@Anon107,
The r word thing, and the way it spreads through a friend group like that, one person decides to be dismissive and suddenly everyone's on board, that made me angry reading it, bc it's just cruelty dressed up as some kind of concern.
I work with kids at a nursery and some of them have autism, and what I've noticed is that people who write someone off based on a diagnosis, without actually sitting with them for five minutes, are usually doing it bc they're uncomfortable with something they don't understand, not bc of anything real about the person in front of them. Your therapist isn't wrong. You're running into a specific kind of person who's scared or just not willing to try, and that's genuinely their loss, even if it doesn't feel that way from where you're standing right now.
I don't have a neat answer for how to find the ones who aren't like that... but the way these guys are talking about you, that's not a verdict on you. ❤️