“You’re not being bullied, it’s the way your brain perceives it. Not everyone is bullying you.” That’s what my family used to say to me all the time whenever I told them I was being bullied. And it was true that they bullied me. The teachers yelled at me and found every possible way to punish me, the kids called me names, avoided me, and called me a disgusting creep, spread rumors about me, and very few students liked me.
I’d say, though not everyone bullied me, a great deal of them did and it wasn’t just how my brain perceived it. That’s bullying to anyone, autistic or not.
While I’m sure there was significant bullying, it is also the case that a lot of the time it is easy to read bullying into just regular ribbing and obtuse communication that people do to find out if they will get along with someone else. Like a lot of humor is based on misleading for the punchline to land and if someone takes that misdirection as being intentionally deceptive then it can come across as meanspirited when it was intended to be silly.
What tends to happen to autistic people I know is they take a joke literally and get mad, then the bullying starts because they want the same reaction as kids, and also a lot of adults, like to push buttons to get reactions. That is bullying even if the first interaction wasn’t.
Your parents probably assume all the interactions are the first misreading while ignoring that taking jokes personally almost always leads to bullying afterwards.