Personally, I see AS as a discription of the weaknesses and issues of children born in a certain spectrum. Giftedness is the list of the strengths in the same spectrum. Whether a child is classified as ASD and/or gifted depends on how obvious either side is. As soon as I see a baby walking or talking earlier than normal or a child with advanced early skills, I am automatically expecting some degree of AS symptoms later in life.
I am hoping this makes AS sound a little less scary. Unfortunately, it also makes Gifted sound a little more scary. An AS person is not entirely AS, they just have some of the symptoms associated with this spectrum. Neither is a gifted person entirely gifted. I think the AS spectrum covers such a wide ranging set of symptoms, it is almost unusable as a classification. However, the individual ways of dealing with specific aspects within the spectrum are useful.
The reason I feel a degree of AS is an essential ingredient of giftedness is society actually values the skills within certain parts of this spectrum. I feel a lot of people outside the autism spectrum are also gifted, but I think I am the only one seeing it this way.
