especially unsourced ones, because a few people said it. But even still, they have no sources proving the claim.
9/12

If the existence of Snopes tells us anything, it’s that internet folklore can be very convincing, but convincing doesn’t mean true. Some people who say “aspec means autism” may genuinely believe it because they’ve been misinformed, but that doesn’t make it true.
10/12

When someone seems well-intentioned, I usually try to explain this. But, well-intentioned or not, the fact remains: They. Are. Wrong.

Like I said, I love folklore, and I can appreciate the topic from a folklore standpoint, but it’s still wrong, and it’s still harmful.
11/12

So if you see anyone try to claim that we’re stealing terms from the autistic community, feel free to hit them with a [citation needed] and shut their aphobic, ableist asses down. -
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