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I guess, theoretically, it's possible that there are allistic people who have some acceptable, non-shitty reason for their strong opinions about the removal of Asperger's Syndrome as a distinct diagnosis from autism.
But ngl I don't think I have ever seen a rationale that didn't come down to "now the diagnosis includes people who are disabled enough to annoy me but not enough for me to pity them." Maybe with a side implication of "if people who can mask are autistic then autism doesn't mean anything!!!!!"
The legacy of AS is complex and fraught among actual autistic people (especially given that the phasing out of AS for reasons of diagnostic unreliability was followed shortly thereafter by exposés of what an absolute monster Hans Asperger was). But allistic people who are super affronted about autistic people they consider insufficiently disabled are just—why do you care? In what way is this your business? What is the mysterious reason you're so very bothered by the wrong kind of autistic people?
Also, honestly, vanishingly few of these people seem to be a) psychologists in any sense, b) at all familiar with the diagnostic problems with AS vs HFA before the exposés about Hans Asperger's, uh, practices [CW Nazis], and c) sometimes have no idea what Asperger did or what purpose the distinctions between autistic groups served.
I'm personally in a kind of weird position wrt AS altogether because I was diagnosed as an adult and went through various tests over about 10 years between my mid-20s and mid-30s. Even the first suggestion of something related to autism going on with me happened right before the DSM-V was released and I had no involvement in AS-centered communities or anything. The suggestion that I might have AS or HFA didn't surprise me at all, though as a psych major I scrupulously avoided diagnosing myself or anyone else [the psychology students at my uni had been taught that those were The Rules and I've always been deeply concerned with Rules, I'm sure for autism-unrelated reasons]. But I was so overwhelmed by the apparatus of US psychological health care and just how many unfamiliar social interactions and transportation difficulties it involved that it took me a good ten years to navigate it all. I went from a university psychologist I was seeing in undergrad for anxiety/disassociation/depression who went "that sounds like it could be related to autism" to various clinicians repeatedly identifying me as autistic according to the DSM-V to "formally tested and diagnosed with a specialist's recommendation detailing support needs." So I was never actually diagnosed with AS or HFA or whatever, just ASD. The fact that navigating the system was such a lengthy nightmare primarily because of symptoms of autism certainly adds a fillip of irony to the whole thing, though!
But ngl I don't think I have ever seen a rationale that didn't come down to "now the diagnosis includes people who are disabled enough to annoy me but not enough for me to pity them." Maybe with a side implication of "if people who can mask are autistic then autism doesn't mean anything!!!!!"
The legacy of AS is complex and fraught among actual autistic people (especially given that the phasing out of AS for reasons of diagnostic unreliability was followed shortly thereafter by exposés of what an absolute monster Hans Asperger was). But allistic people who are super affronted about autistic people they consider insufficiently disabled are just—why do you care? In what way is this your business? What is the mysterious reason you're so very bothered by the wrong kind of autistic people?
Also, honestly, vanishingly few of these people seem to be a) psychologists in any sense, b) at all familiar with the diagnostic problems with AS vs HFA before the exposés about Hans Asperger's, uh, practices [CW Nazis], and c) sometimes have no idea what Asperger did or what purpose the distinctions between autistic groups served.
I'm personally in a kind of weird position wrt AS altogether because I was diagnosed as an adult and went through various tests over about 10 years between my mid-20s and mid-30s. Even the first suggestion of something related to autism going on with me happened right before the DSM-V was released and I had no involvement in AS-centered communities or anything. The suggestion that I might have AS or HFA didn't surprise me at all, though as a psych major I scrupulously avoided diagnosing myself or anyone else [the psychology students at my uni had been taught that those were The Rules and I've always been deeply concerned with Rules, I'm sure for autism-unrelated reasons]. But I was so overwhelmed by the apparatus of US psychological health care and just how many unfamiliar social interactions and transportation difficulties it involved that it took me a good ten years to navigate it all. I went from a university psychologist I was seeing in undergrad for anxiety/disassociation/depression who went "that sounds like it could be related to autism" to various clinicians repeatedly identifying me as autistic according to the DSM-V to "formally tested and diagnosed with a specialist's recommendation detailing support needs." So I was never actually diagnosed with AS or HFA or whatever, just ASD. The fact that navigating the system was such a lengthy nightmare primarily because of symptoms of autism certainly adds a fillip of irony to the whole thing, though!
