On the flip side, there are many adults who consider themselves to be on the autism spectrum who self identify (i.e., have not officially been diagnosed), and that has generally been accepted.
Three thoughts on this:
1) On a forum specifically for ASD, it may be less accepted than in general?
2) Whereas for
children, society is asked to provide services...
adults may not be trying to receive services/remediation/accommodations. Rather they be seeking insight to work on self-healing and self-improvement.
3)
Adult ASD is NOT the topic at hand. It may be wise to discontinue what you introduced so as to not hijack the thread, and instead resume the thread's focus on identification of gifted/PG (which may sometimes be made more complex due to a need to tease out differences between gifted and ASD behaviors, as explained in the
article upthread).
What if I were to flip this around and ask why you seem to have a desperate need to exclude people who are likely looking for a community that can understand and validate their experiences?
The
article describing the need to tease out differences between gifted/ASD traits may help explain this.
It has been explained elsewhere that the more "inclusive" the gifted identification, the less it may serve the PG gifted outliers.
Confusing "giftedness" with comorbid diagnoses such as ADD/ADHD, ASD, bipolar, etc does not serve the gifted community well.
Why should a potentially outdated notion of how human intelligence works (this is at least true of the WISC-IV), or scores from different tests on different days with different confidence ranges, be used to govern who should be allowed to use the PG label without always having to preface it with "suspected"?
I believe the conversation is related to how human intelligence
is measured, not how human intelligence works, per se.
The phrase "who should be allowed to use the PG label" seems to advance the notion of PG as something to be grasped at.
Some kiddos are so far above the measure that there is no doubt. Those close to the measure but not quite there seem to have had the bar lowered to increase inclusion in a number of programs and services... sometimes supplanting the PG child.
I think there is a tendency to put too much confidence into IQ testing as an absolutely objective measure. It's the best we have, currently, but that doesn't mean there isn't subjectivity within it, either.
This does not seem to be a reason not to test. All tests, measurements, and comparisons have a potential margin of error, including medical tests, radar traffic speeding tests, ACT/SAT/PSAT, GMAT/GRE, and feats of athletic ability such as the Olympics.
I have a kid who has scored in the HG+ range. We weren't expecting that at all, and we still are hesitant to believe that even the highly gifted label applies to him.
Two thoughts here:
1) What was your reason for testing?
2) Do the test results which you received help you in understanding, raising, and advocating for your child?
