My sister was a special education teacher and had a theory about autism that she described with a metaphor. Imagine riding a tricycle. Neurotypical people are along the fairly limited spectrum of "healthy children riding tricycles." Some are a little better or a little worse, but most can do it, and the skill variation isn't that high.

People on one end of the autism spectrum are more like adults trying to ride a tricycle. They're too big, too powerful. It doesn't work now, but if they try really hard or come up with creative workarounds, they can sort of do it.

People on the other end of the autism spectrum are trying to ride a tricycle with a jet engine attached. There's way too much power. The tricycle can't handle it. There's no way to ride the tricycle with a jet engine on it that will even vaguely resemble a child riding a tricycle.

Maybe if you're an adult riding a tricycle, you can argue you don't need help. You'll come up with something. You might have to ride with your knees over the handlebars, but you'll still get where you're going. It would just help if people would leave you alone and stop staring at you while you do it.

But if you're trying to navigate a jet bicycle, that's not really going to help. You might need really severe intervention to keep you from crashing and hurting yourself. Maybe that's picking the trike up off the ground or something so at least it's not crashing, even if the heat is still a lot to handle (it's a metaphor; it's not perfect).

Might it be nice someday if the world had the capacity to handle jet-powered tricycles? Maybe, but that's not going to happen immediately enough to help the people already on them when the whole world has been built around children on trikes, whereas the world might be able to change fast enough to accommodate adults on trikes, since that would mostly mean not looking askance at the people riding in different ways.

It might be a spectrum, but many things considered opposites are on a spectrum. Light and darkness are on a spectrum too, but what works in the light may not be any use in the darkness, and vice versa.