Asperger’s autism diagnosis was rooted in fascist ideology, not science.

Evidence

For Sheffer, this taints not only the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome but also, potentially, the much broader autism spectrum diagnosis that Asperger did so much to shape. Based on these writings, it clearly had far less to do with medical science than with fascist thought: the Nazis required submission to a supremacist groupthink in order to build the Aryan race. Asperger’s claim that autistic children were pathological because they lacked the capacity for Gemüt was less a medical diagnosis than a highly ideological one about what should constitute normal behavior: he was diagnosing them, quite literally, with a deficit of fascism. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 697

Categorization

• QUESTION: Sheffer’s historiographic claim is contested — worth chasing the counter-arguments from autism historians before treating the fascist-origins reading as settled.
• XREF: Connects to Klein’s diagonalism thesis: an ostensibly ‘medical’ category quietly encoding far-right social norms.