Let’s stop splitting hairs – it’s a handy term, and I defy anybody to cite one real-life example of anybody suffering as a result of its use. “Autist” reminds me or “artist” which feels positive. It never entered my head to look down on anybody thus labelled.

A number of years ago, I was caught up in debates about whether or not to “use the hyphen”: Should one say “Asian American” (in which Asian is an adjective, with the implication that one is an American of Asian background), or “Asian-American” (in which one is referring to a person who is both Asian and American). The similarity that I see in this with the word “autist” is whether or not one sees “Asianness” or “autism” (”autism-ness”) as “essential” to a person.

In my own writing, I go back and forth between using “autistic person/child” and child/person “with autism.”

It’s sort of analogous to talking about someone as a member of the “democrat party” or the “Jew culture.” The nouning of the adjective projects a negative connotation, no matter what it does to the denotation. BTW, the distinction between connotation and denotation is a long-recognized phenomenon in linguistics, not a form of modern “political correctness.”