I think each person should decide for him/herself what is revealed to other people. To me, SPD, denotes only the sensory part, whereas ASD includes all the social stuff too, but then you can say you have social anxiety disorder instead of ASD. It depends what label you want to use. I think one's diagnosis is relevant only in certain very limited situations. Obviously, you are a high-functioning person, so you don't need to tell some random stranger you encounter about your diagnosis. Your close friends or your boss could be told if you determine that's appropriate. Your boss then has legal obligations toward you and also toward confidentiality. Your friends should not change their feelings toward you, and if they do, maybe they aren't your friends in the first place.
It used to be that people with Aspergers were often considered smarter than average (they called it the "little professor syndrome"), but now that it has been lumped into the autism spectrum, other people could potentially get the wrong idea about intelligence level, because of their own ignorance. The truth, as far as I understand it, is that autism itself, even severe autism, doesn't actually indicate a deficit in intelligence. There are nonverbal people who have found other ways to communicate and are actually very intelligent and go to university, etc. There are, of course, comorbid conditions and learning disabilities, etc., many of which also don't indicate an intelligence deficit, but some that do. The autism spectrum is independent from the human intelligence spectrum; any given person could occupy any point on either one of them. The problem is that once people hear that someone has a "disorder" in the brain, they assume an intelligence deficit by default. I don't think it is a matter of whether someone needs daily assistance, but I could be mistaken about that.
As a female, all my life I have had to face certain attitudes and prejudices about my abilities. Even if it was never said out loud, some of my math teachers in school (particularly the male ones) were surprised when I came at the top of the class in anything mathematical, and won math contests, but that didn't stop me from doing so. Then I encountered the same attitude when I found that I really enjoyed physics and that I was really good at it. It was also assumed that I couldn't play the trumpet (a traditionally male instrument) very well, but now I do so semi-professionally. When my friend and I started a business together one summer to do odd jobs, people would hear my voice on the phone and assume that I couldn't do anything involving heavy lifting or anything technical, and would hang up on me. Okay, I might not be able to easily lift heavy things, but now I could operate a machine or program a robot to do it for me. This was all long before my ASD diagnosis, and that might have made it worse, even though I'm the same person with the same abilities. I had a hard enough time as a child being a socially inept girl with odd interests without adding a "brain disorder" to all of that.
I guess what I am saying is that we all have to face prejudice in our lives from close-minded, ignorant individuals, who seem to get no greater pleasure than when they assign us labels to put us down, especially when those aforementioned ignorant individuals feel themselves inferior to us in some way. ASD, or SPD or SAD, for that matter, are "built-in" labels, and that must just give those ignorant people so much joy, because that saves them the trouble of assigning the labels themselves.
I think humanity has taken some steps toward true equality beyond the attitudes that prevailed in, say, the 1950's, but also that we have a long, long way to go. It's a shame that we have to have laws against various "isms", but, for now, what we as individuals with ASD (and related conditions) have to do in order to become protected by the law (in reality and not just in theory) is hold our heads high and insist on being treated properly, and not be ashamed of our diagnoses (primarily in our own minds more than worrying about what other people might think). I also think that it is very important to educate some of the ignorant people (I say "some" because some of them just can't be educated in anything) who think that we are automatically less intelligent than they are. However, I think that part of our empowerment naturally implies that it is each individual's choice of how and to whom he/she reveals his/her diagnoses.
Ok, there's my way-too-long post for the day.
