11:34pm July 27, 2014

“Shaun is what some autistic adults refer to as a Kanner-autistic, which means that he is recognisable immediately by most people as autistic, whereas high-functioning autistics often appear normal or just mildly eccentric to the casual observer and low-functioning autistics simply seem to be retarded.”

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The Autism Picture Page (written by an autistic person, sometime before the year 2000)

This is not something I believe. At all. It’s just a reminder that at one point in time, this was a way that autistic people and nonautistic people alike split up the autistic spectrum. Kanner wasn’t ‘low functioning’ like some people use it today, or 'high functioning’ like people often meant by it in the seventies, it was this weird category of autistic people who were considered autisticer than all other autistic people. But nobody could ever really define what 'Kanner autism’ meant.

(I once wrote a blog post called “What does Kanner actually mean, historically?” that Morton Gernsbacher was quite fond of. But that was in response to people using it to mean “low-functioning person who is totally cut off from the world”.)

Anyway, there really once was a time when “Kanner” was a common thing you’d hear to describe some autistic people, but nobody could ever explain exactly what was meant by it. I think it really just meant “fits my stereotypes of what Real Autism looks like” to most people. It certainly didn’t mean “resembled Kanner’s patients” or “fit Kanner’s original autism criteria” (and mind you even many of Kanner’s patients didn’t fit his own autism criteria, really, so that was another weird thing).

Anyway, this was once a thing. I hope it doesn’t become a thing again. It’s a thing that really is better off dying out. Also according to this guy’s definitions I’m all three – high functioning, low functioning, and Kanner. Go figure, this happens to me a lot when bizarre categorization schemes are proposed – I break them, or they break against me, or something.