The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all. Well, that's the bit I'm questioning, although I'm definitely no expert. This Astral C

The vast majority of people simply aren't on the autism spectrum at all. Well, that's the bit I'm questioning, although I'm definitely no expert. This Astral Codex Ten post would seem to back me up, although on re-reading it's more ambiguous: Autism is such an annoying thing to have on this list – just when everyone finally agreed there was an “autism spectrum” and no clear difference between neurotypical-people-with-some-autistic-traits and high-functioning-autistics, along comes this meta-analysis to say nope, it’s a taxon, neurotypicals and autistics are two clear objectively separate categories. I did hunt down the studies here and they actually seemed pretty good. But none of these results are strong enough to be more than suggestive, so I am going to keep believing in an autism spectrum until more research comes in. I don't know enough to rate the research here. But it does seem to me a bit strange to work so hard on communicating to laypeople that there isn't just a single condition called "autism", it's a whole spectrum with degrees of severity, but at the same time to still insist that only a small discrete set of people "have autism" and the rest of us are completely free and easy. As other commenters have noted, all the symptoms of low-level autism (social awkwardness, sensitivity to overstimulus, difficulty in communication, etc) are things that almost everybody experiences now and then. So it seems much more helpful to me to think of autistic symptoms as things that everybody has to a greater or lesser degree; so the autistic spectrum has room for everybody.