[tfb]

You really hit the nail on the head here and said exactly what I (and probably others here) have been thinking.

As much as it's a very humanly thing to do, I think it's ridiculous to try to lump people into categories, especially when the differences are so minute that it's almost as if there's one way that people should be, and if someone doesn't fit that mold exactly, they must be classified as different. This leads to unnecessary (and unintentional) segregation and gives common folk more reason to disproportionately view and treat certain individuals differently.

[city41]

It's really not like that though. People with Asperger Syndrome behave and act very different from "normal" people. It's not simply a different personality, an introversion preference or anything like that, they genuinely have a very different brain.

[tfb]

It really is like that though. Most people genuinely do have quite different brains from each other, regardless of whether or not they fall within the autistic spectrum; but that's not reason enough to label them based on some common ground so that people who happen to fall within the majority can have some way to differentiate themselves and explicitly think, "That guy is abnormal because his brain doesn't focus on the all same things mine does."

And I chose the word abnormal because it sometimes has negative connotations and probably best represents the way most people think, i.e., afraid of what they're unfamiliar with. But imagine if the Asperger brain was actually the norm. Would that mean we should label people whose brains focus more on social interaction and reproduction than rules and solving problems?

Maybe I'm just uneducated and the label already exists, but sometimes I feel like we should put some specific label on "normal brained" people (other than the word normal or "neurotypical") to kind of even out the stigma. Perhaps my point of view is distorted but when I see people categorized like they are with Asperger Syndrome, I always get the sense that "normal" people look and treat them like they're aliens or like they're retarded or it's almost as if they're lab rats in some scientific study, all because of the "Asperger Syndrome" label... or even worse now, "Autistic Spectrum Disorder".