A decade ago I was participating in a research seminar at an Australian university and one of the academics responded to a presentation about autism with the comment “all academics are a little bit autistic”.

Recently, I was speaking to a colleague about a someone from another university that she found hard to deal with. My colleague told me of the trouble she was having and finished up with “you know how he is … a bit on the spectrum”.

Academic Sandra Jones is autistic and wants to challenge lines like all academics are 'a little bit autistic'.

So even if not all academics "a little bit autistic", the ones that are hard to get along with must be "a bit on the spectrum"?

Sadly, those two conversations were not isolated incidents, but rather the earliest and the most recent of dozens of occasions where I have heard people use "autistic' as a gross over-generalisation or as an insult.