ABQMom, have you considered getting a second opinion? Gifted kids are obviously very difficult to make a call on, particularly if they are quite borderline, but your son seems to be having a lot of difficulties.
Pemberly my DD is (generally) not so literal that she rings alarm bells for most people (a lot of the very extreme examples they give of literalness in books on ASD she would not do), but she is CONSTANTLY having those subtle communication failures that lead to people being irritated, frustrated, etc. She seems like she is being deliberately obtuse, cheeky, stupid, or some other negative attribute, when she simply doesn't get it. We ourselves missed how much of our difficulty in parenting her came from these more subtle issues of literal thinking.
You know I was about to say that if I said to her:"you need to put yourself in someone else's shoes" she wouldn't say "Why would I want to do that?" But now that I think about it I wonder if she doesn't get it, but does have enough of a clue to not reveal that she doesn't get it. Maybe her literalness is worse even than we realise. The more we have understood what to look for the more often DH and I give each other the look about her communication misfires.
