Ma’am, that sounds like an awfully specific word choice for you to be using there…

Because they are.

The rights of an individual to live must always be held above the desire of a business to control employees.

Tell me you want to ban women from leaving their homes without telling me you want to ban women from leaving their homes.

The issue is not what meaning we(those of us who are autistic) take from it. The issue is that the people who will bully will use it as further justification to bully and to socially abuse people.

In both houses of Congress, majorities (232–197 in the House and 57-43 in the Senate) found Trump to be liable for the insurrection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_Trump

I don’t know about the other people involved in this discussion, as I know that obsessive interests are part of different communities, but I am someone who studies languages and word meanings.

The information that I am sharing is not my perspective. Those words do have that context in common spoken English in the year 2023.

That would not have been the case many decades ago, but the word “identify” tends to be used ironically and sarcastically and with derision. It doesn’t matter if the word is used by itself or paired with the word “self”.

I’ll point out the definitions on Urban Dictionary, to point this out(and not just on the first page, but on pages beyond that):

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=identify

Insisting that people who have not been professionally diagnosed use “self-identified” will lead to even more bullying and social abuse from neurotypical people who already use that context when trying to justify their bullying and social abuse.

“Self-assessed” would be a phrase which is more exact and does not have that additional context of being tied to groups that have been targeted for bullying and social abuse.

Bigots commonly insist that trans people use “I identify as” rather than “I am” when the transgender people are giving their gender, because the intention is to deny those people the ability to be seen as their preferred gender and instead give the impression that those people are impostors, implying that “identifying” is more akin to “relating” instead of categorization.

Insisting that an ostensibly autistic person use “self-identified” instead of “self-diagnosed” would have the same effect.

If you want to use a proper word that’s not “diagnosed”, “self-assessed” would be more accurate.

“What is your ethnicity?”

The term “identified” is used as an insult, particularly when referring to transgender people, to imply that they aren’t really correct. I don’t think it’s appropriate to use that in the context of autism, because many of the people who do believe themselves to be autistic do go on to get professionally diagnosed. I became interested about 20 years ago in the possibility that I may be autistic, as I met all of the criteria, but only recently did I actually get the resources to pay for a diagnosis. It cost me nearly $3500.

The problem is that self-diagnosis IS valid, when it is valid, and is not valid, when it is not valid.