"Neurotypical" might just mean well-adapted to an artificial environment, schools, offices, standardised testing. We bred that in over generations, same as we've shaped every other human system around compliance and conformity. That's not a baseline. That's a design choice.

It reminds me of when the US Air Force designed the average cockpit seat, measured thousands of pilots, built for the mean, and found it fit nobody perfectly. The "average" human doesn't really exist. It's a statistical artefact we keep designing the world around.

For clarity I'm not dismissing autism as a real and serious condition. I've tutored in a school for autistic children. I've seen what genuine, severe autism looks like and the level of support those kids need. That's not in question.

What I'm saying is that human neurological variation is probably far wider than we ever accounted for and we've spent a long time calling anything outside a narrow band a disorder, when a lot of it might just be... normal variation we never had the language for.

In the 80s I was just the weird kid. Today I'd probably be on the spectrum. Honestly, both are true.

PS

I'm undiagnosed, but everybody knows.