Why? We don't have 2 different terms for "blindness" (or any other condition for that matter), one for people who are intelligent and another for those who aren't.

Hans Asperger was a Nazi collaborator who drew an imaginary line between "less autistic" children, whom he believed could still be valuable to society, and "more autistic" children who were considered to be a threat to their racial purity - so he murdered them. That's the only reason this distinction came to be.

Autism "spectrum" isn't about severity at all - it's a spectrum because every person has a unique presentation and combination of challenges, e.g. sensory processing, communication, relationships, emotional processing, and cognitive rigidity. "Asperger syndrome" was just one specific combination of those that drew a line between people who are worthy of life and those who aren't.

It's not very odd. It's all part of the drift of science, where now things are loosely defined and what passes for science is often political propaganda.

The removal of Aspergers label has a lot more do to with politics (not wanting to be associate with nazi) than anything else.

As far I'm concerned, the only hope is from genetics studies, which greatly accelerated thanks to computing. At some point with enough studies, we will know what's what. In the meantime, it is safe to discard most of the bullshit coming from psychological studies...

This is a direct result of a push from within the autistic community to stop using eugenicist labels and notions of "more" or "less" autistic. The community is really sensitive to eugenics because of all of the people trying to do eugenics against them and treating them as subhuman.

Autism isn't a scalar. One is not more or less autistic than another. It's a multidimensional vector space where each individual has unique needs and disabilities throughout that space.

We also don't really talk about the IQ angle because, again, eugenics and elitism. It is a fact that some or many autistic people are incredibly intelligent, but it is exclusively allistic people who get hung up on this point. For autistic people, it's just the way things are and we have to make do, just like with everything else in life.

Turns out when a lot of people want to murder, sterilize, experiment on, or genetically engineer you, you get pretty sensitive about other people using actual, factual, literal Nazi eugenicist ideas to describe you.

That's why everyone should be using the terms that autistic people choose for themselves. So that you're not continuing to promote, again, actual Nazi war crimes as a way to distinguish "good" autism from "bad". That's why we've purged Asperger's as a diagnostic label.