But after a few years of resorting to elaborate, novelistic descriptions to explain him to teachers and friends, we began to wonder whether some more officially recognized category, even if flawed, might be helpful. It turned out to be more useful to us than we had expected. In fact, almost the minute we got the diagnosis, my resistance to labeling melted, and so did my husband’s. We walked willingly into another world, with its own language, rituals, and worldview. This was our version of the transformative experience Robison had described in his memoir. “It did fit me. Completely,” he wrote of the diagnosis, which he received at the age of 40. “The realization was staggering. There are other people like me. So many, in fact, that they have a name for us.” We found a summer day camp for Jacob specifically designed for people like him. This fall we moved him from public school, where he was struggling, to a private-school program that has the word Asperger’s in its name and a curriculum that integrates social and emotional learning into every lesson—that caters, in other words, to a population that technically no longer exists.

It was a little like being an agnostic who finally turns evangelical, finding comfort and guidance in a new fold, at just the moment when the Bible is exposed as the work of false apostles. What should one believe now? How does a culturally entrenched identity accommodate such a swerve? Once we—along with everyone else—had embraced a category as vivid and special as Asperger’s, it was hard not to appreciate the clarity and attentive care that came with it. I wasn’t alone in trying to navigate a landscape in flux, I discovered as I read a new round of books by Robison, Tammet, and Temple Grandin, whose Emergence: Labeled Autistic (1986) had offered the pioneering account of life on the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum. A year later, with their books fresh in my mind, I can say that the diagnostic shake-up could not have been better timed.

The American Psychiatric Association expunged Asperger’s in large part because studies revealed little consistency in how the diagnosis was being applied. A review of 12 university-based sites showed that children with similar test scores and profiles received different diagnoses. Whether a child was labeled as having Asperger’s or diagnosed instead with autism, or some other developmental disorder, depended mostly on the clinician’s somewhat arbitrary interpretation. After much debate, the APA decided to simplify the diagnostic process, or perhaps more accurately, to complicate it in a democratic way.

The new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reduces the main criteria for autism to two factors: impairment in social interaction and social communication, along with repetitive behavior. Severity is assessed based on the extremity of a child’s symptoms—the degree of difficulty he or she has initiating an interaction, for example, or the intensity of a particular sensory fixation. The normal IQ and language fluency that set most children with Asperger’s apart have been relegated to a descriptive footnote. In short, the model no longer grants the special status that the Asperger’s label once supplied to a high-functioning cohort. But as a consolation to everyone else, you could say, the newly explicit spectrum thinking gives at least the illusion that there are no fixed boundaries at all. Taken to its logical extreme, the perspective implies an unbroken continuum among minds that extends from autism all the way into the realm of the normal.