Social Skills and Social Skills

In one sense, autistic people definitionally have bad social skills. You have to meet two criteria in order to get your gold autism star, and the first one involves "persistent deficits in social communication and social interactions across multiple contexts." Your code-switching might suck, your intuitions about eye contact might be a little bit borked. You might have trouble identifying faces. You definitely have some deficits in social-emotional reciprocity (that feel when you have deficits in social-emotional reciprocity). But, this is not always what people mean when they talk about 'social skills.' Very often, they mean how well you can get along with others, mostly how well you can manage conflict and compromise. And it's far from obvious to me that we autistics are always bad at this. Autistic children are very often catastrophically inflexible (I certainly was). But, in my experience, this is often not true of high-functioning adults. Some autistics suck at managing conflict,…