Autistic – Noun or Adjective? Which is offensive?

So I wrote my last post and titled it: “AutCraft – The not so little Minecraft project for autistics and their families” and went about my day. Until this happened:

Now, I’m sure you’ve all heard the “person first language” thing, where some people insist that you use “person with autism” rather than “autistic.” I’ve written about it before in articles such as The last word on “person first language” where I explain why I use the terminology that I use.

This however, is entirely new to me. Now, in this seemingly middle ground area, it’s ok to use as an adjective but not as a noun. The woman that tweeted above, uses “mom to autistic son” in her bio and yet uses “ouch” and “awful” in her tweets to me because I referred to people as “autistics” in my post title.

I am an understanding person though so I’m not going to dismiss hers or anyone else’s concerns. I do however feel that we should work this out so that we have a better mutual understanding of each other.

Now, in conversations, I’ve referred to myself as a Canadian, a baldy, a male, a genius, an idiot, an autistic, an introvert, a bore, a supporter, a nerd and a whole bunch of other things. These can all be used as adjectives.

What I need now is a list of terms that you use when referring to yourself.

Then I’ll pick and choose the ones that I think should offend me and we can then come to some sort of agreement where you can no longer refer to yourself that way and I can no longer refer to myself that way and we can finally go back to being happy people.

Because the last thing I’d ever want is to offend YOU by referring to ME.