If you were diagnosed with Himmler’s Syndrome using the diagnostic criteria of the ICD-10, would you be okay with that?

No? Then why are you okay saying you were diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome?

Naming a developmental disorder after a Nazi is wrong. It is offensive to the Jewish community and to the Autistic community. If you reject my analogy because you want to debate which Nazi was worse, you are missing the point. If you want to argue that Hans Asperger wasn’t a Nazi, please read my rebuttal on the next slides. But first I’m going to talk about why this issue is so important to me:

I’ve had a hard time explaining my autism diagnosis to my Jewish grandparents because they’re older, and their only image of autism is a non-speaking five-year-old boy. It would be so much harder to explain Asperger’s Syndrome to my grandfather, knowing that his father lost his entire family in the Holocaust. It is time to let Asperger’s Syndrome go. I know it can be hard to change the language you use, but this simple change will make the autism community more inclusive.

I was going to write a whole post about the evidence that Asperger was a Nazi but then I remembered I already did that. Go see my ‘autism politics’ highlight. Or you could go to the link in my bio and read a peer-reviewed paper explaining how Asperger’s legacy was sanitized. Or you could read Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger’s Children: the Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (I highly recommend you read this book). Demonstrating that Asperger was Nazi is not a good use of my emotional energy because so many experts have already done it beautifully. Instead, I’m going to try and keep up with my responsibilities!

TL;DR: Asperger’s Syndrome is named after a Nazi, which would be unacceptable if you named any other syndrome after any other Nazi.