Transcription: crude line drawing of a young goofy person sitting in a school chair. They have mid-length straight red hair, messy and needing a trim. They are wearing a hoodie of GIR from the cartoon show Invader Zim. That character is a pet-coded green alien dog with a goofy long tongue.
Dialogue: off screen character saying "She has Aspergers"
main character thinking: "ha ha ha ass burger"
Thought bubble of a very crudely drawn pair of butt cheeks and a hamburger. End transcription.
Asperger's is pretty ableist, albeit not popularly known as ableist. It was pretty much the term for the autism that Nazis saw as a superior subgroup of people, from the name of a Nazi doctor. While being autistic could get you killed by the Nazis, being diagnosed with Asperger's would have been a good thing. It's essentially saying that you have good autism and not bad autism.
Not saying anything bad about the meme because most people don't know the origin of the term and who doesn't love the ass burger thing. But I'm never gonna see the use of a Nazi doctor's name for this sort of thing as normal and will educate people at any opportunity. It would be like saying conjoined twins have Mengele syndrome. Yeah he started a bunch of research on conjoined twins, but he usually just brutally murdered them.
I know what you mean, I loved the joke in middle school. But once I learned what Dr. Asperger was actually guilty of, I just felt so weird using his name
To add to this, it isn't only the origin of the term that is a problem, it is the whole idea that "levels" of autism exist, which leads to such nonsense as functioning labels which are harmful, and worse, lateral ableism in the form of "Asperger's supremacy"
This, I make this point to another commenter in this thread because it's really important. Pitting autistic people against each other at diagnosis is awful.
Nuance is needed here... The terms high- and low-functioning are definitely problematic, because they're too reductionist, and lead people to assume things. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that autism having "levels" is bad - the DSM-5 (as horribly flawed as it is) contains two sets of three levels each for determining level of support needed by an autistic person, with the two sets being related to socialization and life-skill functioning. Given that autism is a spectrum, and some autistic people aren't disabled by it at all, being able to categorize people by their needs is useful - we just have to make sure that it's qualitative, rather than arbitrary labels being picked by how the doctor is feeling that day. And it's something to be kept in medical records, not used for self-identification.
It's ableist because it was used to reinforce the idea of autism that's good and autism that's bad. It was a quiet endorsement of the eugenics that Dr. Asperger and the Nazis supported. Using a different category of disability specifically to call them lesser is ableist. It's not just the name, but the separate categorization that pits autistic people against each other at diagnosis.
I'm really grateful for the discourse. I knew the gist of the story but now I know more and I got some useful links. This community fucking rules. So awesomely helpful.
Glad you're receiving it well. I don't like being a buzzkill, but I just think the Asperger's name is too problematic within neurodivergent communities not to be mentioned anytime it's brought up. Because it really isn't just some slur, it sows division within the autistic community and keeps people with the "less annoying" autism from getting the help they need.
well, you are all very eloquent. I knew the name was a bit problematic, but in future I won't even post a meme that uses it. And I'm glad to have laughed and then learned.