be potentially contentious by suggesting that autism (and various other conditions) are "really" the same sort of auto-immune damage that can manifest as ME/CFS (or MS etc) as a result of infections of various kinds anyway.

neurological conditions can have similar origins as what ME/CFS seems to have (especially with the long COVID research coming out (sadly in my opinion)). It's really tricky when some of the research is coming from organisations which are dedicated to the narrative. Leads to questions of conflict of interest.

sef_lopod: how does that explain 100+ genetic variations associated mainly with macro brain structure found in Aspies vs. Neurotypicals or the actually observed macro brain structure variations? At least the foetal testosterone theory has some vague statistical support, but it really looks like it's just inherited from your parents.

immunology is heritable too - and I'm very much including infections in utero and during early development.

often likening things to one of those magic paintings where the elements are already there (or not) but only become visible / instantiated according to where the water goes.

as I thought, you can't.

does not need to explain away a tendency towards a thing when that is part of my view anyway.

you don't need to do anything. It's not worth arguing about - your hypothesis doesn't explain the existing evidence and doesn't have any supporting evidence.

relying on the same ingredients evidence as you - just adding a cooking stage.

the statistical models around the idea of immunology are not sufficiently strong to make a direct connection, rather that (from my perspective) an infection is quite often resulting in increased expression of neurological differences.